Decoded

1

I spent every holiday for two years on the railways of southern China, travelling the country to interview the fifty-one middle-aged or elderly eyewitnesses to these events; it was only after having compiled thousands of pages of notes that I finally felt able to sit down and write this book. It was my experiences of travelling round the region that meant that I came to understand why the south is different. In my own personal experience, after arriving in the south, I would feel as though each one of my pores was tingling with life — breathing deeply, enjoying every minute, my skin became smoother, even my hair seemed to become more glossy and black. It is not difficult to understand why I decided to write my book in the south

— what is harder to understand is why having moved there, my writing style also changed. I could clearly sense that the soft air of the south was giving me courage and patience in my writing — a task which I normally find extremely troublesome; at the same time, my story began striking out in new tangents, just like the lush growth of a southern tree. The main protagonist of my story still has not appeared yet, though he will soon arrive. In one sense, you could say that he is already here, it is just that you have not seen him; in the same way that when a seed begins to sprout, the first shoots are invisible below the surface of the well-watered soil.

Twenty-three years earlier, the brilliant Rong Youying had gone through appalling suffering to give birth to the Killer; everyone must have hoped that such a thing would not happen again. However, a few months after the mysterious woman went to live with the Rongs, history repeated itself. Because she was so much younger, the mysterious woman’s screams had a redoubled power, like a knife shrieking against the grinder. Her screams floated through the darkened mansion, making the flames of the lamps flicker and dance, making even the flesh of the crippled and dazed Mr Rong creep. First one midwife came and went and then another, sometimes they emerged to swap one cloth for fresh one, but each one left the room with the heavy stench of blood clinging to her body and splashes of blood everywhere, like butchers. The blood dripped from the bed down onto the floor, only to spread across and out over the doorsill. Once out of the room it continued to seep into the cracks between the dark stones set into the path, and on until it reached the roots of a couple of old plum trees growing amid the mud and the weeds. Everyone thought that those blackened plum trees in the overgrown garden were dead, but that winter they suddenly burst into flower — people said that this was because they had supped on human blood. But by the time that the plum blossoms bloomed in January, the mysterious woman was long dead and her soul had flown off to become a hungry ghost haunting some desolate stretch of hillside.

Those who were there at the time said it was a miracle that the mysterious woman was able to give birth to the baby at all; some of them also said that having given birth to the baby, for the mother to survive would be adding one miracle on top of the other. That didn’t happen here — the baby was born, but the mysterious woman suffered a haemorrhage and died. It is not that easy to have one miracle happening right after the other. That was not the real problem though

— the real problem was that when the midwife cleaned the baby of blood and slime, everyone was shocked to discover that he looked just like the Killer: the thick mat of dark hair, the huge head, right down to the shape of the Mongolian spot above his buttocks: the two were the same. Young Lillie’s innocent little deception stood revealed now as a nasty trick; the mysterious baby born after his mother’s pilgrimage turned in the blink of an eye into the illegitimate brat of a murderer foisted on his long-suffering relations. If it had not been for the fact that Mrs Rong found some resemblance in the baby to his grandmother, the sainted Miss Lillie, even she would have steeled herself to abandoning him in some uninhabited stretch of wilderness. In fact, it seems that when the question of simply getting rid of the baby was seriously mooted, it was his connection to his grandmother that saved his life and ensured that he was brought up in the Rong mansion.

The baby survived, but this certainly wasn’t a matter of congratulation for the Rongs — they did not even recognize him as a member of the family. For the longest time, anyone who wanted to talk about him called him the ‘Grim Reaper’. One day, Mr Auslander happened to walk past the front door of the old servant couple who were tasked with looking after the baby and they politely invited him in, hoping that he could choose a new name for the child. They were both pretty elderly by this time and found it most unpleasant to speak to the baby like that, as if he had come there to kill them. They had been thinking about changing his name for a while. To begin with they had tried to come up with a name themselves — the kind of baby-name that other children in the village had — but they couldn’t find anything that really seemed to stick; they used it but no one else did. Hearing their neighbours call him the ‘Grim Reaper’ all the time gave both of the old people the willies and they found themselves often having nightmares. That is why, for want of any better suggestion, they were forced to ask Mr Auslander to think of something, something that would appeal to everyone.

Mr Auslander was the foreigner who all those years before had been invited to the house to interpret Grandmother Rong’s dreams. Grandmother Rong adored him, but he was certainly not every rich man’s cup of tea. There was the time when, down at the docks, he interpreted the dream of a tea merchant from another province: that earned him a crippling beating. Both his arms and legs were broken, but that was not the half of it: one of his bright blue eyes was put out. He crawled back to the Rong family mansion and they took him in, thinking of it as a good deed that would help the old lady to rest in peace. Once he had entered their household he never left again. Eventually he found himself a job to do which suited him right down to the ground — as befitted such a wealthy and prominent family the Rongs decided that they needed a genealogy compiled. As the years went by, he came to know the various different branches of the family better than anyone. He knew the history of the clan, the men and the women, the main branches and the illegitimate offspring, which ones were flourishing and which had failed, who had gone where and done what: everything was sitting in his notes. So when it came to this baby, other people might be completely in the dark, but Mr Auslander knew exactly which branch of the family he came from and what scandals surrounded his birth. And it was because he knew exactly who the baby was that picking the right name for him was such a ticklish issue.

Mr Auslander thought about the matter and decided that before choosing a proper name for the baby, they would have to deal with the issue of a surname. What was the baby’s surname? Of course, he ought to be called Lin, but to put it mildly that surname now had unfortunate connotations for everyone. He could take the surname Rong, but it would be most unusual for someone to take their grandmother’s maiden name — it didn’t really seem suitable. It would of course be perfectly acceptable for him to take his mother’s surname, but what was the mystery woman’s name? Even if they knew it, it would hardly be appropriate to use it: that would be rattling the skeletons in the family closet with a vengeance! Thinking about it carefully, Mr Auslander decided to put the issue of choosing a proper name for the baby to one side for the moment and concentrate on finding a suitable baby-name for him. Mr Auslander thought about the baby’s huge head and the suffering that he would face having lost both his parents so young, how he would have to make his way without any help from his family, and suddenly an idea flashed into his mind. He decided to call the baby ‘Duckling’.

When this was reported to Mrs Rong in her prayer chamber, she sniffed the incense meditatively while she spoke: ‘Although people called his father horrible names too, in the case of the Killer, he was actually responsible for the death of his mother, a truly wonderful woman and a great credit to the Rong family. You could not find a better name for him if you searched for a month of Sundays. On the other hand, this baby was responsible for the death of shameless whore. That woman dared to blaspheme against the Buddha, a crime for which she deserves a thousand deaths! Killing her doesn’t count as a crime: it’s a work of merit. Calling the poor little thing the Grim Reaper does seem a little unfair. In the future we can call him Duckling, though it is hardly likely that he is going to grow into a swan.’

‘Duckling!’

‘Duckling!’

No one cared where he came from or who his parents were. ‘Duckling!’

‘Duckling!’

No one cared about whether he lived or died.

In all that great mansion, the only person who treated Duckling

like another human being — who treated him as he would any other child — was Mr Auslander, who had drifted there from the other side of the ocean. Every day after he had completed his morning tasks and had his midday siesta, he would walk along the dark little pebble path overhung with flowers to where the old servant couple lived. He would sit down next to the wooden crate in which Duckling was playing and smoke a cigarette, talking in his own language about the dream that he had had the night before. It seemed as though he were talking to Duckling but in fact he was talking to himself, because Duckling was still too little to understand. Every so often he would bring the baby a rattle or a little pottery toy, and bit by bit Duckling came to adore the old man. Later on, when Duckling learned to walk, or to be precise when he learned to crawl, the very first place he went on his own was to Mr Auslander’s office in the Pear Garden.

The Pear Garden, as the name suggests, was named after its pear trees: two hundred-year-old pear trees. There was a little wooden house in the middle of the garden, the attics of which had been used by the Rong family for storing their supply of opium and medicinal herbs. One year, a female servant disappeared in mysterious circumstances — to begin with they imagined that she had eloped with some man; later on they discovered her body, already badly decomposed, inside this building. The woman’s death was impossible to cover up: soon every single member of the Rong family and their entire staff knew all about it. Subsequently the Pear Garden became the subject of ghost stories and people were scared to go there; people would change colour when its name was mentioned and if children were being tiresome, their parents would threaten them, ‘If you don’t stop that immediately, we’ll leave you in the Pear Garden!’ Mr Auslander took advantage of other people’s fear of the place to live quietly and without interference. Every year when the pear trees flowered, Mr Auslander would look at the misty sprays of blossom and smell their intensely sweet fragrance with the feeling that this place was exactly what he had been looking for all these years. When the pear flowers fell, he would sweep up the fallen petals and dry them in the sun, before placing them in the building that he might enjoy the fragrance of the blossoms all the year round — a kind of eternal spring. When he wasn’t feeling well, he would make tea with the flowers. He found it very settling for his stomach; it made him feel a lot better.

After the first time that Duckling came, he came every day. He would not say anything, but he would stand underneath the pear trees and watch Mr Auslander in silence, timidly, like a frightened fawn. Since he had practiced standing up in his wooden crate from a very young age, he walked a little bit earlier than most other children. On the other hand he was much slower at learning to talk. At past two years of age, when other children of the same age were stringing together their first sentences, he could only make one sound — jia. . jia. This made people wonder whether he might not prove to be mute. However, one day when Mr Auslander was taking his lunchtime siesta on a rattan chaise longue, he suddenly heard someone call out to him in a desolate voice:

‘Dad. . dy!’

‘Dad. . dy!’

‘Dad. . dy!’

Mr Auslander realized that someone was trying to call him

‘Daddy’. He opened his eyes and saw that Duckling was standing next to him, tugging at his jacket with his little hand, his eyes wet with tears. This was the first time in his life that Duckling had ever called out to anyone, and he thought of Mr Auslander as his father. Since his father had seemed to him to be dead, he started crying, and when he cried, he brought his father back to life. That very day, the foreign gentleman took little Duckling into the Pear Garden to live with him. A couple of days later, the eighty-year-old Mr Auslander climbed up into one of the pear trees to hang a swing, to be little Duckling’s present on the occasion of his third birthday.

Duckling grew up surrounded by pear flowers.

Eight years later, just as the pear flowers were beginning their annual dance off the trees, Mr Auslander looked up at the flurries of petals whirling through the sky. Moving along with tottering steps, he carefully mulled over every word he planned to use. Every evening, he wrote out the lines that he had composed during the day. Within a couple of days he had formulated the letter which he sent to Young Lillie — the son of Old Lillie — at the provincial capital. That letter resided in a drawer for more than a year, but when the old man realized that he did not have much longer to live, he took it out again, telling Duckling to put it in the post. Due to the war, Young Lillie had no fixed abode and often moved around, so the letter did not reach him for a couple of months.

The letter said:

To: The Vice-Chancellor of the University

Dear Sir,

I do not know if writing this letter to you will be the last mistake I ever make. It is because I think I might be making a mistake, and because I would like to spend more time with Duckling, that I will not immediately put this letter in the post. By the time this letter reaches you, I will be dying; in which case — even if it is a mistake — I will no longer care. I can use the special powers granted to those who are about to die to refuse to carry any further the burdens life has placed upon me. These burdens have been, if I may say so, quite sufficiently numerous and heavy. However, I am also planning to use the all-seeing eyes supposed to be granted to the dead to check up on how seriously you take the points raised in my letter and what you propose to do about them. In many ways, you could say that this is my last will and testament. I have lived on this difficult and dangerous planet for a long time — almost a century. I know how well you treat the dead in this country, not to mention how badly you treat the living. The first is entirely praiseworthy; the latter is not. It is for this very reason that I am certain you will not disobey my final instructions.

I have only one regret and that is Duckling. I have been his guardian for many years, faute de mieux, but now I can hear the bell tolling for me and it is clear that I have only a few days left. It is time for someone else to take care of him. I beg you to take over as his guardian. There are three reasons that you would be the perfect choice.

1. It is thanks to your bravery and generosity — you and your father (Old Lillie) — that he was ever born at all.

2. Whether you admit it or not, he is a member of the Rong family and his grandmother was the person that your father loved and admired more than anyone else in the world.

3. This child is very clever. These last few years, he has been my new-found-land. At every step, I have found myself amazed and impressed by his truly remarkable intelligence. Do not be misled by his somewhat misanthropic and cold personality; I believe that he is just as clever as his grandmother was, not to mention the fact that the two of them are as alike in appearance as two peas in a pod. She was exceptionally clever, extremely creative; an amazingly forceful personality. Archimedes said, ‘Give me a place to stand and I will move the earth.’ I believe that he is that kind of person. However, right now he needs you, because he isn’t quite twelve years old.

Believe what I tell you and take the child away from here. Bring him up in your home because he needs you, needs your love, and needs an education. Perhaps more than anything else, he needs you to give him a name. I beg you!

I beg you!

This is the first and last time I have ever begged anyone for anything.

The dying R. J.

Tongzhen, 8 June 1944

2

1944 was the worst year that the people of the provincial capital, C City — and N University at its heart — had ever experienced. First they suffered in the front line of battle; then they were ground under the heel of the Nanjing puppet government. This brought about an enormous change not only to the appearance of the city, but also to the hearts of its people. When Young Lillie received Mr Auslander’s letter, the worst of the fighting was already over, but the chaos unleashed by the bad faith of the temporary government had reached the point of no return. By this time Old Lillie had been dead for many years and Young Lillie’s position at N University had been adversely affected by the collapse in his father’s fortunes, not to mention the intransigent attitude of the puppet government. Nevertheless, the puppet government thought very highly of Young Lillie. First of all he was famous, which meant that he was useful to them in a way that an ordinary man wouldn’t have been; secondly the Rong family had suffered a great deal at the hands of the KMT government, so they were hoping that he would prove amenable. So when the puppet government was first established, they generously offered Young Lillie (at that time just acting vice-chancellor of the university) the job of chancellor, imagining that this would be all that it took to buy him. They were not expecting that he would tear up the brevet in front of everyone and proclaim in a stentorian voice: ‘We Rongs would rather die than betray our country!’

As you might imagine, Young Lillie’s answer was very popular, but it guaranteed that he was not going to find himself with an official position. He had already been thinking for some time of avoiding the repulsive overtures of the puppet government (and the associated ferocious infighting in the university) by going into hiding in Tongzhen, but Mr Auslander’s letter unquestionably speeded his departure. Still mulling over the letter, he stepped off the paddle-steamer. At a glance he picked out the steward of the Rong mansion from the crowd huddled together against the rain and wind. The steward asked him politely if he had had a good journey. Instead of responding, he asked abruptly, ‘How is Mr Auslander?’

‘Mr Auslander is dead,’ the steward said. ‘He passed away some weeks ago.’

Young Lillie felt his heart thump in his chest. Then he asked: ‘Where is the child?’

‘Who do you mean?’

‘Duckling.’

‘He is still at the Pear Garden.’

He was living in the Pear Garden, that was right enough, but no one seemed to know what he was doing in there, since he hardly ever came out and very few people bothered to go in. Everyone knew that he was living in the mansion, but he seemed to move from place to place like a lost soul, with hardly anyone even catching a glimpse of him. According to the steward, Duckling was the next best thing to a mute.

‘I don’t understand a thing that he says to me,’ the steward said. ‘He doesn’t often speak, and when he does, he might as well not bother, because no one can understand it.’

The steward also said that according to the servants in the main mansion, it was only because the old foreign gentleman got down on his hands and knees and kowtowed three times to the Third Master that he agreed to allow Duckling to carry on living at the Pear Garden after his death. Otherwise they would have thrown him out onto the street. He went on to say that Mr Auslander had left his savings of many decades to Duckling and that was what he was living on, since the Rong family couldn’t possibly afford to pay for his food.

It was lunchtime the next day when Young Lillie walked into the Pear Garden. The rain had stopped by then, but having fallen continuously for several days, it had washed the buildings clean while creating a thick squelchy layer of mud underfoot. His footsteps left deep prints in the mud and in some places it was deep enough to cover his galoshes. As far as Young Lillie could see, there were no other footprints to be seen — the spider’s webs in the trees were empty, the spiders having retreated under the eaves to get out of the rain. Some of them were now busily occupied spinning a new web in front of the door. If it were not for the smoke rising from the chimney and the sound of something being chopped on a block, he would have believed the place to be deserted.

Duckling was chopping up a sweet potato. There was boiling water in the pot on the stove, in which a few grains of rice were bobbing about. He did not seem alarmed at Young Lillie’s intrusion, nor was he angry. He just looked at him for a moment and then went back to his work, as if it was his grandfather who came in after a short absence — his grandfather or perhaps a dog? He was smaller than Young Lillie had been expecting, and his head was not as large as people said. His skull was dolichocephalic and oddly pointed on top; almost as if he were wearing a homburg hat — perhaps it was because of this that his head did not appear abnormally huge. Young Lillie did not find anything at all remarkable in his appearance; however, his cold, calm manner made a very deep impression; he was like a little old man. The only nice pieces of furniture in the room were the medicine chest (left over from the original use of the building), a table and a director’s chair. There was a large volume lying open on the table, a musty smell emanating from its leaves. Young Lillie closed the book so that he could read the title on the spine: it was an English book — one volume of the Encyclopedia Britannica. Young Lillie put the book down and looked questioningly at the child. Then he asked, ‘Are you reading this?’

Duckling nodded.

‘Can you understand it?’

Duckling nodded again.

‘Did Mr Auslander teach you?’

He nodded again.

‘You don’t say anything: is this because you are mute?’ As Young Lillie spoke, he realized that his tone of voice was more aggressive than he had intended, as if he were blaming the child. ‘If you are then nod your head twice. If you are not, then say so.’ Because he was afraid that the child might not understand Chinese, Young Lillie repeated what he had said in English.

Duckling walked over to the stove, put the sweet potato that he had just finished chopping into the water and replied in English that he was not a mute.

Young Lillie asked him again if he could speak Chinese and Duckling replied — in Chinese — that he could.

Young Lillie laughed and said, ‘Your Chinese is as bad as my English. Did you learn it from Mr Auslander?’

Duckling nodded again.

Young Lillie said, ‘Don’t nod.’

Duckling said, ‘Fine.’

Young Lillie said, ‘It is many years since I last used my English and it is terribly rusty. In the future we had better speak Chinese together.’

Duckling said in Chinese, ‘Fine.’

Young Lillie walked over to the table, sat down in the director’s chair and lit a cigarette. He asked, ‘How old are you?’

‘Twelve.’

‘Apart from getting you to read these books, did Mr Auslander teach you anything else?’

‘No.’

‘You mean that Mr Auslander never taught you how to interpret dreams? He was famous for that.’

‘He taught me that.’

‘Are you any good?’

‘Yes.’

‘I had a dream last night. Would you interpret it for me?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I only interpret my own dreams.’

‘Well, why don’t you tell me what kind of things you dream about. . ’

‘I dream about all sorts of things.’

‘Have you seen me in your dreams?’

‘I have.’

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who?’

‘You are a member of the eighth generation of the Rong family to live here and you were born in 1883. You are the twenty-first in your generation. Your name is Rong Xiaolai and your style name is Dongqian, and your soubriquet is Zeshi. People call you ‘Young Lillie’. You are the son of the founder of N University, Old Lillie. You graduated from the mathematics department at N University in 1906; in 1912 you went to the United States to study, and obtained a Master’s degree from MIT. In 1926 you returned to your Alma Mater to teach and you have been there ever since. You are now the vice-chancellor of N University and a full professor in the department of mathematics.’

‘You know a lot about me.’

‘I know a lot about all the members of the Rong family.’

‘Did Mr Auslander teach you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he teach you anything else?’

‘No.’

‘Do you go to school?’

‘No.’

‘Would you like to go to school?’

‘I don’t know; I have never really thought about it.’

The water in the pot had now come to the boil again and filled the room with its warmth — that and the smell of cooking. The old man stood up with the intention of going out into the garden. The child thought that he was leaving and called out to him to wait a moment. He said that Mr Auslander had left something for him. As he spoke, he walked in the direction of the bed. He pulled a paper parcel out from underneath the bed and handed it to him with the words: ‘Daddy told me that when you came, I was to give this to you.’

‘Daddy?’ The old man thought for a moment. ‘You mean Mr Auslander?’

‘Yes.’

‘What is this?’ The old man picked up the parcel.

‘When you open it, sir, you will see.’

Whatever was inside had been wrapped up in a couple of layers of brown paper and looked pretty large. This however turned out to be a mistaken impression, for when all the paper wrappings had been removed, they revealed a statuette of the Bodhisattva Guanyin that you could hold in the palm of your hand. It had been carved from muttonfat jade and had a single dark sapphire set between its eyes as the urna, the Buddhist ‘Third Eye’. Holding it delicately in his hand the old man scrutinized it carefully; immediately he sense a kind of icy pure aura spreading from his palm to the rest of his body — a testament to the high quality of the jade. The workmanship was also excellent; the combination of these two factors suggested that this statuette had a long and complex history. He was sure that such a remarkable treasure must be worth a very great deal of money. The old man thought the matter over, looking at the child. Then he said with a sigh, ‘I hardly knew Mr Auslander. Why should he leave me any bequest at all?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You know, this statuette is worth a lot of money. You should keep it.’

‘No.’

‘Mr Auslander took you in when you were only a baby and he loved you as if you were his own son; you ought to take it.’

‘No.’

‘You need it more than I do.’

‘No.’

‘Or is it that Mr Auslander was worried that you would be cheated if you tried to sell it yourself and wanted me to do it for you?’

‘No.’

While he was speaking, the old man’s eyes happened to fall on the outer wrapping paper and he noticed that it was covered in figures, line after line of calculations, as if someone were working out a very difficult sum. When he spread out all the papers and looked at them, he realized that they were all the same, covered in line after line of mathematical calculations. Changing the subject completely, the old man now asked: ‘Did Mr Auslander teach you mathematics?’

‘No.’

‘Who wrote this then?’

‘I did.’

‘Why?’

‘I was trying to work out how many days Daddy lived for. . ’

3

The disease that finally killed Mr Auslander first manifested itself in his throat. Maybe this was some kind of karmic revenge for all those years he had spent interpreting other people’s dreams — everything that he had gained in life had come to him thanks to his elegant turn of speech; likewise all the harm he had suffered was brought about by others taking umbrage at his choice of words. Even before he started composing his last letter to Young Lillie, he had already pretty much lost the ability to speak. It was this that made him feel that death was coming and that he needed to start making some plans for Duckling’s future. Every morning during those silent days, Duckling would put a cup of pear blossom steeped in water by the old man’s bed and he would be woken by the faint breath of its perfume; as he watched the pale dried flowers would uncurl in the warm liquid. It made him feel calm and relaxed. These pear blossoms seemed to alleviate the pain he felt from his badly-set bones; he came to think of them as the one thing that had enabled him to live to this great age. When he had first begun collecting these flowers, it was simply because he was bored. After a time, he began to appreciate the startling clarity of their colour, not to mention their delicate texture. He would collect the flowers and sun them under the eaves. When they were completely dry, he would put them in his pillow or on top of his desk. Every time he smelled their fragrance, it seemed as if he were prolonging their flowering season by keeping them by him.

Since he only had one eye and his legs had never recovered properly after they were broken, he found it difficult to get around. As a result, he spent much of his life sitting in his chair. As time went on, he gradually became sick with constipation; at its worst he felt that there was no point in him being alive. One year, at the beginning of winter, his constipation returned. He used all his regular methods: every morning when he first woke up he would down a large bowl of cold water, then he would continue drinking more in the hope of giving himself a stomach-ache. This time the constipation proved particularly obdurate — for a couple of days he downed cup after cup of water, but with no sign of the slightest reaction from his guts. He had only succeeded in making himself even more sick; he felt terribly unwell and hopeless. One evening he came back from the town having picked up his medicine — fumbling round in the dark he picked up the bowl of cold water waiting for him by the front door and drained it to the dregs. Because he drank it so quickly, it was only afterwards that he realized there had been a strange flavour to the water — at the same time he felt that something or other soft had gone down his throat with the liquid — a horrifying experience. When he lit his oil lamp, he discovered that the bowl was full of sodden dried pear petals. Maybe they had been blown there by the wind, or maybe they had been disturbed by a rat. He had never heard that pear-blossom could be used to make a drink and so he waited uneasily to find out what happened next — he was even ready to discover that they were going to kill him. But before he had managed to finish brewing up his medicine, he felt a pain deep in his guts. Soon, he realized that this was the pain he had been hoping for day and night. He knew that he would be okay. After a long and resonant fart he headed off to the lavatory. When he returned, he was completely relaxed.

On previous occasions, any relief from constipation had been followed by a period of serious stomach inflammation. Thus his stoppage of the bowels would normally be followed by dreadful diarrhoea, as if he had to proceed through these two extremes to recover. This time, however, he seemed to have escaped from this vicious circle — his constipation relieved, he made a complete recovery without any other symptoms or problems. He now started to become seriously interested in the medicinal properties of pear-blossom water. What had begun as a pure accident now struck him as the inner workings of divine providence. From this time onwards, he would brew himself a cup of pear blossoms the way that other people make themselves a cup of tea — the more he drank the more he enjoyed it. Every year when the pear trees flowered, he would feel an incomparable joy and sense of satisfaction. Picking these fragrant and delicate blossoms, he would feel as if he were slowly recovering his long-lost health. Under the stress of long-term pain, he had dreamed every night of the pear flowers bursting open in the sunlight, floating through the wind and the rain. It was a sign that he hoped that God would let him die, would let him leave with the pear blossoms.

Early one morning, the old man called Duckling to his bedside and gestured that he wanted a piece of paper and a pen. He wrote down the following message: ‘When I am dead, I want you to put pear flowers in my coffin.’ That evening, he called Duckling back to his bedside and again demanded paper and pen, so that he could give more detailed instructions: ‘I am eighty-nine years old and I would like eighty-nine pear flowers to be buried with me.’ The next morning, he called Duckling to his bedside again and once supplied with paper and pen, he made his wishes even more precise: ‘Work out how many days there are in eighty-nine years and then bury me with that number of pear flowers.’ Perhaps the old man was confused and fearful in the face of his oncoming death, for at the moment that he wrote these increasingly complex instructions, he seemed to forget completely that he had never taught Duckling any mathematics.

Although he had never formally been taught any mathematics, Duckling was quite capable of this kind of simple addition. It is part of life, everyday stuff: a moderately intelligent child, even if you don’t formally teach them this kind of skill, will still be able to manage it. If you look at it from that point of view, then Duckling had already received as much instruction in addition and subtraction as he needed, since every year when the pear blossoms began to fall from the trees, Mr Auslander would collect them and afterwards get Duckling to count them. When he had come up with the correct number, it would be noted on the wall. Later on, Mr Auslander might well get him to count them again and the total was written up a second time on the wall. That way, by the time that the flowers had all fallen, Duckling’s addition and subtraction had had a thorough work-out, not to mention his understanding of numbers and decimal places. However, that was all that he had learned. Now he was going to have to rely on this strictly limited experience to calculate how many days his daddy had been alive, based on the information that old Mr Auslander had prepared for his tombstone, including the time and place of his birth. Because he had such limited mathematical experience, the calculation took ages — it was a whole day before he got a result. Dusk was falling when Duckling walked up to the bed and showed the result of his lengthy calculation to his daddy, who by that time no longer even had the strength to nod his head. He touched the boy’s hand gently and then closed his eyes for the last time. It was for this reason that Duckling had no idea whether the answer he had obtained was right or not. When he realized that Young Lillie was looking at his workings out, for the very first time he began to understand that this relationship might be very important to him, so he began to feel nervous and uncomfortable.

Duckling had used three sheets of paper for working out his calculations. Even though they were not numbered, when Young Lillie looked at the uppermost page, he realized immediately that it was also the first page. The first page began like this:

One year: 365 days.

Two years: 365 + 365 = 730 days.

Three years: 730 + 365 = 1,095 days.

Four years: 1,095 + 365 = 1,460 days.

Five years: 1,490 + 365 = 1,825 days.

Having got this far, Young Lillie realized that Duckling didn’t know how to do multiplication. Since he did not know multiplication, he had no choice but to use this cumbersome method. Having added up year by year until he reached the total for eighty-nine years, he worked out the figure of 32, 485 days. From this figure he had deducted 253 days, leaving a final total of 32, 232 days.

Duckling asked, ‘Am I right?’

Young Lillie realized that Duckling was wrong, because of course not every year consists of 365 days. According to the solar calendar, every four years you have a leap year, which consists of 366 days. On the other hand he also realized that it cannot have been easy for a child of twelve to work through such a long and tiresome calculation without making any mistakes. He didn’t want to upset him, so he said that the answer was correct and praised him for all the trouble that he had gone to:

‘You are absolutely right about one thing. By basing your calculations on the number of days in a whole year, starting from the day of his birth, yosaved yourself a lot of trouble. If you think about it, if you had started your count on the first of January, it would have left you with two incomplete years at the beginning and end of Mr Auslander’s life to include in your final count, whereas this way you only have to think about the number of days that he lived passed his birthday. That really has saved you a lot of effort.’

‘But now I have worked out a much easier way of doing it,’ Duckling said.

‘How?’

‘I don’t know what it is called, but look at this.’

As he spoke, Duckling fished another couple of pages out from under his bed for the old man to look at.

These pieces of paper were of a completely different size and texture from the previous ones, and Duckling’s handwriting was also somewhat altered, indicating that it must have been written at some other time. Duckling said that he wrote it after Daddy’s funeral. Young Lillie looked at it and realized that the left-hand column contained addition as before, while the right-hand column contained the method of calculation that he did not know the name for:

One year: 365 days. 356.1 = 365. Two years: 365 + 365 = 730 days. 365.2 = 730. Three years: 730 + 365 = 1,095 days 365.3 =1,095.

As I am sure you will have realized, Duckling was using a dot to indicate multiplication — he did not know the proper sign and hence had to invent one of his own. Using this dual method of calculation, he had worked out a total for the first twenty years. But from the twenty-first year, he swapped the order of the two methods, giving his dot multiplication first and the addition second:

Twenty-one years: 365.21 = 7,665 days.

7,300 + 365 = 7,665 days.

At this stage, Young Lillie noticed that the figure of 7,665 obtained by multiplication had been corrected; the original answer had been something like 6,565. After that the total for every year was worked out the same way. The dot method came first and the addition came second, furthermore the result obtained by multiplication sometimes showed signs of having been corrected, to fit with the figure obtained by addition. However, the figure obtained by multiplication for the first twenty years of old Mr Auslander’s life did not seem to have been corrected. That meant two things:

1. For calculating the first twenty years, Duckling was using addition as his primary method, while his dot principle was just a kind of decoration, which he seemed to regard as something that could not necessarily stand independently. On the other hand, from twenty-one years on, he was using multiplication only, with the addition functioning merely as mathematical proof.

2. To begin with he had not completely mastered multiplication and thus made mistakes, hence there were corrections to be found in his workings. However, later on, once he came to understand multiplication fully, the corrections gradually disappeared.

He carried on multiplying one year at a time until he reached forty, and then there was a sudden leap to eighty-nine, which by his dot method of calculation he worked out to be 32,485 days, a figure from which he then subtracted 253 days to reach a final total of 32,232 days, exactly as before. He had drawn a circle around this number, to make sure that it caught the eye and stood out from all the other figures.

There was one final page of workings, which appeared very confused, but Young Lillie realized at first glance that he was trying to work out the principles of multiplication. At the very bottom of the page, the rules were clearly set out. As the old man looked at this page, he could not stop himself from reciting it out loud –

Once one is one.

Once two is two.

Once three is three. .

Two twos are four.

Two threes are six.

Two fours are eight. .

Three threes are nine.

Three fours are twelve.

Three fives are fifteen.

Three sixes are eighteen. .What he was reading was indubitably multiplication.

When he had finished, Young Lillie looked silently at the child, as he was enveloped by a very strange and unfamiliar sense of uncertainty. The quiet little room still seemed to resound with the echoes of his chanting; as he concentrated, he felt warmed and comforted. It was at that moment he decided that he had to take the child away. He said to himself, the war has gone on for years now and there is no end in sight; at any moment, with the very best motives at heart, an unconsidered action might bring disaster down upon me and those dearest to me. But this child is a genius and if I don’t take him away with me right now, I am going to regret it for the rest of my life.

Before the end of the summer holidays, Young Lillie received a telegram from the provincial capital to say that the university would begin classes again in the autumn. They hoped that he would return as soon as possible to prepare to begin teaching. Once he received this telegram, Young Lillie thought that he might well not return to take charge, but that he would have to bring back a new student for them. He called out to the major-domo and told him that he was leaving. When he finished, he gave the man a fistful of notes. The majordomo thanked him, imagining that this was a tip.

Young Lillie said, ‘This is not a tip. I want you to do something for me.’

‘What is it?’ asked the major-domo.

‘Take Duckling into the village and buy him two sets of clothes.’

The major-domo just stood there, thinking that he must have misheard.

‘Once you have done that, I will give you your tip,’ said Young Lillie.

A couple of days later, when the major-domo came for his tip, Young Lillie said, ‘You had better help Duckling to pack: we are leaving tomorrow.’

As you might imagine, yet again the major-domo just stood there, thinking that he must have misheard.

Young Lillie had to repeat what he had said all over again.

The following morning, just as the sky was getting light, all the dogs in the Rong family mansion suddenly started barking. First one started barking and then the next joined in, until the cacophony was indescribable and wrenched every member of the household — masters and servants — out of bed, to peer at what was going on outside through the cracks in the doors. Thanks to the lamp that the majordomo held, the residents of the Rong mansion were treated to such an amazing sight that they were hardly able to believe their eyes. They saw Duckling in a new suit of clothes, carrying the ox-hide suitcase that Mr Auslander had arrived with all those years before, walking silently in Young Lillie’s wake, trying desperately to keep up. He seemed scared, and moved like a bewildered little ghost. Because it was so amazing, they none of them dared believe their own eyes. When the major-domo got back from the docks, they learned from him that it was only too true.

There were many questions. Where was Young Lillie taking him? Why was he taking him away? Would Duckling ever come back? Why was Young Lillie so kind to Duckling? And so on and so forth. The major-domo had two answers to all these questions.

To his masters he said: ‘I don’t know.’

To the junior servants he said: ‘Who the fuck knows!’

4

If the horse made the world smaller and boat travel made the world larger, then the internal combustion engine made the world magical. A couple of months later, when the Japanese Army advanced from the provincial capital in the direction of Tongzhen, the advance motorbike division arrived within a couple of hours. They were the very first motors ever to be seen on the road between the provincial capital and Tongzhen and their speed made people wonder whether Heaven might not have finally taken pity on the Foolish Old Man who wanted to move a mountain and shifted the entire mountain range that lay between them out of the way. Up until that moment, the quickest way to go between the city and Tongzhen was to travel by horse. If you could find a horse with a good turn of speed and applied the whip when necessary, it was possible to make the journey in about seven or eight hours. Some decades earlier, Young Lillie had always made this journey by horse-drawn carriage: though this was of course slower than going on horseback, nevertheless, providing the driver pressed on, it was quite possible to reach your destination by dusk if you set out at dawn. However, now that he was getting on, Young Lillie could no longer cope with the jolting that entailed and so he had to travel by boat. The journey to Tongzhen took two days and two nights, but that was moving against the current. Coming back wouldn’t take nearly so long, but it would still be at least one day and one night.

Sitting on the boat, Young Lillie started to worry about the boy’s name. Even when the boat travelled the final stretch before the provincial capital, he still hadn’t come to any decision. Once he had started thinking about it, he discovered what a tricky problem this was. The fact is, Young Lillie was confronted with exactly the same problems that old Mr Auslander had faced when he was asked to pick a name for the baby: this was not a difficulty that had resolved itself with time. Having thought about it carefully, Young Lillie decided to put all other considerations on one side and give the boy a name suitable for someone who had been born in Tongzhen and grown up in Tongzhen, and that way he came up with two names, both of which seemed to him a little forced: Jinzhen, meaning ‘Golden Sincerity’ and Tongzhen, meaning ‘Childlike Sincerity’. He decided to let the boy decide for himself which one of the two he would prefer.

‘I don’t care,’ said Duckling.

‘In that case,’ said Young Lillie, ‘I will pick for you. Do you think that Jinzhen would be all right?’

‘Fine,’ replied Duckling.

‘In that case I’ll be called Jinzhen.’

‘I hope that you live up to your name in future,’ said Young Lillie.

‘Fine,’ Duckling replied, ‘I will try and live up to my name.’

‘That means I hope that in the future you will shine like gold,’ said Young Lillie.

‘Fine,’ Duckling replied, ‘I will try to shine like gold.’ After a moment, Young Lillie asked another question: ‘Do you like your name?’

‘Yes,’ said Duckling.

‘I would like to change one of the characters in your name,’ said Young Lillie. ‘Would that be okay by you?’

‘Okay,’ said Duckling.

‘I haven’t even told you which character I want to change,’ said Young Lillie, ‘so why do you just agree?’

‘Which character?’ Duckling asked.

‘I want to change the character zhen meaning “sincerity” to the zhen that means “pearl”,’ said Young Lillie. ‘Is that okay with you?’

‘Okay,’ replied Duckling. ‘The zhen that means pearl.’

‘Do you know why I have changed that character in your name?’ Young Lillie asked.

‘No,’ said Duckling.

‘Would you like to know?’

‘Well. . I don’t know. . ’

To tell the truth, the reason that Young Lillie wanted to change the character in his name was purely out of superstition. In Tongzhen, just like the rest of the Jiangnan region, there was a popular saying: ‘Even the devil is scared of a feminine man.’ That means that when a man has some feminine quality, he has both yin and yang in his nature and the two complement each other. Strength is complemented by pliability. They thought that this was the way to produce the very best kind of man — a truly outstanding individual. It was because of this that local customs developed a million ways to balance yin and yang, including the names that they gave to their sons. A father who hoped for great things from his son would often deliberately pick a girl’s name for him, in the hope that this would guarantee him a sterling future. Young Lillie wanted to tell Duckling this, but then he decided that it would not be quite appropriate. After hesitating a bit, he realized it would be best if he kept his reasoning to himself. So in the end he just said: ‘Right, that’s decided then. You are going to be called Jinzhen, the zhen that means “pearl”.’

By that time, the skyline of C City was just emerging on the horizon.

Once they had arrived at the docks, Young Lillie called for a rickshaw, but he did not go home. Instead he went straight to a very well-respected primary school near the West Gate, to find the headmaster. The headmaster was a man named Cheng. This man had once been a pupil at the high school associated with N University, and when Young Lillie was a student — and later as a junior instructor at the university — he would often teach classes at the high school. Cheng had a remarkably lively character and was much admired by his fellow students; he had made a deep impression on Young Lillie. When he finished high school, his grades were such that he could easily have gone on to university, but by that time he had been bewitched by the uniforms of the National Revolutionary Army. When he came to say goodbye to Young Lillie, he was already shouldering a gun. In the depths of winter two years later, Cheng came back to see Young Lillie again. He was still wearing the uniform of the National Revolutionary Army, but this time he did not carry a gun. Looking more closely, Young Lillie realized that it was not only the rifle that was missing, the arm that was needed to hold it was also gone, leaving an empty sleeve. As Cheng manoeuvred himself awkwardly into place, Young Lillie felt more than a little uncomfortable. He gingerly took hold of his remaining hand — the left one — and realized that it was just as strong as normal. He asked whether he could write with that hand and Cheng said that he could. Young Lillie then provided him with a letter of introduction to a newly established primary school near the West Gate, where he could train as a teacher. This gave the wretched man a new lease of life. Because of his handicap, when he first became a teacher, everyone called him One-Arm. Now that he was the headmaster, people still called him One-Arm, because he had single-handedly made the school was it was.

A couple of months earlier, Young Lillie and his wife had hidden out at the school when the battle raging around the city was at its height — they had lived in the shed attached to the carpentry workshop. Today, the moment that Young Lillie clapped eyes on One-Arm, he said, ‘Is the shed where I used to live still empty?’

‘It is,’ replied One-Arm. ‘There are just a couple of basketballs and footballs in there.’

‘I’d like it if this young man could stay there,’ said Young Lillie. He pointed to Duckling.

‘Who is he?’ asked One-Arm.

‘Jinzhen, your new student,’ said Young Lillie.

From that day onwards, no one called him Duckling any more; everyone called him Jinzhen.

‘Jinzhen!’

‘Jinzhen!’

This new name marked the beginning of Duckling’s life in the city and everything that happened to him after that; it was also the end of his connection with Tongzhen.

As for what happened over the course of the next couple of years, the most reliable witness is Young Lillie’s oldest daughter, Rong Yinyi.

5

Everyone at N University called Miss Rong the Master; Master Rong, but I do not know whether this was the result of their fond memories of her father, or out of respect for her unusual position. She never married, but that is not because she never fell in love. Rather, it is because she fell in love too deeply, too painfully. The story goes that when she was young she had a boyfriend, a brilliant student from the physics department of N University, specializing in wireless technology. Supposedly he could make a triple waveband radio for you from scratch in the space of a couple of hours. Once the War of Resistance broke out, given that N University was a hotbed of patriotism in C City, it is hardly surprising that every month there were students abandoning their studies to join the army, rushing headlong for the front line. One of the students who left was Master Rong’s boyfriend. For the first couple of years after he joined the army, he and Master Rong were able to keep in touch, but later on they gradually lost contact. The last letter she ever received from him was sent from the city of Changsha in Hunan province in the spring of 1941. It explained that he was now engaged in top-secret research work for the military and that he would temporarily have to break off contact with his family and friends. He wrote over and over again about how much he loved her and how he hoped that she would wait for him. The last line was the most moving: ‘Darling, wait for me to come back to you. The day that the Japanese are defeated will be our wedding day!’ Master Rong waited until the Japanese were defeated and then she waited until the Liberation, but still he did not come back — there wasn’t even word that he had died. She heard nothing until 1953 when someone returned from Hong Kong bringing a message for her, saying that he had gone to Taiwan many years earlier and was now married with children. He told her to find someone else.

That was the end result of all Master Rong’s decades of devotion and waiting. It goes without saying that it was a terrible shock to her and she never really got over it. Ten years ago, when I went to N University to meet her, she had just retired from the position of head of the department of mathematics. Our conversation began with a discussion of a family photograph hanging in her living room. There were five people in the photograph. Young Lillie and his wife were in the front row, sitting down, and standing behind them was Master Rong, then in her twenties, with her hair in a shoulder-length bob. Standing to her left was her younger brother, wearing glasses, and on her right was her younger sister with her hair in pigtails, aged maybe seven or eight. This photograph was taken in the summer of 1936, just as Master Rong’s younger brother was getting ready to go abroad to study. The picture was taken to commemorate the occasion. Because of the war, her younger brother did not come back home until 1945; during that time the family lost and then gained a member. The person they lost was the little sister, who had died in the epidemic the year before; the person they gained was Jinzhen, who joined the family that summer, just a few weeks after she died. As Master Rong explained: [Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

My little sister died during the summer holidays, when she was just seventeen.

My mother and I didn’t even know of Jinzhen’s existence until after she was dead. Daddy had him hidden in the house of Mr Cheng, the headmaster of a primary school near the West Gate. We didn’t have much to do with Mr Cheng, so even though Daddy was hoping to keep this all a secret from us, he didn’t bother to specifically warn him not to mention it to us. One day, Mr Cheng came to the house. I don’t know where he had heard that my sister had died, but he came to pay a visit of condolence. My father and I happened to be away from home that day, so only my mother was there to greet him and as they talked, Daddy’s secret came out. When he came back, Mummy asked him what was going on, and he told her everything he knew about all the misfortunes this boy had already suffered in his short life, his remarkable intelligence, and the old foreign gentleman’s request. Perhaps it was because Mummy had been so deeply affected by my sister’s death that she just burst into tears when she heard about his unhappiness. She said to Daddy: ‘Yinzhi (that was my little sister’s name) has gone and this boy needs a family. Bring him to live here.’

That was how my little brother Zhendi joined us — Zhendi was Jinzhen’s nickname, you see.

My mother and I both called him Zhendi, only Daddy called him Jinzhen. Zhendi called Mother ‘Mummy’, but he called Daddy ‘Professor’ and me ‘Sis’, so everything was kind of topsy-turvy. Of course, if you looked at the family tree, I would be one generation senior to him, so by rights he should have called me ‘Auntie’.

To tell the truth, I didn’t like Zhendi one little bit when he first turned up. He didn’t smile at all and wouldn’t speak to anyone. He moved round the house in absolute silence, like a ghost. He turned out to have all sorts of disgusting habits, like belching while eating. His hygiene was also appalling: he didn’t wash his feet at night and he would just take his shoes off and throw them down by the stairs, filling the dining room and the corridor with a foul stench. We were living in the house that my father had inherited from Grandpa, a kind of Western-style villa. There was a kitchen and dining room on the ground floor and all the bedrooms were upstairs. Every time I came down the stairs from my bedroom for meals, I would see his rotten and stinking old shoes and think about the way that he belched over his food, and I would find myself not really wanting anything to eat at all. Of course the problem with his shoes was sorted out almost immediately: Mummy told him that he ought pay attention to this and make sure that he washed his feet and put on clean socks every day — after that his socks were cleaner than anyone’s. He was a very capable boy: he knew how to cook, wash his clothes, build a fire out of coal-dust briquettes; he even knew how to sew — in fact he was much better at that kind of thing than I was. Of course, this was all to do with the way that he had been brought up: he had learned how to do all sorts of things. The belching and farting turned out to be much more difficult habits to break him of. Habits can be broken eventually, but in this case it turned out that he had very serious stomach problems, which were also the reason why he was so thin. Daddy told me that his stomach problems were the results of drinking the pearl-blossom tea that Mr Auslander was so fond of day in and day out: that kind of thing was all very well for an old man, but how could it possibly be considered suitable for a growing child! To tell the truth, once we found out about his stomach problems, he ate more medicine than food in our house. He could only eat one little bowl of rice per meal, less than a cat, and even so after just a mouthful or two he would start belching.

One day, Zhendi forgot to lock the door of the lavatory and I walked in, not realizing that it was already occupied. That really wasn’t acceptable. As far as I was concerned, that was the last straw and now I wanted him out of our house. I told Mummy and Daddy that I couldn’t stand it any longer and I wanted him to start boarding at school. I told them that even though he was a relative, that was no reason for him to be living in our home and that lots of other boys lived as boarders at the school. Daddy didn’t say a word — he let Mummy do the talking. Mummy said that it wouldn’t be right to make him leave when he had only just arrived; she said that once term had started, then it might be all right for him to become a boarder.

Daddy then chipped in and said, ‘Okay, once term has started he can stay at school as a boarder.’

Mummy said, ‘We will go and fetch him so that he can spend every weekend here, because he ought to feel that this is still his home.’ Daddy agreed to that. So everything was decided.

However, that is not at all what happened in the end. . [To be continued]

One evening, towards the end of the summer holidays, Master Rong happened to mention at the dinner table something that she had read in the newspapers earlier that day: the previous summer many parts of the country had suffered one of the worst droughts since records began, with the result that in some cities there were more beggars than there were troops. Her mother sighed and said that the previous year had been a double leap year — those years always saw terrible natural disasters. In the final analysis it was always the peasants that suffered the most. Jinzhen did not often open his mouth and so Mrs Lillie always did her best to bring him into the conversation. It was for this reason that she made a point of asking him if he knew what a double leap year was. When he shook his head, Mrs Lillie explained that it came about when a leap year in the solar calendar coincided with one in the lunar calendar; when the two leap years came together. Seeing that he didn’t really understand what she was talking about, Mrs Lillie asked him, ‘Do you know what a leap year is?’

He shook his head again, without making a sound. He was that sort of person: if it was possible to express something by any other means, he would not open his mouth. Immediately Mrs Lillie began to explain to him what a leap year was and how it was dealt with in first the solar calendar and then the lunar calendar, and so on and so forth. When she had finished, he just stared at Young Lillie as if he had been pole-axed, waiting for him to confirm what his wife had just said.Young Lillie said, ‘Exactly. That is how it works.’

‘You mean my calculations were wrong?’ Jinzhen went bright red in the face and looked as if he was about to burst into tears.

‘Your calculations?’ Young Lillie did not know what he was talking about.

‘Daddy’s age — I thought that every year was 365 days long.’

‘That is not quite right. . ’ Before Young Lillie had finished speaking, Jinzhen broke down into floods of tears.

It proved impossible to console him. Whatever people said to him to try and cheer him up, it did not make the blindest bit of difference. In the end Young Lillie had simply had enough and angrily thumped his fist down on the dining table, shouting at him to control himself. Although he did stop crying at that point, it was clear that he was still terribly upset. He was holding onto his thighs, digging his nails in, as if his life depended on it. Young Lillie ordered him to keep his hands above the table. Afterwards, he spoke to him very sternly, though he was clearly intending his words to console the boy. He said, ‘What are you making that kind of racket for? I still haven’t finished speaking. When I have, then you can see if you still want to cry.’

He continued, ‘When I said that you were wrong just now, I was speaking theoretically — the fact is that you ignored the existence of leap years. On the other hand if you look at it from the point of view of mathematics, it would be impossible to say that you were wrong, because there are acceptable errors in any calculation.

‘According to my knowledge, the time it takes the earth to complete one orbit of the sun is three hundred and sixty-five days, five hours, forty-eight minutes and forty-six seconds. So why do we need leap years? There is a simple reason: according to the solar calendar, every year there are five extra hours, whereby every four years you need a leap year which consists of three hundred and sixty-six days. However, as I am sure you will realize if you think about it, if you calculate that ordinary years consist of three hundred and sixty-five days and that each leap year contains three hundred and sixty-six days, you are still not going to obtain a completely accurate calculation. It is convenient for most ordinary purposes to let the mistake go by; in fact, it would be impossible to work the solar calendar without this acceptable error. What I am trying to tell you is that even if you had allowed for leap years, your calculation would still be wrong.

‘Now you can go away and work out how many leap years Mr Auslander lived through during his eighty-nine years and then add that number of days to your original calculation. Then you can work out how big the difference is between your original calculation and the new one. In a calculation involving figures of more than four places of decimals, the acceptable margin for error is normally set at 0.01 per cent; any more than that and you have made a mistake in your calculations. Right: now you tell me, is your mistake within the acceptable margin for error?’

Mr Auslander died in a leap year at the age of eighty-nine, thus he had lived through twenty-two leap years: that does not sound many, but it is also not a few. Adding one day for every leap year means that twenty-two leap years is equivalent to twenty-two days. Adding that to the more than 30,000 days that Mr Auslander had spent on this earth meant that it was a mistake well within the acceptable margin of error. The reason why Young Lillie made such a point of this is that he wanted Jinzhen to find a way to forgive himself for the mistake that he had made. Thanks to the way that Young Lillie first shouted at him and then cajoled him, Jinzhen finally calmed down.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Later on, Daddy explained to us how Mr Auslander had asked Zhendi to work out his age. Thinking of how upset he had been, I suddenly found myself feeling moved by his obvious affection for the old foreign gentleman. On the other hand I also realized that he had an obsessive streak in his character — not to mention an inability to cope with his own mistakes. Later on we realized more and more clearly that Zhendi could on occasion be really stubborn and fierytempered; most of the time he was so quiet and kept himself to himself. He could put up with all sorts of things and simply carry on as if nothing had happened — in fact he could tolerate things that most people would find absolutely unendurable. But once an invisible line was crossed, once something had touched the most delicate part of his psyche, he would lose control very easily. This loss of control was always expressed by some extreme act. I could give you lots of examples of this kind of thing. For example, he really loved my mother and so one day he wrote a message in his own blood, completely in secret. What he said was: ‘Daddy is dead. The rest of my life is going to be devoted to looking after Mummy.’

When he was seventeen, he got terribly sick and spent a long time in hospital. Mummy discovered this note then, because she was forever popping into his room to look for something or other that he wanted. It was slipped inside the binding of his diary and written in large characters. It looked as though he had used the tip of a finger to write it, but there was no date on it, so we didn’t know when it had been written. It was clear that it was not recent, so I reckon that he probably wrote it during the first year or two that he was living with us. The foxing on the paper and the fading of the characters certainly suggested that it had been there for some time.

My mother was a very kind and gentle woman, friendly with everyone. She remained the same throughout her long life. When you think about her relationship with Zhendi, it really seemed as though they were destined to be friends, because the two of them got along amazingly well right from the very beginning. They had the kind of silent rapport that you normally only see among close family members. From the very first day that he came to live with us, Mummy called him Zhendi. I don’t know why she called him that; maybe it was because my little sister had only just passed away and she was transferring all her affection to him. After my sister died, Mummy didn’t set foot outside the house for the longest time; she just sat at home and mourned. Many nights she had nightmares, and during the day she often imagined that she saw my dead sister. Once Zhendi arrived, Mummy gradually recovered. Maybe you don’t know this, but Zhendi knew how to interpret people’s dreams. He was wonderfully good at it, just like visiting a professional shaman. He was a Christian though and read a little English-language Bible every day, even though he knew lots of passages completely off by heart. I think that the reason Mummy recovered so quickly and with so few setbacks along the way was entirely thanks to the fact that Zhendi was there interpreting her dreams for her and telling her stories out of the Bible. It is hard to explain exactly why they got on so well together. Of course, Mummy loved Zhendi; she always thought of him as one of the family and respected and cared about him. What nobody knew at the time was how deeply Zhendi was affected by this and how he became determined to repay her for everything that she did for him. That is why he secretly wrote that message in his own blood. In my opinion, Zhendi had lacked affection in his earlier life; in particular he had never experienced mother-love. Everything that Mummy did for him — cooking him three meals a day, making his clothes, asking him if he was too hot or too cold — this was all new to him and he felt it deeply. As time went on and more and more things were done for him, he wasn’t able to deal with his emotions any more and found this way of expressing his gratitude. Of course, the way that he chose was more than a little melodramatic, but that is the kind of boy he was. If I may be allowed the benefit of hindsight, I think that nowadays we would say that Zhendi was autistic.

I could cite lots of other examples of similar kinds of behaviour, and perhaps I will tell you about them later on. However right now we need to go back to the evening when he had hysterics, because the matter is not yet over. .

[To be continued]

The following evening, again at suppertime, Jinzhen returned to the matter that had been under discussion the previous day. He said that Mr Auslander had lived through twenty-two leap years and hence it might appear that he had got his figures out by twenty-two days, but that in fact he was only wrong by twenty-one days. That seemed completely stupid! If you have lived through twenty-two leap years then that adds one day for every year — it should be twenty-two days. Why did he say that it was twenty-one? Everyone, including Mrs Lillie, thought that he must have gone off his head. But when Jinzhen explained what he meant, those present realized that he had a point.

You see, Young Lillie had explained that leap years were introduced because in fact each year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds long, and thus every four years they add another 24 hours. But obviously it is not precisely 24 hours that needs making up, because that would require the earth to take 365 days and 6 hours to travel once around the sun. How much is the error introduced? Every year it is 11 minutes and 14 seconds, so in other words over the course of four years, an error of 44 minutes and 56 seconds is introduced. This means that in every leap year cycle, a certain amount of time is added: 44 minutes and 56 seconds. Mankind steals that time from the earth. Mr Auslander lived through twenty-two leap years, so for him, a total of 16 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds of non-existent time had been added to his life.

However, as Jinzhen pointed out, according to the original figure Mr Auslander had lived for 32, 232 days, a number that he obtained not by working out how many days there were in eighty-eight years, but how many days there were in eighty-eight years plus 112 days. While it was perfectly true that when he was calculating the 112 extra days he ignored the existence of leap years, it is also a fact that a day is not precisely twenty-four hours long. In actual fact a day is twentyfour hours plus almost a minute long — over the course of 112 days that would add up to 6,421 seconds, or in other words one hour and forty-seven minutes. So you have to deduct that one hour and fortyseven minutes from the original figure of 16 hours, 28 minutes and 32 seconds, which gives you a new total of 14 hours, 41 minutes and 32 seconds. That gives you the real figure for the non-existent time added to Mr Auslander’s life by the modern calendar.

Jinzhen went on to say that according to his information, Mr Auslander had been born at noon and he died at nine o’clock in the evening, so at the beginning and end of his life, there was at least ten hours of non-existent time being factored in, not to mention the 14 hours, 41 minutes and 32 seconds that he had accumulated during his lifetime. No matter how you worked it out, Mr Auslander had one whole day’s worth of non-existent time added to his lifespan. Jinzhen had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about what a leap year meant. You could say that since the existence of leap years had put his calculation of the number of days that Mr Auslander spent upon this earth out by twenty-two days, now he had got his own back by cutting down his mistake by twenty-four hours.

According to Master Rong, she and her father were both amazed at this development. They both felt impressed and moved by this evidence of the boy’s crystal-clear intellect. However, the most amazing thing was yet to come. A couple of days later, when Master Rong had just arrived back home in the afternoon, her mother (who was cooking downstairs) told her that her father was in Zhendi’s room and that she was to go and join them. When Master Rong asked why, her mother said that Zhendi seemed to have come up with some kind of mathematical theorem and that her father had been absolutely stunned.

As mentioned before, since the last 112 days of old Mr Auslander’s life had originally not been calibrated to take account of the existence of leap years; if you insist that each day consists only of twenty-four hours, in fact you are leaving 1 hour and 47 minutes, or 6,421 seconds, unaccounted for each year. The error introduced annually is 6, 421 seconds. In the cycle of one leap year, you can deduct the uncounted time from the non-existent time: –6,421 + 2,696 seconds, where 2,696 represents the number of seconds in 44 minutes and 56 seconds. In the second leap year cycle, the amount of non-existent time is (–6,421 + 2 x 2,696) seconds, and so on and so forth until you arrive at the calculation for the last leap year: (–6,421 + 22 x 2,696) seconds. Jinzhen had calculated the missing time, unaccounted for in his original figure for how many days Mr Auslander had lived, which he worked out as 88 years and 112 days, or 32,232 days, into twenty-three lines of elegant calculations, to wit:

(–6,421)

(–6,421 + 2,696)

(–6,421 + 2 x 2,696)

(–6,421 + 3 x 2,696)

(–6,421 + 4 x 2,696)

(–6,421 + 5 x 2,696)

(–6,421 + 6 x 2,696)

. .

(–6,421 +22 x 2,696)

Based upon this, and without any instruction from anyone, he had gone on to work out a mathematical formula:

X = [(first value + last value) x number] / 2* He had managed to work out a mathematical formula completely unaided.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Mathematical formulae are not such bizarre and abstruse things that ordinary people cannot work them out. The fact is that anyone with a good knowledge of mathematics could reframe their knowledge in the shape of a formula — provided that they know that formulae exist in the first place. I could shut you up in a dark room, having told you in considerable detail about its contents. If I then demanded that you find me a particular object, even though the room was pitch-dark, you might well still be able to find it. If you used your intelligence, if you moved your feet carefully and felt with your hands, gradually working out what things have been put where, you ought to be able to find what I have asked you to look for. On the other hand if I had not told you what was in the room in the first place and then demanded that you go and find me a particular object, the chances are that you would not be able to do it.

Well, if he had been faced with a simple list of numbers, like say 1, 3, 5, 7, 9, 11 (not something complicated and irregular) and he had worked out a mathematical formula for that, it would have been much more easy to understand and we wouldn’t have been quite so amazed. You could compare this to someone making a piece of furniture from scratch without a single lesson from a carpenter. It doesn’t matter that other people have made the same piece many times before:* Conventionally, this formula would be given as: S = [(A₁ + A_n) x n] / 2.

we would still be impressed at your abilities. If the tools and material at your disposal were of poor quality, if the tools were rusty and the wood rough, and yet you still managed to produce a decent piece of furniture, we would all be doubly impressed. That is what Zhendi had done: he had effectively taken a stone hand-axe and a tree standing in the forest and turned them into a beautiful piece of furniture. We were that amazed, we could hardly believe the evidence of our own eyes. It was completely unbelievable!

After this, we felt that it would not be a good idea to keep him on at primary school, so Daddy decided to enrol him in the middle school attached to N University. The school was only a couple of doors down from our house, so if he went there as a boarder, it would quite possibly be even more damaging to Zhendi’s fragile psyche than if we had just thrown him out onto the streets. So, at the same time as Daddy decided to enrol Zhendi in the first year at middle school, he also decided that he would have to continue living with us. The fact is that after Zhendi came to live with us that summer, he never left until he got his first job. .[To be continued]

Children like giving each other nicknames; any child in the least bit peculiar will find himself being given a nickname by his classmates. When the other pupils at the school first caught sight of Jinzhen’s huge head, they called him ‘Big-head’. Later on they realized that he had all sorts of peculiar habits — like he really enjoyed counting the hordes of ants that marched backwards and forwards across the playground and was completely oblivious to anything else while he was doing it, or that in the winter he would always wear a tatty old scarf trimmed with dog-fur (apparently this had been a present from old Mr Auslander), or that he would fart and belch in class, without the least sign of restraint, just letting it all hang out as it were. People really did not know how to take him. Another thing: he always wrote his homework in duplicate — once in Chinese and once in English. What with one thing and another, people felt that there was something wrong with him, that he must be stupid. But at the same time his grades were fantastic, really impressive, better than what the rest of the class could achieve put together. So they came up with a new nickname for him, ‘Idiot-savvy’ by which they meant ‘idiot savant’. This nickname was particularly apposite because it encompassed his behaviour both inside and outside the classroom. Like many nicknames it seemed to denigrate its possessor, but at the same time it had an element of praise — a perfect mix of contempt and respect: everyone felt it was the right name for him. Everyone called him that.

‘Idiot-savvy!’

‘Idiot-savvy!’

Fifty years later, when I went to visit the university, there were plenty of people who had no idea who I was talking about when I mentioned Jinzhen, but the moment I said ‘the Idiot-savvy’, it was like putting a match to the train of their memories — this nickname brought a whole host of stories to mind. One of the people I talked to, an old gentleman who had once been Jinzhen’s class teacher, was happy to share the following memories with me:

I remember one interesting thing. During break in class, one of the other pupils noticed a line of ants crawling along the corridor and called him over. He said to Jinzhen, ‘You like counting ants, don’t you, so why don’t you come and count how many ants we have here?’ I saw it with my own eyes — he came over and counted a couple of hundred ants walking along — just like that. There was another time that he borrowed a book off me, a dictionary of proverbs and aphorisms, and he gave it back to me a few days later. I said he could keep it but he said that he didn’t need it, since he had already memorized the whole thing. Later on, I found out that he could recite the whole damn thing from memory! I can tell you, of all the many, many pupils that I have taught during my career, there was no one else who came even close in terms of basic intelligence or academic ability. His memory, creative ability, comprehension, his ability to calculate, to extrapolate from the evidence, to make a summary, to come to a decision. . in many, many ways his abilities were truly amazing; ordinary people could not even begin to imagine what he could do. In my opinion, he did not need to waste his time in high school and could have gone straight on to university, but the Headmaster refused — he said that old Mr Rong didn’t want it that way.The old Mr Rong that this gentleman was talking about was Young Lillie.

Young Lillie had two reasons for his refusal. First, he was worried about the fact that Jinzhen had spent much of his childhood entirely cut off from other people, so he now needed to learn how to build normal social relations, spending time with other children of his own age, growing up in the ordinary way. Putting him in a situation where he would be entirely surrounded by people many years older than himself would be extremely damaging to a difficult and inward-looking personality. Secondly, he had discovered that Jinzhen would often do stupid things: he would try and conceal from Young Lillie and his teachers that he was trying to prove things that they had already explained to him had been demonstrated conclusively by other people — maybe it was just that he was too clever. Young Lillie thought that someone with no experience of the world, but with such great intelligence, needed to proceed one step at a time, otherwise he might end up wasting his genius on finding out things that other people already knew.

Later on it became clear that they would have to let him skip whole grades or the teachers simply would not be able to carry on themselves: he was treating his high-school teachers to barrages of obscure questions that they simply could not answer. There was nothing that could be done: Young Lillie had to listen to the advice of the boy’s teachers and let him skip a grade. Having created a precedent, he skipped one grade after the other and so by the time that his fellow classmates from the first year of high school had reached the last, he was already long gone. He passed the university entrance exams with flying colours: 100 per cent in mathematics and seventh place in the entire province. Naturally he ended up in the mathematics department of N University.

6

The mathematics department at N University was famous; in fact it was often said to be the cradle of the best mathematicians in the country. About fifteen years ago, a famous author from C City happened to overhear some people making derogatory remarks about his home town. His response was really remarkable. He said, ‘Even if C City was twice as run-down and backward than it is, we would still have the outstanding N University. If N University also started to fail, they would still have a mathematics department that ranks among the best in the world. How dare you make derogatory remarks about us!’

He meant it as a joke, but the fact is that the mathematics department of N University has always been very highly regarded.

On Jinzhen’s first day at university, Young Lillie gave him a diary. He had written a message on the fly-leaf, which ran as follows:

If you want to become a mathematician, you have come to the very best place in the country to foster your talents. If you do not want to become a mathematician, then you do not need to attend this university, for you already know enough mathematics to last you for the rest of your life.

Perhaps there was no one more aware than Young Lillie of the rare and amazing mathematical genius concealed beneath Jinzhen’s impassive exterior. Because of that, there was no one who hoped that Jinzhen would become a mathematician more than Young Lillie. As you will have realized, the note that he wrote in the front of Jinzhen’s diary is proof of that. Young Lillie was quite sure that in the future there would be a long train of other people who followed in his footsteps in realizing that Jinzhen had a remarkable genius for mathematics. However, at the same time he was worried that if that recognition came now it would be damaging — he was trying to hold it off for a year or two, to let Jinzhen concentrate on his studies, for he was sure that Jinzhen’s mysterious mathematical genius would sooner or later shine through.

As things turned out, Young Lillie was perhaps a bit too conservative. After just two weeks of class, Professor Jan Liseiwicz joined him on the list of people who had noticed the boy’s talents. As the professor said, ‘I can see that N University has produced yet another fine mathematician, and perhaps he will be one of the great mathematicians of our time. At the very least he will be the best that you and I will ever see.’

He was talking about Jinzhen.

Jan Liseiwicz was almost the same age as the century. He was born into a Polish aristocratic family in 1901. His mother was Jewish, and she bequeathed him what people in those days thought of as a typical Jewish face: a strong forehead, a hawk-like nose, and dark curly hair. He was also remarkably intelligent: his memory amazed people; on the Binet-Simon tests he registered practically off the scale. At the age of four, the young Liseiwicz was already obsessed by games in which the competitors pitted their intelligence against each other — it was at this stage that he started playing chess and learning set variations. By the time he was six, none of his family or their friends would dare to play against him. Everyone who saw him play chess said the same thing: he was a genius such as comes along maybe once in a century. Others complimented his mother: ‘Another great Jewish mathematician has been born!’

At the age of fourteen, Jan Liseiwicz accompanied his parents to a party to celebrate a wedding in another local aristocratic family; also present on this occasion were the family of Michael Steinroder, at that time one of the most famous mathematicians in the world. At the time of this unexpected meeting, Michael Steinroder was the Director of the Institute of Mathematics at Cambridge University and a chess grandmaster. Mr Liseiwicz senior explained to the mathematician that he hoped that one day his son would be able to study at Cambridge University. Steinroder said arrogantly, ‘There are two ways to gratify that ambition. Either he has to pass the standard entrance examinations held every year for Cambridge University or he has to win the Newtonian Prize in Mathematics or Physics offered every two years by the Royal Society.’ (The prize was awarded in mathematics in oddnumbered years and for physics in even-numbered years. The first five highly commended individuals could attend Cambridge University without having to pass the entrance examinations and for free.)

The young Jan Liseiwicz then piped up: ‘I have heard that you are regarded as the world’s finest amateur chess player. How about we play a game? If I win, surely I should be allowed to attend the university without having to take the entrance examinations?’

Steinroder replied sternly, ‘I am happy to play a game with you, but let me make it clear — you have demanded a great favour from me if you win. I am happy to oblige, but in return I am going to ask something of you if you lose. In this way the game will be fair. If you do not agree, then I decline to play.’

‘Tell me what you want me to do,’ Jan responded.

‘If you lose,’ the mathematician said, ‘you can never apply to attend Cambridge University.’

He was hoping to scare Jan off, but the only person who got frightened was the boy’s father. A storm of protest from Mr Liseiwicz senior made his son somewhat hesitant, but in the end he said confidently, ‘Fine!’

Surrounded by onlookers, the pair of them began to move their chess pieces, but within less than half an hour, Steinroder got up from the table and said with a laugh to Mr Liseiwicz: ‘Bring your son to Cambridge next year.’

Mr Liseiwicz said, ‘You haven’t finished the game yet.’

The mathematician said, ‘Do you really think I can’t tell when I am beaten?’ Turning back, he asked young Jan: ‘Do you think you can beat me?’

The boy replied, ‘Right now I only have a thirty per cent chance of victory; you have a seventy per cent chance.’

The mathematician said, ‘You are absolutely right. On the other hand, because you have realized that, there is at least a sixty to seventy per cent chance that you could force me to make a mistake. You have done very well and I hope to play many more games of chess with you when you come to Cambridge.’

Ten years later, Jan Liseiwicz (then aged just twenty-four) was listed by the Austrian journal Monatshefte für Mathematik as one of the rising stars in the world of mathematics. The following year he won the highest prize offered in international mathematics: the Fields Medal. People call this the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for Mathematics, but in fact it is much harder to achieve, for the Nobel Prize is offered every single year while the Fields Medal is only awarded once every four years.

One of Liseiwicz’s fellow students at Cambridge was a young woman who belonged to one of the junior branches of the Austrian imperial family. She fell madly in love with this young winner of the Fields Medal, but he remained completely indifferent to her. One day, the young woman’s father came to see Liseiwicz — naturally this was not in the hope that he would marry his daughter, but because he wanted to discuss his ideas for improving the state of mathematical knowledge in Austria. He asked the young man if he was prepared to help him achieve this ambition. Liseiwicz asked him what exactly he had in mind, and he said, ‘I will put up the money. You find suitable people. We ought to be able to put together a nice research institute.’

‘How much money are you prepared to invest in this?’ Liseiwicz asked.

‘Tell me how much you need.’

Liseiwicz thought about it for two weeks and worked out a mathematical formula for calculating the benefits to his own future career and for the field as a whole. The result was that going to Austria won over staying in Cambridge, no matter what number he looked at.

So he went to Austria.

A lot of people thought that he went to Austria at the behest of two people — one was the rich father and the other the besotted daughter. Some people imagined that this lucky young man would marry the girl and massively advance his career at one fell swoop. However, in practice the only thing that happened was that he advanced his career. He used the Hapsburg prince’s inexhaustible resources to create the finest mathematical research institute in Austria and gathered many excellent mathematicians under his banner — eventually the young woman who had been so desperate to marry him found a replacement from among their number. There was much gossip at the time that he was homosexual, and some of his actions did indeed seem to give credence to the rumours: for example, he never employed a woman in his research institute — even the secretaries and support staff were all male. Furthermore, when newspapers required an interview with him, they quickly learned to send a male reporter. As a matter of fact, more women reporters went to interview him than men, but they came back empty-handed; although this was probably more the result of his secretive nature than anything else.[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Jan Liseiwicz came to N University as a visiting scholar in the spring of 1938 — I imagine that he was headhunting. Of course, he was not expecting that such earth-shattering events would occur over the next couple of weeks. When he heard that Hitler had invaded Austria, he had no choice but to stay on at N University, at least until the situation in Europe became clearer. While he was waiting, he received a letter from a friend in the United States, informing him that the situation in Europe was truly appalling. The Nazi flag was already on the march through Austria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland, and Jewish people were being forced to flee. Those who did not leave in time were being rounded up and placed in camps. It was then that he realized that there was now nowhere to go and that he was stuck with us for the foreseeable future. He took up the position of professor of mathematics here, but he was still waiting for an opportunity to get to America. It was during this time that his personality (or perhaps it was his body) underwent a mysterious and unexpected change — almost overnight he began to experience an overwhelming attraction to the young women at the university. This was apparently something that had never happened to him before. He seemed like a strange tree that puts out different flowers when it is planted in different places, which then mature into different kinds of fruit. His decision to go to the United States was swamped by this new interest in the opposite sex, and two years later he married a young instructor from the physics department — he was forty years old at the time and she was a good fourteen years younger. This delayed his plan of going to the United States yet again, and he did not come back to the idea for another decade.

Everyone involved in the world of mathematics realized that after Jan Liseiwicz went to China he changed a great deal, becoming a wonderful husband and father, but less and less of an original and creative mathematician. Perhaps his remarkable talents were intrinsically bound up in his undomesticated existence; and thus once he married his genius deserted him. The fact is that if anyone had thought to ask him, he would have been hard put to answer whether his actions had destroyed his talent, or whether it had just vanished of its own accord. As any mathematician could tell you, before Jan Liseiwicz went to China, he wrote twenty-seven papers which were greeted with international acclaim, but afterwards he did not write even one. On the other hand, it was during this time that his sons and daughters were born. It was as if his genius vanished in a woman’s embrace, only to transform itself into a succession of adorable babies. Looking at what happened to him, people came to believe that there might be something in the old adage about how east is east and west is west and never the twain shall meet. For such a strange man to change in such a mysterious way, in such a profound way, was really quite unbelievable. At the time no one realized quite what was going on, but we all saw the results.

Of course, though he might have lost one part of his genius, Jan Liseiwicz remained a truly remarkable teacher. You could say that while he became less and less of an original, creative mathematician, he had transformed himself into a professional and highly respected instructor. Liseiwicz taught at the mathematics department in N University for eleven years, and the chance to become one of his students was unquestionably a great honour and a wonderful beginning to any mathematician’s career. To give you just one example: of the handful of students of N University who have achieved international recognition in their field, more than half were his students during his eleven years there. Of course, being one of his students was no sinecure. First, you had to be able to speak English (after Hitler’s invasion of Austria he refused to speak German ever again). Secondly, he would not allow anyone to take notes in his classes. Furthermore, when setting out a problem he would often only give half of it, or he would deliberately set out part of it incorrectly. Having set it out wrongly he would not correct it, or at least not on the same occasion. If he happened to remember it a few days later, he might give you the problem correctly, but if not, he didn’t care. It was that little trick more than any of the others which made many of his less intelligent students give up halfway or transfer to another department. His whole educational theory could be summed up in a single sentence: An interesting but wrong theory is always better than a boring but perfect proof. If you get right down to it, the reason he used these tricks was to force his students to think, to develop their imaginations and their creative abilities. At the start of every new academic year, facing his new students, he would begin his first class with the same message, couched in a strange mélange of Chinese and English: ‘I am a wild animal, not an animal trainer. I am going to chase you deep into the mountains and forests and you are going to have to do your damnedest to run ahead of me. The faster you run, the faster I will chase you. If you run slowly, I will chase you slowly. Whatever happens, you must run, you must never stop, whatever difficulties you face. The day that you stop running, our relationship is over. The day that you run deep into the woods and disappear from sight, our relationship is also over. In the first instance, I have given up on you; in the second, you have set yourself free. Right: now it is time to start running and see who can get away from whom.’

Of course, it was very difficult to set yourself free from him, but the means of doing so was extremely simple. At the start of every term, in the very first class, Liseiwicz would begin by writing a tricky equation in the top right-hand corner of the blackboard. Whenever someone worked out the answer, he would be given 100 per cent as his grade, and for the rest of the term he would only have to attend class if he wished to do so. You could say that you had set yourself free for the rest of that term. Once that had happened, he would write a new equation in the same place on the blackboard and wait for a second person to get the answer right. If you solved three equations in a row, he would set a new problem for you alone, which would function as your graduation thesis. If you solved that too, whenever it happened, even if you had only attended the university for a couple of days, you would graduate with top marks, thereby completing your studies. Of course, in the nearly ten years that he had been teaching by then, there had never been anyone who had achieved anything close — even being able to solve one or two of his equations was a remarkable achievement.[To be continued]

Jinzhen was now sitting in Liseiwicz’s class, and because he was so short (being still only sixteen), he sat in the very front row. He could see the sharp flash and sparkle of Jan Liseiwicz’s pale blue eyes much more clearly than any of his fellows. Liseiwicz was a tall man, and standing by the teacher’s podium, he seemed even taller. His eyes were fixed on the very back row of seats. Jinzhen felt the occasional fall of drops of spittle when the professor became excited and the sudden exhalation of breath when he raised his voice. He talked about these dry, abstract mathematical notations in a voice filled with intense emotion. Sometimes he waved his arms and shouted; sometimes he walked slowly up and down, reciting. Liseiwicz, when he stood in front of the teacher’s podium, seemed like a poet, or maybe like a general. At the end of the class, he walked out without a further word. However, on this occasion, just as he was stomping out, Jan Liseiwicz’s gaze happened to fall on the thin young man seated in the front row. He had his head bent over the sheet of paper where he was working out a calculation. He seemed entirely intent upon his work, like a student in an exam hall. Two days later, Liseiwicz held his second class. When he took his place at the podium, he asked a general question: ‘Is there someone here called Jinzhen? If so, could you please raise your hand?’

Liseiwicz realized that the student who raised his hand was the young man in the front row that he had noticed when he left after his first class. He waved the couple of sheets of paper that he was holding in his hand, and asked, ‘Did you put these under my door?’Jinzhen nodded.

Liseiwicz said, ‘Let me tell you, this term you don’t need to attend class.’

There was a sudden uproar.

Liseiwicz seemed to be enjoying something, for he waited for the hubbub to subside with a smile on his face. Once everyone was quiet again, he wrote the equation out on the blackboard again — not in the top right-hand corner this time, but on the top left-hand side — and then he said, ‘Let us have a look at how Jinzhen solved this problem. This isn’t an extra-curricular novelty. His solution is going to be the subject of our class today.’

He began by writing out Jinzhen’s answer on the board in full and explained it from start to finish. Then he used different methods to produce three alternative solutions, so that those sitting in class felt that they were learning something through the comparison, tasting the strange joy of reaching the same goal by travelling different routes. The topic of this new class was developed step-by-step as he explained each method. When he had finished, he wrote a new question at the top right-hand corner of the blackboard and said: ‘I would be really pleased if someone can answer this before the beginning of the next class. That is the way to go: I give you a question in one class and you answer it in the next.’

That was what he said, but Liseiwicz was well aware that the chances of that happening were vanishingly small. If you were going to express it mathematically, you would need to use a very small fraction of a per cent, and even then you would be rounding the number up. Calculation often proves a slipshod method of determining the future — it shows the possible as being impossible. People often do not work as tidily as calculations: they can make the impossible possible; they can turn earth into heaven. That means that in actual fact there is no great gulf between heaven and earth: one fraction more and earth becomes heaven, one fraction less and heaven will change into earth. Liseiwicz really had no idea that this silent and impassive boy would be someone who could confuse him as to the nature of what he was looking at — having decided that it was earth, he could come up with a result demonstrating that in fact it was heaven. In other words Jinzhen solved the second problem that Professor Liseiwicz set him right away!

This problem having been solved, of course a new one had to be set. When Liseiwicz wrote this third question up on the top right-hand corner of the blackboard, he turned round and rather than speaking to the class as a whole, he directed his comments to Jinzhen alone: ‘If you can answer this problem too, then I am going to set you your personal question.’ He was talking about the question that would be the basis of his graduation thesis.

Jinzhen went to three of Professor Liseiwicz’s classes in total, lasting just over a week.

In the case of this third question, Jinzhen was not able to solve it as quickly as the previous two, so when the next class came around, he did not yet have a solution to offer. When Professor Liseiwicz finished the fourth class of that term, he stepped down from the teacher’s podium and spoke to Jinzhen: ‘I have already thought of the question for your graduation thesis. You can come and pick it up whenever you finish the previous one.’ Having said that, he walked out.

After he married, Jan Liseiwicz rented a house in Sanyuan Lane, just near the university. That was officially where he lived, but in fact he still spent a lot of time in the rooms he had occupied when he was a bachelor, living in faculty accommodation. His set was up on the third floor, a suite of rooms with a bathroom attached. He would read there, or do research — it was his library-cum-office. That afternoon, having had his siesta, Professor Liseiwicz was listening to the radio. The clumping sound of feet coming upstairs interrupted his listening. The heavy footsteps stopped right by his door, but instead of being followed by the sound of a knock, there was a susurrating noise, like a snake moving through dry leaves, as something was pushed under the door. It was a couple of sheets of paper. Liseiwicz went over and picked them up, recognizing immediately a familiar handwriting: Jinzhen. He flipped through the pages until he got to the answer: it was correct. As if he had just been flicked by a whip, he wanted to throw open the door and shout for Jinzhen to come back. However, when he got as far as the door, he hesitated for a moment and then went back to sit on the sofa. He began looking at the first page of calculations. When he had read the whole thing through carefully, Liseiwicz felt the same impulse that had propelled him towards the door. This time he rushed to the window, from which he could see Jinzhen walking slowly away. Throwing open the window, Liseiwicz bellowed at the retreating back, far in the distance. Jinzhen turned round, to discover that the foreign professor was pointing at him and yelling to come upstairs.

Jinzhen sat down opposite the foreign professor.

‘Who are you?’

‘Jinzhen.’

‘No,’ Liseiwicz was smiling, ‘I mean what family are you from? Where do you come from? Where did you go to school? I can’t help feeling that I have met you somewhere before — who are your parents?’

Jinzhen hesitated. He hardly knew how to reply.

Suddenly Liseiwicz exclaimed: ‘Ah! I remember. You look just like the woman whose statue stands in front of the main building — Miss Lillie — yes, Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie, that’s it! Tell me, are you related to her? A son. . no, a grandson?’

Jinzhen pointed to the papers lying on the sofa and asked as if Liseiwicz had not spoken: ‘Did I get it right?’

Liseiwicz said, ‘You still haven’t answered my question. Are you related to Miss Lillie?’

Jinzhen didn’t admit it, but he also didn’t deny it. He just said woodenly, ‘You will have to talk to Professor Rong — he’s my guardian. I don’t know anything about my parents.’

Jinzhen was simply trying to avoid discussing his relationship with Miss Lillie, which was a subject he found very difficult to deal with; but he was not expecting that this would start Liseiwicz down an even worse line of enquiry. Staring at Jinzhen suspiciously, he said: ‘Oh, really. . So tell me, did you come up with the answer to my equations all on your own, or did someone help you?’

Jinzhen drew himself up: ‘Of course I did it myself!’

That evening, Jan Liseiwicz went in person to visit Young Lillie. When Jinzhen saw him, he imagined that the foreign professor was still concerned that he might have received help with his work. In fact, although Liseiwicz had indeed expressed such a possibility earlier in the day, he had immediately dismissed it. His reasoning for this was that if either the professor or his daughter had suggested a solution, they would never have expressed it in those terms. After Jinzhen left, Liseiwicz had reviewed his papers and was impressed all over again by his method of working. He discovered that the method of proof used was most unusual and impressive: at once naïve and yet clearly demonstrating both the grasp of logic and the intelligence of the young student who had worked it out. Liseiwicz found it hard to put his feelings into words. It was only in talking to Young Lillie that he gradually found a way to express what he thought.

Liseiwicz said, ‘The way that I think about it is this: it is as if we were asking him to go somewhere and pick up something which is located inside a maze of tunnels so dark that you cannot see the five fingers right in front of your face, and furthermore, the maze is full of crossroads, forks, and traps. If you don’t have a source of light, you can’t move even one step from your starting position. If you want to find your way through this maze of tunnels, you first need to prepare a source of light. There are lots of possible sources. You might use a torch, or an oil lamp, or a brand, or even a heap of firewood. This kid is so ignorant that he does not know about these tools and even if he did, he could not find them. So he does not go near them — he uses a mirror instead, setting it at just the right angle so that it will bend the sunlight into the tunnel that he is digging. When he comes to a bend in the tunnel, he sets up another mirror to light his path. He carries on his way, thanks to that one feeble beam of light, past all the traps and dangers. The thing that I find most mysterious is that every time he reaches a fork in the road, some kind of sixth sense seems to be telling him which is the right path to take.’

In almost a decade as colleagues, Young Lillie had never heard Jan Liseiwicz say anything so complimentary about anyone. It was very difficult to get someone like Liseiwicz to admit anyone else’s mathematical abilities, but here he was praising Jinzhen to the skies without the slightest hesitation. It was a pleasant surprise for Young Lillie, but also made him feel very strange. He thought to himself: ‘I was the very first person to discover that the boy has remarkable mathematical abilities and Liseiwicz is the second, but all he is doing is confirming my initial discovery.’ On the other hand, what could be better than confirmation of his discovery from a man like Liseiwicz? The two men talked together more and more happily.

However, on the subject of Jinzhen’s future studies, the two men were diametrically opposed. In Liseiwicz’s opinion, the boy already knew quite enough and had shown signs of such remarkable ability that he did not need any further classes on the basics. He thought that he could skip all of that and move straight on to completing his graduation thesis.

Young Lillie did not agree.

As we know, Jinzhen treated other people with an unusual degree of coldness — he liked spending time on his own. He had very little experience of interacting with his peers. This was a weak point in his character and something that would endanger him greatly in the future. Young Lillie was doing his very best to repair the damage caused by his early upbringing. In many ways, Jinzhen’s social problems and his unstable character, not to mention his unspoken animosity towards other people, would be obviated if he spent more time with other children — it would be more relaxing for him. He was by far the youngest of the students in the mathematics department and Young Lillie felt that the boy was already dangerously alienated from people of his own age. If he were forced to expand his social circle to an even larger number of adults, it could have a devastating effect on his future development. Young Lillie didn’t feel able to explain this right now; it really wasn’t the kind of thing that he wanted to talk about. It was all so complicated and the boy had the right to some privacy. All he could do was to say that he disagreed with the professor’s point of view: ‘In China we have an expression, “Iron needs time and effort to become steel.” The boy is unusually clever, it is true, but he also lacks basic ordinary knowledge. As you just said yourself, there are lots of tools that you can use to light your way and they are lying all around you, but he won’t pick up any of them — he will find some weird and unusual way to achieve something perfectly simple. In my opinion, he is not doing this on purpose; it is because he has no choice — his lack of basic knowledge forces him to become inventive. It is wonderful that in such circumstances he can still think of using a mirror to light his way, but if he spends the rest of his life using his genius in the same way, wasting his time on finding weird ways to achieve something that could perfectly well be done by simple means, he may be able to satisfy his own intellectual curiosity, but what is the point of it all? So, for the sake of his education, I think it is very important that Jinzhen spends more time studying, learning the things that other people have already done. It is only when he has a good grasp of the basics that have already been laid down that he can go on to research genuinely worthwhile unknowns. I have heard that when you came back from your travels last year, you brought back a very fine library. Last time I visited your house, I was hoping to be able to borrow a couple of your books. However, when I saw the notice pinned to the shelf saying “Don’t even bother asking”, I decided that there was no point. But I was thinking, if you would be prepared to make an exception, I would very much appreciate it if you would let Jinzhen read your books. I am sure that would be a very great help to him. As the saying goes, golden mansions are to be found in books.’

Now it was Jan Liseiwicz’s turn not to agree.

The fact is that at that time there was a lot of talk about the two weirdos of the mathematics department. One weirdo was Professor Rong Yinyi (that is Master Rong), who treasured a heap of letters, sticking to them when she could have been getting married to any one of her admirers. The other weirdo was the foreign professor, Jan Liseiwicz, who cared more for a couple of shelves of mathematics books than for his wife — certainly he would not let anyone other than himself look at them. Young Lillie could say whatever he liked, but he didn’t hold out much hope that Liseiwicz was going to change his mind. He was well aware that the chances of that happening were vanishingly small. If you were going to express it mathematically, you would need to use a very small fraction of a per cent and even there you would be rounding the number up. However, calculation often proves a slipshod method of determining the future — it shows the possible as being impossible.

That evening, when Jinzhen mentioned at the supper table that Professor Liseiwicz had lent him a couple of books and agreed that in the future he could borrow whatever books he wanted whenever he liked, Young Lillie suddenly felt his heart thud. He now realized that in spite of his assurance that he was ahead of the rest, in fact Liseiwicz had already left him far behind. More than anything else, it was this that made Young Lillie realize quite how important Jinzhen was in Liseiwicz’s eyes: he was irreplaceable. Liseiwicz was hoping for great things from Jinzhen, much greater than Young Lillie could even begin to imagine.

7

Of the two wierdos of the mathematics department, Master Rong’s story was very sad and people felt a great deal of respect for her. Professor Liseiwicz on the other hand seemed to be making a mountain out of a molehill, and it caused a lot of talk. Under normal circumstances, where there is a lot of talk, you end up with endless gossip. Hence, of the two wierdos, there were a lot more rumours about Professor Liseiwicz than there ever were about Master Rong. Pretty much everyone at the university had some sort of story to tell. Because everyone had heard about him refusing to lend anyone his books, they also heard about the fact that he was now lending books to one person — this is the effect you get when some little thing is done by someone famous. This is like the mathematical conversion of mass into energy. People gossiped constantly, asking why Professor Liseiwicz was so kind to Jinzhen, and only to him? It was practically as if he were letting him sleep with his wife. One explanation was that the foreign professor appreciated his student’s intelligence and hoped for great things from him — but the theory that he was doing it purely out of friendly motives was not particularly popular. Eventually those who said that Professor Liseiwicz was taking advantage of Jinzhen’s genius out-shouted the rest.Even Master Rong mentioned this in my interview with her.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

The very first winter after the end of the Second World War, Jan Liseiwicz went back to Europe. The weather was terribly cold, but I guess that it was even worse in Europe, because he didn’t take any of his family with him — he just went on his own. When he came back, Daddy borrowed a Ford car from the university and told me to go down to the docks to collect him. When I got there I was stunned to see that Professor Liseiwicz was sitting on an enormous wooden packing case, about the same size as a coffin, with his name and address at N University written on it in both Chinese and English. The size and the weight of his packing case made it impossible to get into the car. I had to get a cart and four brawny men to transport it back to the department. On the way, I asked Liseiwicz why on earth he had brought so many books back with him and he said excitedly, ‘I have a new research interest and I need these books!’

Apparently on this trip to Europe, Liseiwicz had recovered the interest in research that had been dormant in recent years: he was feeling inspired and was going to make a new start. He had determined to begin research on an enormous new topic: artificial intelligence.

Nowadays, everyone has heard of the subject, but at that time the world’s first computer had only just been built.* That was what had given him the idea — he was way ahead of most people in realizing the potentials of the field. Given the massive scope of the research project that he had in mind, the books that he brought back were just a tiny part of the whole; but it is not surprising that he was not prepared to lend them to other people.

The problem is that the blanket ban applied to everyone except Zhendi, and so people started making wild guesses about what was going on. There were all sorts of stories circulating in the mathematics department anyway about what a genius Zhendi was — how he completed four years of study in the space of two weeks, how cold sweat broke out on Professor Liseiwicz’s face at the mere sight of him; and before you knew it, some people who didn’t understand the first thing about how these things work were saying that the foreign professor was using Zhendi’s intelligence to advance his own research.

That kind of gossip breaks out all the time in academia — it makes professors look bad and people enjoy the idea that they get where they are by stealing someone else’s work — that is just the way it is.

When I heard this story, I went right round to Zhendi to ask him about it and he said it was a pack of lies. Daddy asked him about it too and he still said it was all rubbish.

Daddy said, ‘I hear that you spend every afternoon round at his house, is that right?’

‘Yes,’ said Zhendi.* The world’s first computer, ENIAC, was built in 1946.

‘What are you doing there?’ asked Daddy.

‘Sometimes I read books, sometimes we play chess,’ said Zhendi. Zhendi was very definite, but we still felt that where there is smoke, there must also be fire — we were worried that he was lying. After all, he was still only sixteen years old and knew nothing about how complicated the world can be; it was quite possible that he was being deceived. Well, I made excuses several times to go round to Liseiwicz’s house and find out what they were doing, and every time I saw that they were indeed playing chess: the standard international game. Zhendi often played go at home with my father, and he was a fine player — the two of them were pretty evenly matched. Sometimes he also played tiddlywinks with Mummy, but that was just for fun. When I saw the two of them playing chess together, I thought that Liseiwicz was just doing it to keep him company, because everyone knew that he played at grandmaster level.

In fact, something completely different was going on. According to what Zhendi told me himself, he and Liseiwicz had played all sorts of different kinds of chess together — the standard kind, go, elephant chess, battle chess and so on. Occasionally he could win at battle chess, but he never beat Liseiwicz at any of the others. Zhendi said that Liseiwicz played all these games to an amazingly high level, so the only reason that he could occasionally win at battle chess was because ultimately victory in that game is not dependent entirely upon the player’s skill; at least half the time the outcome is determined by sheer luck. If you think about it, even though tiddlywinks is a much simpler game than battle chess, it is a much better determinant of the player’s skill, because the element of luck is so much smaller. In Zhendi’s opinion, battle chess should strictly speaking not be considered a type of chess at all; at the very least, it should not be regarded as a chess game for adults.

You may well be wondering, given that Zhendi was so far from being able to give Liseiwicz a good game, why did they keep on playing together time after time?

Let me explain. As a game, all types of chess are easy to learn to play, in the sense that they do not require the player to develop any special skills: you can just learn the basic rules and get stuck in. The problem is that once you have started playing, chess calls upon completely different attributes from any game requiring physical skill, where as you practice you just get better and better; from a rank beginner you become a practiced player, then a skilled one, and finally an excellent one. The more you play chess the more complicated it gets. The reason for this is that as you improve, you learn more of the set variations and that then opens up more avenues for you to explore — it is like walking into a maze. At the entrance, there is only one way to go, but the further you penetrate, the more crossroads you encounter; the more options you are faced with. That is one reason that the game is so complex; the other is that as you might imagine, if two opponents are walking through the maze at the same time, as one proceeds he is also trying to block the other’s advance, and he is trying to do the same — advance and block, advance and block — well, that is adding another level of difficulty to an already extremely complex game. That is what chess is like: you have standard openings and endgames, attacking and defensive moves, obvious and secret manoeuvres, pieces that you move close at hand and those you send to the other side of the board, enveloping your opponent in a fog of mystery. Under normal circumstances, whoever knows the most set variations has the most room to manoeuvre, and can create the most mystery about his moves. Once his opponent has become confused and can no longer determine the direction of attack, he has created the most favourable circumstances to win the game. If you wish to play a good game of chess, you have to learn the set variations, but that is not enough. The whole point about set variations is that everybody knows about them.

What is a set variation?

A set variation can best be compared to a path beaten through the jungle by many passing feet — on the one hand you can be sure that it is a route that goes from A to B, on the other hand it is also available for anyone to use. You can travel this path, but so can everyone else. Or to take another example: set variations are like conventional weapons. If you are fighting against people who have no weapons at all, your weapons will kill them dead in an instant. On the other hand if your opponent has exactly the same conventional weapons, you may be out there laying mines but he just sends in the minesweepers to clear them up, so you have been wasting your time; you send up your planes but he can see them bright and clear on his radar and he can blow you out of the sky. In those circumstances, you need secret weapons to win on the battlefield. Chess has many secret weapons.

The reason that Liseiwicz was prepared to carry on playing chess with Zhendi was because he realized that he had many secret weapons. He seemed to be able to conjure up an endless series of bizarre and tricky moves, apparently from thin air, giving his opponent the feeling that as he was walking along, someone was tunnelling through the ground beneath his feet. He could really confuse you, because a piece that you thought was dead would — in his hands — suddenly turn out to be crucial for his next move. Zhendi had been playing chess for such a short time, he had so little experience, and he knew so few of the set variations that it was easy to confuse him with your conventional weapons. Or to put it another way, because he did not know any but the most basic set variations, your standard moves were deeply mysterious to him. Of course each of these moves had been used by tens of thousands of people — they are reliable, they have been proved time and time again — so whatever peculiar and tricky move he had thought up was not able to stand up against the tried and tested, and in the end he would lose the game yet again.

Liseiwicz once told me himself that Zhendi was losing not on the basis of intelligence, but on experience, knowledge of the set variations, and playing skill. Liseiwicz said, ‘I have played all sorts of different kinds of chess, starting at the age of four, and over the course of the months and years I got to learn the set variations for each type of game like the back of my hand. Of course it is difficult for Jinzhen to beat me. The fact is that there is no one in my immediate circle who can beat me at chess — I can say without fear of contradiction that at chess, I am a genius. Furthermore, having played for such a long time, I have honed my skills. Unless Zhendi were to spend the next few years concentrating solely on improving his chess-playing abilities, he is never going to be able to beat me. However, when we range our forces against each other, I often feel a refreshing sense of surprise, which I enjoy enormously — that is why I have carried on playing with him.’

That is what he said.

Another game of chess!

And another game of chess!

Because they were playing chess together, Zhendi and Liseiwicz became close friends — they quickly moved beyond the normal teacher — pupil relationship to become really good friends, going out for walks together and eating together. Because they were playing chess, Zhendi spent less and less time at home. Up until then, during the summer and winter holidays, Zhendi would hardly put his nose out of doors — Mummy would often have to practically throw him out of the house in order to get him to spend some time in the fresh air. However, that winter Zhendi was hardly ever at home during the day; to begin with we thought he was playing chess with Liseiwicz but later on we found out that this was not the case. They weren’t playing chess — they were developing a new kind of board game.

I am sure that you will find it difficult to believe they were inventing their own variant of chess — Zhendi called it ‘mathematical chess’. Later on, I got to see them play on many occasions and it was really weird — the board was about the same size as a desktop, and there were two military encampments on it — one was a kind of hatch # shape, the other the shape of a Coptic cross. They played this game with mahjong tiles rather than chess pieces. There were four routes across the board and each player held two of them, stretching out from the hatch and the Coptic cross encampments. The pieces that started in the hatch encampment had a set arrangement, somewhat like that seen in elephant chess, where each piece has a particular starting position, but the pieces in the Coptic cross encampment could begin in any position — the arrangement was determined by your opponent. When your opponent arranged your pieces, he was of course thinking entirely of his own plan of campaign, placing them in the most favourable positions for his own purposes. Once the game began, you took over control of these pieces and it was up to you to move them. Naturally, your priority was to move these pieces from a position advantageous to the enemy to one favourable to yourself at the earliest possible opportunity. During the course of a game, a piece could move between the hatch and the Coptic cross encampments, and in principle, the fewer impediments you faced in advancing your pieces into the enemy encampment, the greater your chances of victory. However, the rules governing the circumstances in which you could simultaneously move a piece into the opposition camp were very strict and needed careful planning and preparation. Furthermore, once a piece had entered the enemy encampment, the way in which it could move changed. The biggest difference in the types of movement possible was that pieces in the hatch encampment could not move on the diagonal nor could they jump over other pieces. Both of these types of moves were allowed in the Coptic cross encampment. Compared to standard chess, the biggest difference was that when you were playing, you had to be thinking about how you would advance your own pieces along the two routes under your control: making sure that you had them arranged for the moves you intended to carry out, while at the same time making sure that at the earliest possible moment the disadvantageous pieces were moved into better positions and that when the time came, both you and your opponent could simultaneously move a piece into the enemy camp. You could say that you were playing chess against your opponent, but also against yourself — it felt as though you were playing against two different opponents at one and the same time. It was one game, but it was also three, for each of the two players had the game going on against themselves, as well as the one against their opponent.

It was a very complicated, strange game. The best comparison I can think of is to say that it is like the two of us joining battle, only to discover that my troops are under your command and your troops are under my command. Just think how bizarre and complicated it would be to fight a battle with only the opposing army at your command — bizarreness can in some cases be a kind of complexity. Because this game was so very complicated, most people simply could not play it. Liseiwicz said that it was designed solely for mathematicians to play and that is why it was called mathematical chess. There was one occasion when Liseiwicz was chatting to me about this game and he said triumphantly: ‘This game is the result of much research into pure mathematics: given the level of mathematical knowledge required to deal with its complexities, not to mention its intricate rules, the subtle way in which the subjective role of the player transforms the structural organization — really only human intelligence can compare. Inventing this chess game was a way of challenging the limits of our intelligence.’

The minute he said this, I was immediately reminded of his current research topic — artificial intelligence. I suddenly felt alarmed and uncomfortable, because I started to wonder whether this mathematical chess might not be part and parcel of his research. If that was the case, then Zhendi was clearly being used — he was covering up what he was doing by pretending that it was all about developing this game. I then made a special point of asking Zhendi why they had decided to develop mathematical chess and how they had gone about it.

Zhendi said that they had both enjoyed playing chess together but that Liseiwicz was so strong a player that he simply had no hope of ever being able to beat him, which in turn made him depressed and unwilling to play. Afterwards the pair had started thinking about developing a new kind of chess game, whereby the two of them would both start at the same level, without one having the advantage of knowing all the set variations. This game was to be structured so that victory would be determined purely by intelligence. When they were designing the game, Zhendi said that he was primarily responsible for designing the board, while Liseiwicz worked out the rules for how the pieces would be allowed to move. In Zhendi’s opinion, if you wanted him to work out how much of the game was his own work, he would say that it was around 10 per cent. If this game was indeed part of Liseiwicz’s research, then Zhendi had made a significant contribution and he deserved some credit for it. So I asked about Liseiwicz’s work on artificial intelligence. Zhendi said that he knew nothing about it and that so far as he was aware, Liseiwicz was not working on anything of the kind.

I asked him, ‘Why do you think that he is not working on anything of the kind?’

Zhendi said, ‘He has never mentioned it to me.’

It was all most strange.

I thought to myself, the moment Liseiwicz caught sight of me he was bubbling over with news of this new research plan, but now Zhendi spends pretty much every day with him and he doesn’t say a word about it? I was sure that something was up here. Later on, I asked Liseiwicz about it myself, and the only reply was that we did not have the facilities, he could not continue, and so he gave up.

Gave up?

Had he really given up or was this just something that he was saying?

To tell the truth, I was very unhappy about the whole thing. I don’t need to tell you, if he was just pretending to have given up on this research then we had a serious problem, because only someone who is engaged in unethical (if not downright criminal) activities feels the need to hide from other people’s eyes like that. The way that I thought about it, if Liseiwicz was indeed involved in something unethical, there was only one person he could be using, and that was poor little Zhendi. The whole department was buzzing with rumours, which had already forced me to think seriously about the unusual relationship that had developed between Liseiwicz and Zhendi — I was really worried that he was being cheated, being used. He was really still only a child at the time, completely unaware of how nasty other people can be, very emotionally immature and naïve. If someone is looking for a patsy, that is the kind of person that they would pick: innocent, isolated, timorous; the kind of person where if you bully them they keep quiet about it; the kind that suffers in silence.

Fortunately it was not long after this that Liseiwicz did something truly unexpected, which completely put all my fears to rest.

[To be continued]

8

Jan Liseiwicz and Jinzhen finalized the rules for mathematical chess in the spring of 1949. Not long afterwards, which was also not long before the provincial capital, C City, was liberated, Liseiwicz received an invitation from the journal, the Annals of Mathematics, to attend an event to be held at UCLA. In order to facilitate the travel arrangements for attendees from Asia there was a contact address in Hong Kong. Everyone was to meet there and then fly to California on the final leg of their journey. Liseiwicz did not spend very long in the States, maybe a month and a half in total, and he was back at work at the university so quickly that people found it hard to believe that he could really have been to America and back in that time. However, he had plenty of proof: job offers from universities and research institutions in Poland, Austria and the US; photographs of himself in the company of John von Neumann, Lloyd Shapley, Irvin Cohen and other famous mathematicians. In addition, he had brought back the question paper for that year’s Putnam Mathematical Competition.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Putnam is the name of a mathematician: his full name was William Lowell Putnam and he was an American — people called him ‘the second Gauss’. In 1921 the Society of American Mathematicians, in concert with a number of universities, established the annual Putnam Mathematical Competition — the focus of considerable interest in universities and mathematical societies and an important way to discover new talent at undergraduate level in mathematics departments and institutes. The competition is designed to test basic principles learned by university students, but the questions are so difficult that they require a very high level of mathematical ability. Although every year the students who take part in the competition are the very best from each university, due to the unbelievable difficulty of the questions set, the majority of people who take part will score around zero. The top thirty competitors in any one year will be picked up by the finest universities in America and indeed the world — for example Harvard offers the top three highest-scoring competitors the most generous scholarships available at the entire university. That year there were fifteen questions, whereby full marks in the competition would be 150, with forty-five minutes to complete the entire paper. The highest mark awarded was 76.5, and to get into the top ten you had to score over 37.55.

Liseiwicz had brought back the competition questions because he wanted to test Zhendi. The only person he wanted to test was Zhendi — everyone else (including the other professors at the university) would just be put to unnecessary trouble and distress by being made to sit these questions, so it was much better for all concerned if they were left in peace. Before he tested Zhendi, he shut himself up in his own office for forty-five minutes and tested himself. Afterwards he graded his own paper. He decided that his final mark should be less than the highest awarded that year, because he had only correctly answered the first eight questions — the ninth was unfinished. Of course, if he had had just a couple of minutes more he would have been able to answer this question correctly as well: the time-constraints were ferocious. But then the purpose of the Putman Mathematical Competition was to emphasize two important points:

1. Mathematics is the most scientific of sciences.

2. Mathematics is the science of time.

Robert Oppenheimer, who is often called the father of the atom bomb, famously said: ‘In science, time is the real obstacle. Given unlimited time, everyone can learn all the secrets of the universe.’ Some people say that by building the world’s first atom bomb, he came up with the best way to solve the problem of how to put an end to the Second World War. But if you think about it, if it was Hitler who had succeeded in developing the atom bomb, wouldn’t the result be that mankind was facing an even worse problem?

Zhendi succeeded in answering six questions in the forty-five minutes allotted to him. In the solution that he offered for one of the questions, Liseiwicz decided that he had made the mistake of tampering with the original question and hence he received no marks. The last question was a logic problem and he had only had a minute and a half left to look at it. There was no time to even begin working out this problem, so he had written nothing, he had just thought about it and in the very last seconds of the examination, he had scribbled down the correct answer. It was a remarkable achievement and yet again demonstrated that Zhendi had a most unusual intelligence. Grading this kind of question is up to the individual examiner — one person might give him full marks, on the other hand someone else might deduct some points: it depended entirely on the examiner’s perspective of the student’s abilities. At worst, he would still have to be given 2.5 points for this answer, so after some thought, Liseiwicz decided to be harsh and give him this mark. Zhendi’s total was 42.5 points, in a year when to reach the top ten in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, you had to get over 37.55 points.

That would mean that if Zhendi had really been able to take part in the competition, he would have been ranked in the top ten, giving him the opportunity to study in an Ivy League university, with a full scholarship and all the fame accorded to a Putnam Fellow in the world of mathematics. But because Zhendi hadn’t formally taken part, if you took his papers and showed them to someone, they would just laugh in your face. No one would have believed that this little kid from somewhere in China that nobody had ever heard of could get such a high mark — they would have thought you were having them on. A stupid attempt to take them in. Even Liseiwicz, looking at the answer papers in front of him, felt that in some way he must be being deceived. It was only a feeling, of course. Because Liseiwicz knew that it was true — he knew that Zhendi had not cheated in any way — and so he turned something that started out as just a game into something very serious indeed.[To be continued]

The first thing that Liseiwicz did was to go and find Young Lillie, to explain the manner in which he had tested Jinzhen on the Putnam Mathematical Competition questions. Afterwards he gave his considered opinion on the matter: ‘I tell you that Jinzhen is the best student the university has ever had, and in the future he could likewise become the best student at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or any other world-class university. That is why I am telling you that he really ought to go abroad to study. Harvard, MIT, wherever.’Young Lillie was silent for a moment.

Liseiwicz pursued the matter: ‘You should believe in his abilities and give him this opportunity.’

Young Lillie shook his head, ‘I am afraid it is impossible.’

‘Why?’ Liseiwicz’s eyes were completely round.

‘We don’t have the money,’ Young Lillie said frankly.

‘You would only need to pay for one semester,’ Liseiwicz said. ‘I am sure that by the time the second semester started he would be on a scholarship.’

‘The problem isn’t the first semester,’ Young Lillie said with a bitter smile. ‘With the situation we are in right now we could not even pay for his fare.’

Liseiwicz left disappointed.

Part of Liseiwicz’s disappointment was due to a natural feeling of sadness that his dream for his student had not worked out, but the remainder was darkened by suspicion. He and Young Lillie had never agreed about Jinzhen’s academic future. Now he did not know whether Young Lillie was telling the truth, or whether it was simply an excuse because he did not want to go along with the plan. He thought that the latter possibility was very likely correct for he found it hard to believe that a family as wealthy as the Rongs could really be in financial trouble.

Everything that Young Lillie had said was perfectly true, however. Jan Liseiwicz did not know that a couple of months earlier, the remnants of the family property at Tongzhen had been seized in the Land Reform, and the only thing that was left in their possession was a few ramshackle buildings in the old mansion. One commercial property remained in the provincial capital, but a few days earlier at the welcome ceremony for the new mayor, Young Lillie (as a member of a well-known patriotic family) presented it to the people’s government of C City as a sign of his support for the newly established People’s Republic of China. The decision to select such a public occasion for making the gift might seem like he was currying favour but in fact this was not the case — it was the recipients who decided it should be done this way. Furthermore, he agreed with their reasoning that it would set an example encouraging other members of wealthy and socially prominent families to support the new government. I can say categorically that the Rong family were great patriots and that Young Lillie was no exception — he beggared himself in order to demonstrate his loyal support for the People’s Republic. His support was determined both by his appreciation of the bigger picture and his personal experience of unfair treatment at the hands of the KMT government. Anyway, of the property that Old Lillie had inherited from his ancestors, when it reached the hands of himself and his son, some had been given away, some had been spent, some had been ruined and some had been divided, to the point where it was now all gone. Young Lillie’s own personal savings had gone in the battle to save his daughter’s life. His salary had not risen to cover the rising cost of living and he had lost all other possible sources of income. Now Jinzhen wanted to go and study abroad, but even though Young Lillie supported him wholeheartedly, there was nothing that he could do to help.

Eventually Liseiwicz realized what had happened. That came about just a couple of months later, when Liseiwicz received a letter from Dr Gábor Szego, then the Head of the Department of Mathematics at Stanford University, which accepted Jinzhen as a scholarship student and included a money order of $110 for travel expenses. This had been extracted from department funds purely thanks to Liseiwicz’s persuasive lobbying. He had written a 3,000-word letter to Dr Szego, and now those 3,000 words had returned, metamorphosed into a fully funded PhD place at Stanford and a ticket for the boat. When he told Young Lillie the news, Liseiwicz was delighted to see how happy the old man was.>

Just as Jinzhen was getting ready to spend his last summer at the university before heading off to Stanford, he became terribly sick. It was this that determined he would spend the rest of his life in China.

[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

He had renal failure!

Zhendi almost died!

When he first became sick, the doctor told us that he was going to die — at best, he would live for another six months. During that time, death was near him all the time; we watched a young man who had always been slim swell up until he looked vast, though his actual body weight continued to drop.

He was suffering from oedema. The renal failure affected him so badly that it was as if Zhendi’s body was made of dough, constantly fermenting, constantly swelling, making him as light and soft as a cotton-boll; it seemed as though he would burst if you poked him with a finger. The doctors said it was a miracle that Zhendi survived — in fact, in his case he did practically rise from the dead. He was in hospital for close on two years and the whole of that time he was not allowed to eat any salt, it was poison to him. The struggle to live wore him out. The money that the people at Stanford had sent to pay for his journey ended up going on his medical expenses and his scholarship to study there, his diploma, his life as a student, his very future were all swallowed up by the appalling present, becoming a vaguer and vaguer dream. All of Liseiwicz’s hard work went for nothing — he had wanted to create a brilliant future for his very best student but now he had to face two unpalatable facts: One, the money was gone and there was no way that the state of the Rong family finances would ever allow us to be able to replace that $110. Two, the people Liseiwicz relied on for his own future security (including me) had suspected him of the worst possible motives.

Liseiwicz’s actions had demonstrated the purity of his intentions and proved beyond any reasonable doubt that he was genuinely fond of Zhendi. Just think about it — if Liseiwicz was really using Zhendi to get results for his own research, there is no way that he would encourage him to go to Stanford. There are no true secrets in this world — over time the truth is always revealed. Liseiwicz’s secret was that he — more than anyone else — had become convinced that Zhendi was a truly rare mathematical genius. Maybe he saw in Zhendi some kind of reflection of himself as a boy — he loved him in the same kind of selfless way as he loved his own childhood — he was completely serious and totally innocent in this.

If Liseiwicz was ever unfair to Zhendi, it came much later and came about as a result of the mathematical chess game that they had developed together. It ended up being very influential in mathematical circles in Europe and America — lots of mathematicians played it. It wasn’t called mathematical chess though, because it was named after Jan Liseiwicz: Liseiwicz chess. I got to read a number of articles on Liseiwicz chess over the years and people clearly thought very highly of it. Sometimes its significance was even compared to that of von Neumann’s theory of chess as a two-person zero-sum game. It was said that while von Neumann’s concept was of particular importance in economic theory, Liseiwicz chess had great significance in military strategy. Although the practical applications of the two games had yet to be demonstrated, their theoretical importance was supposed to be enormous. People pointed to Liseiwicz, the youngest ever recipient of the Fields Medal, and said that he was an ornament to the world of mathematics — however, after he went to China, he had really done no original research of any importance with the exception of Liseiwicz chess — the last great achievement of his later career.

As I said before, Liseiwicz chess was originally known as mathematical chess and it was developed by Jan Liseiwicz and Zhendi together — Zhendi deserves some of the credit. Once Liseiwicz called the game after himself, there was no chance that Zhendi’s role would be recognized: he was eliminated from the story and Jan Liseiwicz took all the credit himself. You could say that he was unfair to Zhendi, but you could also say that the pair were really fond of each other and that Liseiwicz really did do his best for the boy. .[To be continued]

9

Early in the summer of 1950, it began pouring with rain one evening and just continued through the night without a break. Enormous raindrops fell against the tiles, sometimes with a noise almost like that of hammering, at other times with a duller thudding. From the sound of the rain lashing against the roof, you might have imagined that there was some kind of giant centipede up there, running for its life. The changes in the noise were the result of the wind getting up — when it blew strongly the sound became sharper. At the same time you could hear the tug of the wind on the window frames. Thanks to all this racket, Young Lillie hadn’t slept at all well. The sleepless night had given him a headache and his eyes were somewhat swollen. He listened to the sound of the wind and rain, realizing that he and his house were both getting old. He finally fell asleep just before dawn. However, he woke up again pretty quickly — something seemed to have woken him. Mrs Lillie said it was the sound of a motor-car.

‘It sounds as though a car has stopped downstairs,’ she said. ‘It will be gone in a moment.’

He knew that he was not going to fall asleep again, but Young Lillie stayed in bed. Once it was dawn, he got up the way that an old man does get out of bed, feeling his way, moving so gently that he made almost no noise, like a shadow. After he got up, he didn’t even go to the bathroom — he went straight downstairs. His wife asked him why he was going downstairs. He didn’t know. He just carried on going, fumbling in the dark, and once he got there, he opened the front door. There were two parts to the front door. The inner door opened into the house; the outer door opened out into the courtyard. The outer door seemed to be being blocked by something because you could only open it a crack, maybe 30 degrees. Since it was summertime, the outer door was in use — a piece of cloth had been hung over the frame so that during the daytime you could leave it open but people couldn’t see into the house. The old man couldn’t see what was blocking the door, so he had to turn sideways and slide out through the crack. He discovered that two enormous cardboard boxes were filling the tiny courtyard. The first one was blocking the door, stopping him from getting in and out; the second one had already become sodden in the wind and rain. The old man tried to push the second box somewhere out of the rain but he simply couldn’t move it — the contents couldn’t have been heavier if they had been paving slabs. He inched his way back into the house and found a couple of pieces of oiled paper to cover it with. Once he had done that, he noticed that there was a letter on top of the box, held down by the stone they normally used to prop open the front door.

The old man picked up the letter — it was from Jan Liseiwicz.

This is what he had to say:

Dear Lillie,

I am leaving and since I do not want to put anyone to any trouble, I have decided to say goodbye in this letter — I hope you can forgive me. I need to talk to you about Jinzhen — in fact, I can’t be happy until I have told you what I what I want to say. The first thing is that I hope he gets well soon. The second is that I hope you will make the best possible arrangements for his future, so that we (by which I mean humanity as a whole) can gain the greatest benefit from his genius.

To tell you the truth, in my opinion, letting Jinzhen immerse himself in an enormous and complex mathematics research topic would be the most suitable use for his remarkable talents. That in its turn creates a further problem. The world has changed, people are becoming more and more short-sighted and profit-orientated; they want to see some immediate and concrete benefit and are less and less interested in topics of purely theoretical application. This is completely stupid. It is no less stupid than entirely subordinating pleasures of the mind to those of the body. However, we cannot change this fact, any more than we can guarantee that the scourge of war has been completely eliminated from our society. It was because of this that I started to wonder whether it might not be better to encourage him to become immersed in a technical topic which would be of some concrete practical benefit. The good point of that kind of research is that you get great encouragement from it: each result pushes you on to the next one — it can be deeply fulfilling. The downside is that once you have finished you have also lost control of your project — your own personal wishes on the subject will be ignored. Your creation may bring great benefits to the world, or it may bring great harm — either way, you have no choice but to stand aside. It is said that Oppenheimer now really regrets his work on the first nuclear bomb and that he would like to rescind his creation — if he could destroy it with a blow from a hammer like a statue, I am sure that he would. But is that kind of thing possible? Once the genie is out of the bottle, you cannot put it back in again.

If you decide that you want him to try and undertake a scientific research topic, let me suggest that he work on artificial intelligence. Once we have solved that particular mystery, we will be able to create a machine that in some way mimics the human mind, and the next step will be the development of robots — inanimate human beings. Science has already begun to unlock the secrets of other organs — eyes, noses, ears — we are now even in a position where we can create artificial wings. Why cannot we begin to work on artificial intelligence? The fact is, the development of the computer involves the creation of a kind of artificial intelligence, though it is solely concerned with calculations. Since we can already create a machine that can carry out that kind of function, surely other aspects cannot be too far behind? Think about it for a moment: if we have this kind of inanimate human beings — creatures made of metal, robots powered by electricity — how many uses they could be put to! In this generation we have suffered so much warfare — in the space of less than half a century we have been forced to go through two world wars. What is more I suspect (indeed I have already seen some proof) that soon we will have another war — what a terrible thing that is! In my opinion, humanity can now make warfare even more appalling, even more frightening, even more terrible that at any point in history. It is now possible to kill a truly enormous number of people on the same field of battle, to have them die at the same time, to have them die instantly, to have them die the moment the bomb explodes. It seems that we will never be rid of warfare, and yet the hope that one day we can rid the world of this scourge has been handed down from one generation to the next. Mankind is faced with many terrible problems of this kind, which require enormous labour; which require exploration in dangerous circumstances. . Mankind seems unable to extract itself from the difficulties that beset it.

If scientists were to succeed in creating an artificial human being — a robot, a creature made of metal, a being without flesh or blood — we could allow them to do work that is at present carried out by people working in genuinely inhuman conditions, fulfilling some of our more perverse requirements. I am sure that no one could object to that. That means that this branch of scientific endeavour, once fully publicized, would have an immeasurable practical value and a wonderful future. The first step is to solve the mystery of intelligence. It is only in this way, by creating artificial intelligence, that you have any chance of making the next step and creating a robot that can undertake some of the tasks at present carried out by humans. At one time I decided that the rest of my life would be devoted to cracking the problems connected with artificial intelligence but before I had even properly begun, I was forced to give up this idea. I have never told anyone why I gave up — let me just say that it was not because of any particular problem or lack of ability, but at the express command of the Jewish people. The last few years I have been working on something very important on their behalf — the troubles that they have faced and their hopes for the future have moved me deeply; for their sake I have given up a long cherished ambition. I have said this much in the hope of piquing your interest.

Let me remind you: without Jinzhen, you cannot do this. What I mean is that if Jinzhen does eventually die from this terrible disease, you had better give up the idea of developing this project because you are too old for it. If Jinzhen survives, perhaps within your lifetime you will see one of the last great mysteries to confront humankind solved through the creation of artificial intelligence. Believe me, Jinzhen is the best person to find a solution to this problem — this is what he was born to do; God has chosen him. As you have mentioned to me before, dreams are the most mysterious manifestation of the human spirit, and this is something he has confronted day and night since the time he was a tiny child. Over the course of time, he has built up truly remarkable skills at interpreting the meaning of dreams. Although he did not realize it, right from the beginning of his conscious life, he began preparations for researching the mysteries of human intelligence. This is what he is meant to do!

Let me end by saying that if you and God are both in agreement that Jinzhen is here to develop the science of artificial intelligence, then this letter may prove helpful. Otherwise, if either you or God is determined to prevent him from pursuing this line of inquiry, then give this letter to the university library, that it may serve as a memento of the twelve happy years that I have spent working there.

I hope that Jinzhen will recover soon!

Jan Liseiwicz.

Written on the eve of departure.

Young Lillie read this letter straight through, sitting on the cardboard box. The wind ruffled the pages; raindrops caught and tossed in the breeze spattered down, as if they too wanted to read the contents of this letter. Maybe it was because he had not slept well the night before; maybe it was because the letter had touched some hidden corner of his mind: the old man sat quiet for a long time after he had finished reading. He sat quietly, looking up into space. After a very long time, he finally seemed to come to. Turning into the wind and rain, he suddenly spoke the following words: ‘Goodbye, Jan. I hope that you have a good journey. . ’[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Jan Liseiwicz decided to leave after his father-in-law was almost executed as a war criminal.

As I am sure you are well aware, Liseiwicz was offered many opportunities to leave, particularly in the wake of the end of the Second World War. There were all sorts of universities and research institutes in the West that wanted him to join them, and his drawers were stuffed with invitations of one kind or another. However, it was quite clear that he had no intention of going anywhere — for example he brought back that huge wooden case of books and then a little bit later on he bought not only the house in Sanyuan Lane that he had been living in for years, but the whole courtyard. He was working hard at his Chinese and spoke the language better than ever. In the end he announced that he was going to apply for Chinese citizenship (this was never followed up). I believe that Liseiwicz and his father-inlaw were very close. This man was the son of a Provincial Graduate and a member of a very wealthy family — by far the most important gentry family in the region. When his daughter announced that she wanted to marry a foreigner he was extremely opposed to the idea. When she told him that she was getting married anyway, he placed very strict demands on the couple. Liseiwicz was told that he would never be allowed to take his wife to live abroad, that he would not be allowed to divorce her, that he would have to learn to speak Chinese, that any children would take their mother’s surname, and so on. From all of this you can see that while the man was a member of a prominent gentry family, he was neither educated nor gentlemanly. He was the kind of unpleasant person who would take advantage of his wealth and power to bully everyone else. When someone with that kind of personality finds themselves in an exalted position, it is easy to imagine that they will build up a lot of resentment against themselves. Furthermore, during the time of the puppet government, he occupied an important office in the county administration and was involved in some very dubious dealings with the Japanese. After the Liberation, the People’s Government was determined to deal with him and he was arrested, tried, and sentenced to death. At the time of which I am speaking, he was in prison awaiting execution.

In the run-up to the appointed date, Liseiwicz went the rounds of every professor and student that he could think of, including Daddy and me, in the hope that we would write a joint letter to the government and thereby save his father-in-law’s life. Everyone refused. I am sure this wounded Liseiwicz deeply, but we really didn’t have a choice. To tell the truth, it is not that we did not want to help; there was genuinely nothing we could do. The situation in those days was not such that a couple of people making a fuss or a small demonstration was going to change anything. Daddy did actually go and speak to the mayor on his behalf, but the only answer he got was: ‘Only Chairman Mao himself can save the man now.’ What he meant was that Liseiwicz’s father-in-law was doomed!

The fact is that in those days, the People’s Government was targeting men like him — bullies who had used their position to make the lives of the local people miserable. This was a matter of state policy and there was nothing that anyone could do about it. Liseiwicz didn’t understand that: he was far too naïve about the whole situation. There was nothing that we could do and so we simply ended up hurting him.

What no one could have imagined was that Liseiwicz was in the end able to use the government of X country to save his father-in-law from the firing squad. It was quite unbelievable! Particularly when you consider that at that time, our two countries were open enemies — you can imagine how difficult it was to achieve what he did. Apparently X country sent a special envoy to Beijing to discuss the matter with our government — in the end the whole matter did end up on Chairman Mao’s plate — either his or Zhou Enlai’s! The final decision must have been made by someone right at the top of the Politburo. It really was quite unbelievable!

The end result of their discussions was that Liseiwicz’s father-inlaw was released, and in return X country allowed two of our scientists that they had barred from leaving to come home. It seemed almost as if this horrible old man — who deserved everything that he had coming to him — had suddenly become a national treasure. Of course, he was nothing to X country; they wanted Liseiwicz. It seems as though they had decided that no price was too high to pay for him. So the question was, why was X country so determined to get Liseiwicz? Was it simply because he was a world-famous mathematician? It seemed that there must be more to it, but as to what on earth that could be, I did not have the faintest idea.

Shortly after his father-in-law was released from prison, Liseiwicz and his entire family departed for X country.

[To be continued]

When Liseiwicz left the country, Jinzhen was still hospitalized, though it seemed that he was now out of danger. The hospital, concerned about the mounting medical bills, accepted the patient’s request to be transferred to his home to recover. The day that he left hospital, Master Rong and her mother went to collect him. The doctor who was waiting to meet them naturally mistook one of them for the patient’s mother. However, judging by their ages, one was a bit old and the other a bit too young, so he had to ask a rather bold question: ‘Which of you is the patient’s mother?’

Master Rong was just about to explain, but her mother had already answered loud and clear: ‘Me!’

The doctor explained to Mrs Rong that Jinzhen’s illness was now under control and his condition was stable, but he would require more than a year of special treatment to make a full recovery. ‘During the course of the next twelve months, you are going to have to look after him like a baby, or he might well still suffer a relapse.’

When the doctor took her through the detailed list of what she would have to do, Mrs Rong realized that his comparison was entirely justified. There were however three key points to the treatment:

1. His food would be subject to extremely severe restrictions.

2. During the night he would have to be woken up at set intervals to empty his bladder.

3. Every day he would have to be given his medication, which would include injections, at certain set times.

Mrs Rong put on her spectacles and made notes of everything the doctor said; then she checked through them and asked questions to make sure that she had entirely understood every point. When she got back home, she asked her daughter to bring a blackboard and some chalk from the university and wrote out everything that the doctor had said. She then placed the blackboard in the stairwell so that she would see it every time she went up or down the stairs during the day. Since she had to get up regularly during the night to wake up Jinzhen to empty his bladder, she and Young Lillie started sleeping in separate bedrooms. She had two alarm clocks placed by the head of the bed, one set to ring just after midnight, the other in the early hours of the morning. After the early morning call to empty his bladder, Jinzhen would go back to sleep, but Mrs Rong would remain up so that she could prepare the first of the five meals that he had to eat during the course of the day. Although she was a fine cook, this was now by far the most difficult and time-consuming thing that she had to do. By comparison, having spent a lifetime punching holes in thick layers of felt to make cloth shoes, giving an injection was not a particularly difficult thing to learn to do — it was just the first couple of days that she was nervous and hesitant. But when it came to making food, how to prevent it from becoming tasteless and bland was a constant source of worry. The basic principle was simple: at that time Jinzhen was abnormally sensitive to salt and yet his life depended upon it: give him too much and he would suffer a relapse; give him too little and he would take much longer to recover than was strictly necessary. The doctor’s instructions on this point were extremely precise: during the patient’s period of convalescence, he would start by being allowed merely micrograms of salt, but that as time went by the amount could be gradually increased.

Of course, if a person’s daily intake of salt could be measured in grams or ounces, this is not a particularly difficult problem to solve — you just buy a good pair of scales. The problem the Rong family was faced with was not nearly so easy to solve because Mrs Rong found it impossible to lay hands on an accurate enough set of scales, so to begin with she just had to use her own careful and patient judgement. Later on Mrs Rong took a whole load of different dishes into the hospital and got the doctors to pronounce on whether they were suitable. She had already made a note of how much salt she had put in each one — having counted every single grain — and once the doctors had decided which ones were suitably unsalty, five times a day she would put on her spectacles and dole out the white and glossy grains of salt, counting them one by one as if they were the pills that would save Jinzhen’s life.

She was enormously careful when she put salt in his food. She put the salt in as if conducting a scientific experiment. Thus as one day followed another, as one night followed another, as one month followed another, her diligence and patience were as tested as if she had indeed been looking after a baby. Sometimes, in a moment of rest between bouts of this exhausting labour, she would take out the letter that Jinzhen had written in his own blood and look at it — it had been Jinzhen’s secret but having discovered it by accident, she kept it without being entirely sure why. Now, every time that she looked at this slip of paper, she was even more sure that everything that she was doing was worth it: it encouraged her to go back to work with redoubled energy. More than anything else, it was this that dragged Jinzhen from the brink of the grave.The following spring, Jinzhen was back in the classroom.

10

Liseiwicz was gone, but part of him had remained behind.

While Jinzhen was being coddled like a newborn baby, Liseiwicz was in contact with Young Lillie on three occasions. The first was not long after he arrived in X country: he sent a picture postcard with a beautiful landscape — on the back there was a simple greeting and a return address. It was his home address so there was no way of knowing where he was working. The second communication arrived not long after the first. It was a letter in response to Young Lillie’s reply. He said that he was very happy to know that Jinzhen was better. He gave a vague reply concerning Young Lillie’s questions about his work; he said that he was working in a research institute but said nothing about which one or what he was doing there — it was almost as if he wasn’t allowed to tell us about it. The third letter addressed to Young Lillie arrived just before Chinese New Year — Liseiwicz wrote it on Christmas Eve. The stamp on the envelope showed a Christmas tree. In his letter, Liseiwicz mentioned that he had recently received amazing news from a friend: Princeton University had amalgamated several independent research units to create an institute dedicated to the issue of artificial intelligence — their work would be directed by the famous mathematician Paul Samuelson. He wrote: ‘This means that it is not just me that has realized the value and importance of this field of research. . As far as I am aware, this is the first group working on this subject anywhere in the world.’

Supposing that Jinzhen was really better (and in fact he had pretty much recovered completely by this time), he was hoping that he too would start work on the field. He made it clear that if Jinzhen could not carry out research into artificial intelligence in China, he thought he should leave and find somewhere better to work. He told Young Lillie that he should not let short-term benefits or problems prevent Jinzhen from achieving the great things of which he was capable. Perhaps it was because he was afraid that Young Lillie would insist on making Jinzhen stay with him and work on this problem that he even lugged a Chinese proverb into his argument: ‘A fine sword should not be used for chopping firewood.’

‘Anyway,’ he wrote, ‘the reason why I insisted that Jinzhen should study in America in the past, the reason why I want him to do so now, is because here he has the facilities to support his work — if he comes here, he will find everything much easier.’He concluded with the following paragraph:

As I have said before, Jinzhen was sent to us by God to research this subject. In the past I have been worried that we would be unable to provide him with the quite the surroundings that he needs, not to mention the support that would carry him through all the difficulties that he will face. However, I now believe we can give him the right circumstances in which to carry on his work and space in which to breathe: Princeton University. There is a joke in your country about the girl who sews a wedding gown for another bride to wear — maybe one day people will discover that all the work Paul Samuelson’s group has put in has achieved nothing but cutting the cloth for a Chinese bride. .

Young Lillie read this letter in a break between undergraduate classes. While he was reading it, the loudspeaker just outside the window was playing a popular song at top volume:

With heads held high,

Grinning in the teeth of danger,

We cross the Yalu River.

The newspaper he had just been looking at was lying on the table in front of him — the headline was one of the political slogans of the day: ‘American Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger’. Listening to the rousing words of the song, looking at the heavy black ink of the headline, he felt completely helpless. He had no idea what he should say to his faraway correspondent — he was also more than a little frightened, as if there was some other person, hidden in the shadows, who was waiting for him to write back. At that time he was the vice-chancellor of N University, but he was also the deputy mayor of C City. That was the reward the People’s Republic of China had given the Rong family for their many years of devotion to science, learning and patriotism over the course of several generations. This was the happiest time of his life — he wasn’t the kind of person to care for nothing but personal aggrandizement, but he wouldn’t have been human if he didn’t enjoy it. The Rong family had been going through a long period of decline, but now the good days were back again — he was treasuring every minute of it. It was only the fact that he had very much the air of an ivory-tower intellectual that made people imagine that he did not appreciate his present good fortune.

In the end, Young Lillie did not write back to Jan Liseiwicz. He took Liseiwicz’s letter and two newspapers full of coverage of the bloody battles between the American Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army in Korea to Jinzhen, and told him to write back to the man.

He said, ‘Thank him, but tell him that you can’t leave because of the Korean War. I am sure that he will be very sad that things ended like this: I am too, but the person who has lost the most here is you. I think that God wasn’t on your side here.’

Later on, when Jinzhen handed him the draft of the letter and asked him to have a look, the old man seemed to have forgotten his earlier advice. He struck through about half of the text, which expressed regret and disappointment — the remainder was given back to Jinzhen with further instructions: ‘You had better clip some of the newspaper reports and send them to him along with your letter.’

That was in the spring of 1951.

After Chinese New Year, Jinzhen went back to class. Of course, he didn’t go to Stanford, or to Princeton, but back to N University. When Jinzhen dropped his carefully worded letter and a couple of newspaper reports that he had clipped into the postbox, he was confining one of the paths that his life might have taken to history. As Master Rong said, some letters record history while others make it: this was a letter that changed one person’s entire life.[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

Before Zhendi went back to class, Daddy discussed with me whether he should go back to rejoin his original class or whether he should start again as a freshman. I knew that Zhendi had fantastic grades as a student, but he had only spent a total of three weeks in class; what is more he had just recovered from a life-threatening illness — he could not possibly cope with a heavy workload. I was afraid that sending him to join the third-year classes would put too much pressure on him so I suggested that he re-enrol as a freshman. However, in the end he did not have to start again from the beginning; the university allowed him to rejoin his original classmates. Zhendi wanted it that way himself. To this day, I remember what he said: ‘God wanted me to become sick so that I would be forced to spend some time away from science books — He was worried that I might become their prisoner and lose my way creatively — in which case I would never have achieved anything.’

A weird thing to say, don’t you think? So bizarre as to almost seem a bit mad?

The fact is that Zhendi had previously suffered from very low selfesteem, but getting so sick seemed to have changed him. In actual fact, the thing that really changed him was the books that he read, a huge number of books that were nothing to do with mathematics. While he was at home recovering, he read all my books and all Daddy’s books, particularly the fiction. He read them very quickly and in a very strange way — some books he would pick up, flick through a few pages and then put them straight back again. Some people imagined that he was actually reading the books from cover to cover in that time and so they called him Little Tuk, after the H. C. Anderson character who learns his lessons by putting his schoolbooks under his pillow at night. That was ridiculous, of course. He did read very quickly, it is true — the majority of books that he took from our shelves were back within twenty-four hours. The fact is that reading quickly is related to reading a lot; the more you read, the more you know and then the quicker you read the next thing. As he read more and more books related to topics beyond the subject he was studying at university, the less interested he was in the things written in his textbooks. That is why he started to cut classes — sometimes he even cut my classes. At the end of the first term after his resumption of study, both his grades and the number of classes that he had missed were quite eye-opening: he was the top of the class and by a very long way. Another thing that he was way ahead of his classmates in was the number of books he borrowed from the university library — in one term he had borrowed more than two hundred books in subjects ranging from philosophy to literature, economics, art, military science — there was all kinds of stuff in there. It was for this reason that during the summer holidays, Daddy took him up to the attic and opened up our storeroom. Pointing to the two cases of books that Liseiwicz had left behind, he said: ‘These aren’t ordinary textbooks. Liseiwicz left them. In the future when you don’t have anything else to do, why don’t you read them? I am afraid though that you may not understand them.’

Another term passed and then in about March or April of the following academic year, Zhendi’s classmates all started working on their graduation theses. It was at around this time that a couple of the other professors in the same department came to see me, because they thought that there was a problem with the subject that Zhendi had chosen. They were hoping that I would speak to him, that I would find a way to persuade him to pick another topic. Otherwise it was going to be impossible for any of them to supervise his graduation thesis. I asked what topic he had picked and they said it was a political problem.

Zhendi had decided that he wanted to write his thesis based on a theory propounded by the famous mathematician Georg Weinacht concerning the binary nature of certain constants. The topic was to be structured around coming up with a mathematical proof for this theory. The thing is that Georg Weinacht was famous at that time in the mathematical community for his anti-communist stance — it was said that he had a notice pinned to the door of his office saying, ‘No Communists or Fellow Travellers Beyond This Point’. At the time of the most appalling carnage during the Korean War, he went on record encouraging the American Army to cross the Yalu River. I know that science is international and knows no borders, and that it is not affected by any ‘ism’, but Weinacht’s powerfully anti-communist stance did overshadow his mathematical theories and give them a political dimension. At that time, there were a number of communist countries, led by the Soviet Union, where the validity of his theories was not admitted and his work was not even mentioned — if it did come under discussion, it was the subject of much criticism. If Zhendi was hoping to prove one of his theories that would very much run counter to the tide. It was a very sensitive topic and would be seen as having dangerous political implications.

Well, I don’t know what kind of intellectual maggot Daddy got in his head — maybe he was persuaded by Zhendi’s cast-iron proofs — but at a time when everyone else was either avoiding the issue or hoping that he would talk to Zhendi and get him to change his topic, he not only did nothing of the kind, he even went so far as to weigh in on Zhendi’s side and take over as his thesis supervisor. Daddy consistently encouraged Zhendi to continue with his chosen subject.

In the end, the title of Zhendi’s graduation thesis was: ‘The Constant π as a Definable yet Irrational Number’. This was a subject far from anything that he had ever studied in class — it was much more the kind of topic that you would expect for an M.A. thesis. There is absolutely no doubt that his choice was heavily influenced by the books that he was reading in the attic. .

[To be continued]

When he read the first draft of Jinzhen’s graduation thesis, Young Lillie was more enthusiastic than ever. He was transfixed by the beautifully incisive and logical thinking recorded therein, but some of the mathematical proofs he felt to be unnecessarily complicated and in need of improvement. The improvements were aimed at simplifying the presentation and removing unnecessary elements to the proofs. However, in order to develop the basic proofs (which in some cases were extremely elaborate), he had to use comparatively sophisticated and direct means, showing an understanding that was far from simply being confined to the field of mathematics. The first draft of Zhendi’s thesis came to 20,000 characters. After a couple of revisions, the final version came in at just over 10,000 characters. Later on it was published in the magazine Popular Mathematics — and made not a small splash in Chinese mathematical circles. However, there seemed to be no one who was prepared to believe that Zhendi had done it all on his own because, having been revised a couple of times, the quality had also been significantly improved. It really didn’t look like an undergraduate student’s thesis, but the ground-breaking essay of an established academic.

Having said that, the good points and the failings of Zhendi’s thesis were both perfectly clear: when you talk about the good points, beginning from a single mathematical constant, Zhendi had developed Georg Weinacht’s binary theory into a pure mathematics solution for one of the major problems facing scholars working on the issue of artificial intelligence. This gave the reader something of the feeling of having seen the invisible wind caught and held in the human hand. The failing of this thesis is that it was all built upon a supposition, whereby π is treated as a constant — all the proofs that he had developed were based upon this theory and so it was impossible for the reader not to feel that this particular castle had been built entirely upon sand. If you wanted the castle to be built upon firmer foundations, if you wanted to demonstrate the academic value of this thesis, then you would first have to prove that π is indeed a genuine constant. As to the problem of whether or not π is actually a constant, even though this issue was first raised by mathematicians many centuries ago, it still has not been conclusively proved. Today most mathematicians do believe that it is a constant, but the fact remains that as long as proof is lacking, it remains in the realm of supposition — you cannot ask that everyone else agree with you. In the same way, until Newton noticed that an apple will always naturally fall to the earth and expressed this in terms of his theory of universal gravity, everyone had the right to express their own doubts as to gravity’s existence.

Of course, if you don’t believe that π is indeed a constant, then Jinzhen’s thesis was completely useless — the theory upon which it was based falls through. On the other hand, if you accept that π is a constant, then you would be amazed by what he had managed to achieve — it was somewhat like bending an iron bar into the shape of a flower. In his thesis Jinzhen suggested that human intelligence should be regarded as a mathematical constant and an irrational number, one that never comes to an end. If you accept this concept, then the second part of Georg Weinacht’s binary theory comes into play, which could serve to resolve one of the major problems with developing artificial intelligence. Human intelligence also includes an element of confusion. Confusion is indefinable: it represents something that you cannot know completely; it is also something that you cannot replicate. Therefore he suggested that under present conditions, it is impossible to be very optimistic about the prospect of entirely replicating human intelligence by artificial means, since the closest you were going to get was a near approximation.

I should mention that there are plenty of mathematicians who entirely agree with Zhendi’s position, including many working today. You could say that there was nothing new about his conclusion: the interesting thing is that starting from a daring hypothesis about the binary nature of the mathematical constant π, he went on to develop a proof for this derived from pure mathematics. At least he was trying to develop a proof; the problem is that the materials he was using (the foundations of his house) had not been proved themselves.

To put it another way, if one day someone does succeed in proving that π is a constant, then the value of this thesis is clear. The problem is that this day still has not dawned, so strictly speaking, his work remains completely pointless — its only success lies in demonstrating his own intelligence and daring. But thanks to his connection with Young Lillie, many people found it difficult to believe that it was entirely his own work and hence his genius remained under question. The fact is that this thesis brought nothing good to Jinzhen: it did not change his life in any way, but it did change the very last years of Young Lillie’s life. .[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

I can be absolutely categorical: Zhendi wrote that thesis all on his own. Daddy told me that apart from recommending a couple of reference books and writing the introduction, he had nothing to do with any of the contents — it was all Zhendi’s hard work. I remember what Daddy wrote in the introduction. He said, ‘The best way to deal with our demons is to go out and fight them — let the devils see how strong we are. Georg Weinacht is a demon infesting the sacred halls of scientific research, and for a long time he has been able to get away with murder. Now is the time for us to lay this demon to rest. This thesis will serve to set Weinacht’s pernicious theories in their place forever; although some of the notes that it strikes are dull and muffled, the rest ring true.’

Not long after the thesis was published, Daddy went on a trip to Beijing. No one knew what he was up to; he left quite suddenly one day without telling anyone what he was doing. About a month later, when someone came to N University with three decisions from the central authorities, we finally realized that this must have been the motive for Daddy’s earlier trip to Beijing. The three decisions were:

1. They gave permission for Daddy to resign as chancellor.

2. The government gave the necessary money to found a computer research unit at the university.

3. Daddy was going to be responsible for setting up this research facility.

At that time there were a lot of people who were hoping to be recruited by this new research facility, but after Daddy interviewed them, he decided in the end that none of them came up to Zhendi’s standard. Zhendi was the very first person recruited for the research facility and as things turned out he was the only person who could have done it — the remainder of the people hired were basically just his assistants, helping out with day-to-day tasks. This gave people a very bad impression, suggesting that this international standard research unit had basically been monopolized by members of the Rong family, and there was a lot of gossip about it.

The fact is that when Daddy was a government official, he was determined to demonstrate how impartial he was, particularly when it came to hiring new staff — he avoided giving a job to anyone with even the remotest connection to the family, to the point where he seemed positively heartless. We in the Rong family founded N University, and if you gathered together all the members of the clan who had worked there over the generations, at the very least you would have had enough people to fill a couple of dinner tables. When Grandpa (Old Lillie) was alive, he looked after the family, finding them jobs in the government and giving those in academia the opportunity to develop their talents, visit other institutions and learn something from them. . But when it came to Daddy, to begin with he had an official position but no real power, so even if he had wanted to help out he would not have been able to. Later on, when he had both the official position and the power, he could have helped out but he didn’t choose to. During the years that Daddy was the chancellor of the university, he did not give a job to one single member of the Rong family, no matter how well qualified they were. Even in my case, the department recommended me for promotion a couple of times, wanting to make me assistant dean, but each time he turned it down. He put a cross down just like you would when finding a mistake on an examination paper. What happened to my brother was even more infuriating — he had come back to the country from abroad with a PhD in physics and he really should have been recruited by N University, but Daddy told him to go elsewhere. Just think about it: in C City, where else could he go? He ended up at the Normal University, but the working conditions and the level of the students were both significantly inferior — he took a job in a university in Shanghai the following year. Mummy was really furious with Daddy about this. She said that he was intentionally forcing our family to split up.

Well, when it came to recruiting Zhendi for the new research facility, all Daddy’s principles about not giving jobs to members of the family went out of the window. He ignored all the gossip and just did what he wanted — he seemed to have become completely obsessed. Nobody understood what could possibly have changed Daddy’s mind; but I knew, because one day he showed me the letter Jan Liseiwicz wrote just before he left. He said, ‘Liseiwicz’s letter did tempt me, but the real clincher was when I saw Jinzhen’s graduation thesis. Up until that moment I thought the whole thing was going to be impossible, but when I saw that I decided to give it a go. When I was young, I really hoped that one day I would be able to make some concrete contribution to science. Maybe it really is too late to start now, but Jinzhen has given me the confidence to try. You know, Liseiwicz is absolutely right: without Jinzhen, I would not stand a hope in hell; but with Jinzhen, who knows what we might not achieve? In the past, I have always underestimated the kid’s genius; now I am going to give him a real chance to show what he can do. . ‘[To be continued]

That is how it all happened. As Master Rong said, her father was inspired to work on this project by Jinzhen — how could he possibly give the job to anyone else? She went on to explain that Jinzhen not only changed the last years of her father’s life, he also changed one of his long-standing principles — you could even say he changed his faith in humankind. In the very last years of his life, the old gentleman went back to the dreams of his youth — he decided to make a real contribution to the development of the field, to the point where he was prepared to discount as worthless everything he had done during most of his working life; everything he had done during his public career. It has always been one of the problems that Chinese intellectuals face: that they regard an academic career as fundamentally incompatible with an official position. Now the old gentleman was effectively starting his working life over again; whether this was a tragedy or a source of great delight, only time will tell.

Over the course of the next couple of years, the pair of them were completely immersed in their work for this research facility — they had very little to do with what was going on in the outside world. They attended the occasional mathematics conference and published a few papers; that was it. From the six papers that they co-authored which appeared in academic journals, it was clear that their work was progressing one step at a time — certainly their research was much further advanced than any other facility in the country, and they were not far behind the international cutting edge. After their first two papers were published in China, they were reprinted in three different international journals — indicating the importance of the results that they had achieved. It was around this time that the chief editor of Time magazine in the US, Roy Alexander, warned the American government: the next computer is going to be built by the Chinese! Jinzhen’s name was now news.

Of course, this was all media scare-mongering. The fact is that if you read this pair of papers closely, ignoring all the hype, you would immediately notice that they had encountered some very real problems in the course of their research. That was perfectly normal — after all a computer is not like a human brain; with people all you need is to have a man sleep with a woman and lo and behold! You have a new example of human intelligence created. Of course, in some cases once the new intelligence is created things go wrong — the result is someone with a mental handicap. In many ways, in the creation of artificial intelligence, what you were trying to do could be compared to turning a mentally handicapped person into a clever one — a very, very difficult task. Given the difficult nature of the task, frustration and setbacks are only to be expected — there is nothing to be surprised at there. In fact, it would be surprising if these frustrations and setbacks made you give up. Later on, when Young Lillie decided to let Jinzhen go, nobody believed a word of his explanation. He said, ‘We have encountered enormous problems in our research and if we carry on like this, I really cannot see any prospect of success. I don’t want to see such a talented and clever young man follow me down this questionable path, running the risk of ruining his own future. I want to make sure that he gets to do something meaningful.’

That was in the summer of 1956.

That same summer, everyone in the university was talking about the man who came to take Jinzhen away. People thought that the whole thing was most mysterious. Why Young Lillie was prepared to let Jinzhen go was much discussed, but without anyone coming up with a good answer — that was part of the mystery.

The man walked with a limp.

That was also part of the mystery.