'Heartbroken' author Ping Fu willing to apologise for inaccuracies in memoir

In many ways, Ping Fu embodies the American dream. The 55-year-old Chinese American entrepreneur and author is an important figure in the global 3-D printing industry, and she sits on US President Barack Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

But six months after she published a critically acclaimed memoir Bend, Not Break: A Life in Two Worlds, Fu, chief strategy officer of 3D Systems in the US, faces potential international lawsuits. Her alma mater, Soochow University in Suzhou, and some of her former schoolmates are threatening to take her to court for libel in China and the US.

“No society at any time should applaud success built upon lies,” Liu Biao, an official at the university’s president’s office, told a meeting of alumni at Soochow two weeks ago. “We will take further actions.”

This is not the book's first controversy. Fu devoted chapters to her early life as the child of a persecuted intellectual family, growing up during the tumultuous Cultural Revolution period, between 1966 and 1976. She recounted heart-wrenching stories of being separated for years from her parents from the age of 10, and of being forced into child labour, starved, tortured, even gang-raped.