Mai Jia: Decoded

This happened in her fifth year at Cambridge, when she was twenty-two years old.

The following year, a pair of brothers who hoped to take the human race into the air came to Cambridge to visit her; their vision and bravery impressed her so much that she went to America with them. Two years later, in North Carolina, the first ever airplane successfully took off over the sand dunes and soared into the sky. Underneath the belly of the airplane, there was a legend in silver letters, recording the names of the most important people involved in the design and construction of the machine. In the fourth line it said:

Wing designer: Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie, from C City, China.

Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie was the name that she used when she was in the West, but in the genealogy of the Rong clan, her name is given as Rong Youying, a descendant in the eighth generation of the family. And the pair that took her away from Cambridge University were the pioneers of heavier-than-air human flight: the Wright brothers.

If the Wrights’ Flyer took her name into the sky, she took the reputation of Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics into the stratosphere. After the Xinhai Revolution, she realized that the nation’s fate was trembling in the balance, so breaking her longstanding engagement to her fiancé, she returned to her alma mater to take up the position of Head of the Department of Mathematics. By this time Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics had already changed its name to N University. In the summer of 1913, the President of the Newtonian Mathematical Society, Professor Sir Joseph Larmor, visited China, bringing with him a model of her design for the Mathematical Bridge using only 388 nails, which was then constructed in the grounds of the university. This event only served to make N University even more famous; you could say that Professor Sir Joseph Larmor was the third person to really bring the place to prominence.

In October 1943, Japanese bombing burned N University to the ground. The remarkable gift that Professor Sir Joseph Larmor had given them — the 1:250 model of Newton’s Mathematical Bridge — was destroyed in that fire. But by that time the woman who designed it had already been dead for twenty-nine years. She passed away the year after Larmor’s visit to N University, before she was even forty years old.

Rong Youying, otherwise known as Rong ‘Abacus’ Lillie or ‘Abacus Head’, died in childbirth.

It all happened so long ago that everyone who saw her suffer and die is now dead themselves, but the story of the terrible agony that she endured has been passed down from one generation to the next, as the tale of an appalling battle might have been. As it was told and retold, the story became more refined and more classic in its details, until it became almost like an event in the sagas. As you might imagine, her sufferings in childbirth were horrific — by all accounts her screams resounded constantly for two days and two nights, as the stench of blood pervaded first her room at the hospital, then the corridor, before finally making its way out onto the main road. The doctor tried the most advanced techniques of the time, and the most stupid of birthing methods, to try and help the baby to be born, but the head still would not emerge from the womb. To begin with the corridor outside the delivery room was crammed with members of the Rong family — and the paternal Lin clan — waiting for the baby to be born, but as time went on they gradually dispersed until there were only a couple of female servants left. Even the toughest were appalled by the length and difficulty of the labour; it became clear that even the joy of welcoming the new arrival would not be able to make up for the horror of the death of his mother. Sometimes her death seemed imminent, at other times it appeared as if she might pull through, as time marched inexorably on towards its merciless decision.

Old Mr Lillie was the last to arrive in the corridor, but he was also the last to leave. Before he left, he said: ‘Either this baby is going to be a genius, or a devil.’

‘There is an eighty to ninety per cent chance that this baby is never going to be born,’ the doctor said.

‘She will have the baby.’

‘No she won’t.’

‘You don’t understand, she is a really remarkable woman.’ ‘But I do understand women and if she has this baby, it is going to be a miracle.’

‘She is the kind of person that miracles happen to!’

Old Lillie wanted to leave once he had said his piece.

The doctor prevented him from going. ‘This is a hospital and you need to listen to what I have to say. What do you want me to do if she really can’t give birth to this baby?’

Old Lillie was silent for a moment.

The doctor persevered: ‘Do you want me to save the adult or the baby?’

Old Lillie said without a moment’s hesitation: ‘Of course you save the adult!’

Of course, in the face of all-powerful destiny and fate, how could old Mr Lillie’s wish be taken into account? At dawn, the woman in labour found her strength totally exhausted after yet another night of struggle, and she slipped into unconsciousness. The doctor roused her by dousing her with ice-cold water and injecting a double dose of stimulant, preparing for the final push. The doctor explained it quite clearly: if this last attempt did not work, they were going to have to abandon the baby in order to save the mother’s life. Things did not go at all according to plan; it was the mother who suffered organ failure as she made that final attempt to give birth. In the end, the baby’s life was saved by an emergency Caesarean section.

This baby was born at the cost of his own mother’s life, from which you can see how much she suffered in the process. After the baby was finally born, everyone was shocked to see how massive his head was. Compared to her son, her head was nothing! To have a first baby with such an enormous head, not to mention the fact that she was almost forty at the time, was pretty much guaranteed to kill the wretched woman. There are times when the workings of fate seem really mysterious: a woman who could send a couple of tons of metal up into the sky ended up as the victim of one of Nature’s practical jokes.

After the baby was born, even though the Lin family chose all sorts of names for him — nicknames, style names, formal names and what have you — they quickly discovered that it was all a wasted effort — his huge head and the horrible story of how he had come into this world ensured that everyone called him ‘Killer Head’.

‘Killer Head!’

‘Killer Head!’

It was a name that no one ever got tired of.

‘Killer Head!’

‘Killer Head!’

His friends called him that.

Everyone called him that.

It is hard to believe, but nevertheless it is a fact that eventually everyone called him ‘Killer’, and he deserved the name, for he did some truly terrible things. The Lin family was the richest family in the provincial capital and the shops they owned filled both sides of a two-kilometre-long stretch of one of the big boulevards. However, once the Killer grew up, their vast holdings started to shrink rapidly as they had to pay off his gambling debts or get him out of other kinds of trouble. If it hadn’t been for the whore who picked up a knife and stabbed him to death, the Lin family would have lost their house along with everything else. The story goes that the Killer first got involved in criminal activities when he was twelve, and he was twenty-two when he died. During that decade he had participated in a dozen or more murders and had seduced and abandoned countless women. At the same time, he gambled away a mountain of money and a whole street’s-worth of shops. It was very shocking to people that such a remarkable woman, a genius such as comes along maybe once every thousand years, could produce such a wicked son.