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Entrepreneur of the Year: Ping Fu

For two years she traveled through rural China, visiting hundreds of towns and villages, interviewing hospital staffers, barefoot doctors, and citizens. The national practice of killing infant girls had long been tacitly acknowledged, but never fully investigated. Ping proved an able reporter--curious, meticulous, resourceful, compassionate. There was no explaining or forgiving the crimes she documented and often witnessed. Because the state had ordered that parents were permitted only one child, however, and because tradition enforced an ironclad, son-centered patrimony, Ping did not judge her compatriots.

In 1980, she delivered her findings to her professor. A few months later, in January 1981, Shanghai's largest newspaper published a report based on Ping's research. The report was widely praised, although credit, of course, accrued to senior government officials. The story was subsequently published nationwide in People's Daily, then picked up by the international media. Which was when the trouble started.

The global community was outraged. The United Nations imposed sanctions on China. Earlier, when the report had been deemed a success, it had proved convenient for Chinese officials to overlook the contributions of the student who had gathered the data. Now that the report had provoked an international human rights scandal, however, it proved convenient for the government to identify and condemn the student, and to throw her into Nanjing prison.

After a seemingly endless period of isolation and darkness, Ping heard boots drumming the corridor outside her cell, the lock turning. She was led to a room where the light blinded her. Through dry lips she asked how long she'd been confined, and was amazed to learn that it was just three days. Ping was weak and disoriented. She assumed her execution was at hand. An official sat behind a desk.

"You must never say a word about your involvement in this project," the official told her. "You are forbidden to engage in any political activity. You will never return to China, but your family remains here. If in any way you disobey these instructions, your family will suffer the consequences. Have I made myself clear, Comrade?"

Ping nodded, although in her weakened state she did not immediately realize that, by some imponderable working of fate and political calculation, the government had decided not to execute her. Instead she was being deported to the United States.

Two weeks later, Ping boarded a United Airlines flight from Shanghai to San Francisco. She was being sent to the University of New Mexico--she didn't know why New Mexico, any more than she knew why she wasn't dead--to study English as a second language. Ping knew three shreds of English: please, thank you, and help. Officials had issued her the ticket to San Francisco, and $80 in traveler's checks to get her to Albuquerque. All Ping knew about America, meanwhile, was a hazy pastiche of Maoist propaganda and Chinese urban legend. The U.S. was a barbaric place where the rich lived in unconscionable luxury and the poor, who were legion, subsisted wretchedly. At the same time, from the fantasies of her childhood friends, Ping had learned that, in America, watermelons grew at your feet and bananas hung in profusion, low enough for easy picking.

Ping was assigned a window seat. She spent the 12-hour flight alternately staring out the window and pouring out her thoughts by scribbling notes on paper napkins. She didn't have writing paper and did not know how to ask for any. When the flight attendant offered her food or drink, Ping shook her head no, and pointed to the stack of cocktail napkins.

At the San Francisco airport, things started badly. The airfare to Albuquerque was $85. Ping was $5 short. But the stranger standing behind her in line heard her plight, and gave her the money. In America, it seemed, watermelons really did grow at your feet, and ripe bananas hung at arm's reach.

She pressed on to Albuquerque, where her luck again soured. There was no one waiting for her at the airport. She had no ride to the university, and no money to pay for one. The air outside the terminal was thin and dry and stung Ping's travel-swollen eyes. She sat down on her suitcase and waited. After a while a man approached. An Asian man. Ping watched him with combined wariness and hope. He turned out to be Vietnamese, but of Chinese origin, and he and Ping could communicate, though not well. Ping told her tale in brief. The man offered to drive her to the university.

Ping and the man didn't speak further. Instead of delivering Ping to the university, he drove to a small stucco house in a working-class neighborhood. The man took her inside, where she was faced with three small children, who looked up at her with the same commingled wariness and hope with which, a half hour earlier, Ping had regarded their father. She recalled her own exile, when she was the same age as these children.