Mai Jia - Decoded

‘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.