Mai Jia - Decoded

You know what the relationship between our country and X was like in those days: there was no good faith to speak of — we were enemies. The slightest movement on either side was treated as evidence of aggressive intent. I could never have imagined that Jan Liseiwicz would be able to come back, let alone that he would arrive at C City only to discover that he would not be allowed anywhere near N University. That meant that I had to go and see him at his hotel. When we met, I might as well have been visiting a criminal in his prison cell — the two of us were sitting there talking and we each had two further people, one on either side of us, listening and making a recording of everything we said — each sentence had to be enunciated clearly so that all four of them could hear. Thank goodness all four of them were completely bilingual or it would have been impossible for us to so much as open our mouths — we would immediately have been condemned as spies or secret agents; anything we said would have been taken as intelligence. It was a very special time — in those days when Chinese people met anyone from X country they were not treated as other human beings: they were devils, our most hated enemies — the least little thing could be evidence of evil intent, shooting out venom, sending the other to their deaths.

In actual fact, Jan Liseiwicz didn’t want to see me, but Zhendi. As you know, by that time Zhendi had left N University to go who knows where. I couldn’t see him, let alone Professor Liseiwicz. When he found this out, Liseiwicz decided that he wanted to see me; I had no doubt that this was because he was hoping to get information about what had happened to Zhendi. When I had received permission from my guards, I told him what I could about what had happened to Zhendi. It was very simple and obvious: he had stopped working on artificial intelligence and had gone on to do something else. I was surprised by Liseiwicz’s reaction to my words — he looked completely horrified. To begin with he clearly couldn’t think of anything to say, then after a long silence he spat out one word: ‘Appalling!’ He was so angry that his face went bright red; he simply could not sit still in his seat. He started pacing up and down the room, going on and on about how remarkable the results of Zhendi’s research into artificial intelligence had been and how he would achieve even greater breakthroughs if he were allowed to continue.

He said, ‘I have seen a couple of the papers that he co-authored. I can tell you that in this field, they are already achieving internationalstandard research. To give the whole thing up midway. . how dreadful!’

‘Sometimes things don’t work out the way that one might wish. . ‘ ‘Was Jinzhen recruited by a government unit?’

‘Pretty much.’

‘To do what?’

‘I don’t know.’

He kept on asking, and I kept on saying that I didn’t know. In theend he said, ‘If my guess is right, Jinzhen is working for a top-secret unit now?’

I just repeated what I had already said: ‘I don’t know.’ It was true — I didn’t know.

The fact is that even today I don’t know what unit Zhendi was working for, where he was, or what he was doing. Maybe you know, but I am not expecting you to tell me. To my mind, that is Zhendi’s secret, but above and beyond that, it is our country’s secret. Every country, every army has its own secrets: secret organizations, secret weapons, secret agents, secret. . too many to name. How could a country survive without its secrets? Maybe it couldn’t. Like an iceberg, if it didn’t have the part that is hidden under the water, how would it be able to survive?

Sometimes I think that it is very unfair to ask someone to keep something secret from his own closest relatives for decades — or maybe even for his whole lifetime. But if it were not like that, maybe your country wouldn’t survive, or at the very least would be in serious danger. That would also be unfair. The one seems to me to outweigh the other. I have thought this way for many years. It is only by thinking in this way that I feel I can understand the decisions that Zhendi made. Otherwise, my life with Zhendi would seem to have been a dream, a daydream, a waking dream, a dream within a dream, a long and strange dream that even he, who was so good at interpreting what other people saw in the still watches of the night, would have difficulty in understanding. .

[The end]

During his meeting with Master Rong, Jan Liseiwicz repeated over and over again that she should tell Zhendi that if it were at all possible he should ignore all other temptations and come back to continue his work on artificial intelligence. After they said goodbye, Liseiwicz watched Master Rong walking away. Suddenly he decided to write to Jinzhen himself. He realized that he had no way of getting in touch with Jinzhen, so he shouted to Master Rong and asked for his address. Master Rong asked her companion whether she could tell him or not, and the latter indicated that she could, so she told him what it was. That evening, Liseiwicz wrote a short letter to Jinzhen. Having showed it first to his own guard and then to the Chinese one and received permission from both of them to send it, he dropped it in the letter-box.

The letter arrived at Unit 701 according to the normal route. As to whether Jinzhen would be allowed to read it or not, that would depend entirely upon the contents. Given that this was a top-secret unit, the Party inspected even personal mail — that was just one of the many ways in which this unit was special. Anyway, when the people in the surveillance team opened Liseiwicz’s letter, they were initially completely baffled because the letter was written in English. That was quite enough to put them on guard and make them take this missive very seriously. It was immediately reported to the head of the team, who demanded a translation from the relevant authorities.

The original text covered an entire sheet of paper but when it was translated into Chinese, it worked out as just a couple of lines. The text ran as follows:

Dear Jinzhen,

I have returned to China at my mother-in-law’s behest and so at the moment I am staying at the provincial capital. I have been told that you have left the university and are now engaged in some other kind of work. I don’t know what it is that you are doing, but from the level of secrecy surrounding it (including the address that I have been given) I am sure that you are engaged in important work for some top-secret unit, just as I was some twenty years ago. Out of sympathy and love for my people, I made a terrible mistake twenty years ago and accepted a mission entrusted to me by a particular country [given that Liseiwicz was Jewish, this must probably refer to the state of Israel]. That mission can be said to have ruined my life. Given my own experience and my knowledge of you, I am very worried about your present situation. Your intelligence is extremely acute, but it is also fragile; it would be disastrous for you to be placed in circumstances where you are subject to external pressure and control. You have already achieved deeply impressive results in your researches into artificial intelligence; if you carry on, I am sure that great fame and glory awaits you! You should not let yourself be diverted into another path. If at all possible, I hope that you will listen to my advice and go back to your original work!

Jan Liseiwicz

13 March 1957

The Friendship Hotel at the provincial capital

It was very clear that the contents of this letter were related to the way in which Rong Jinzhen had reacted to being recruited for Unit 701. Right then, people (at least the relevant project directors) had no difficulty at all in understanding why Rong Jinzhen seemed to be so work-shy; there was someone telling him to go back to his original field. The foreign professor, Jan Liseiwicz!