Decoded
Page 2
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.
3.
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.
The Lin family breathed a sigh of relief when the Killer died; only to find themselves being pestered by a mysterious woman. She arrived from somewhere outside the province and demanded to see the head of the Lin family. Once he admitted her, she just got down on her knees without another word and started to cry. Pointing to her protruding belly, she said: ‘This is young Mr Lin’s baby!’ The Lin family knew that if you wanted to put all the women that the Killer had seduced out to sea, you would have enough to pack out half a dozen boats; but so far none of them had turned up at the house claiming to be pregnant. What is more, this woman came from another province, so they were suspicious as well as angry. They literally had her kicked out of the door. The woman thought that the kicking would result in a miscarriage, a prospect that did not particularly bother her. However, in spite of the bruising and the pain that she had suffered, the baby stayed put. She balled up her fist and punched herself hard in the stomach a couple of times, which also had no effect. She was so upset that she sat
down in the middle of the road and started bawling. She ended up being surrounded by a circle of onlookers, one of whom felt sorry for her and suggested that she go to N University to try her luck there. After all, they were the Killer’s family too. The woman staggered off to the university, to kneel in front of old John Lillie. Old Mr Lillie was a very upright and highly principled man who was deeply upset at any evidence that other people had behaved badly. He was very sympathetic to anyone who had suffered an injustice, so he took the woman in. The following day, he ordered his son, Rong Xiaolai – the one that people called Young Lillie – to take her to his old home town of Tongzhen.
The Rong mansion at Tongzhen occupied half the village. The roofs of the different buildings were still as closely packed together as the scales on a fish, though they were starting to get old. Flaked-off bald patches had appeared on the paintwork of the pillars and eaves, making it clear that times were changing. After Old Lillie set up his academy in the provincial capital, many members of the Rong family moved there to study with him, which began the decline of the mansion from its glory days. One of the reasons for this precipitate decline was that very few of the young people who had left were interested in returning to carry on the family business. Furthermore, things were looking very bleak anyway – after the government introduced the state monopoly on salt, the Rong family were deprived of their chief source of income. The attitudes of many of the members of the Rong family who studied with Old Lillie were deeply affected by these developments: they had become interested in scientific method and upholding the truth; they were not at all interested in making money and living in the lap of luxury. Isolated in their ivory tower, the collapse of the family business and the concomitant decline in their fortunes did not seem to affect them in the slightest. Within a decade, the Rong family lost virtually all that they had once owned, though they did not like to talk openly about how this came about. In fact, everyone could see the reason hanging up over the main gate to the mansion. It was a placard with five huge words picked out in gold: ‘Supporter of the Northern Expedition’. There was a story behind this. Apparently, when the National Revolutionary Army reached C City, Old Lillie saw all the students out in the streets collecting money for the cause, and he was so moved that he went back to Tongzhen that very night to sell the docks and half the shops that represented the business empire the Rong family had built up over the generations. He used the money to buy a boatload of ammunition for the Northern Expedition, for which he was rewarded with this placard. Because of this, the Rong family came to be regarded as great patriots. Unfortunately, not long afterwards, the famous general who wrote the calligraphy for the inscription became a wanted criminal, on the run from the KMT government, which significantly dimmed its lustre. Later on, the government had a new placard made with exactly the same wording and identical gilding, but with different calligraphy. They asked the Rong family for permission to exchange it for the old one, but Old Lillie simply refused. From that moment on, the Rong family seemed to get into endless trouble with the government, so their business was guaranteed to suffer. Old Lillie didn’t mind the business suffering, but he did want the placard to stay. He went so far as to say that the placard would be taken down only over his dead body.
The Rong family had to accept that they were getting poorer all the time.
The Rong mansion, which had once been bustling with life as masters and servants went about their business, was now desolate and quiet. When you did see people about, it quickly became apparent that many of them were old and that there were far more women than men, far more servants than masters. The place was obviously falling into ruin, as things went from bad to worse. As fewer and fewer people lived there, particularly young lively people, the house seemed even larger than normal and much more silent. Birds built their nests in the trees, spiders spun their webs in front of the doors, the paths between buildings became lost in the weeds as they wound their way into the darkness, the pet birds flew off into the sky, the artificial mountain became a real one, the flower garden became a wilderness and the rear courtyards turned into a maze. If you say that in the past, the Rong family mansion had been like a beautiful, elegant and brightly coloured painting, you could say that now, although the traces of the original pigment still remained, the lines of the earlier sketches had reappeared, blurring the purity of the finished work. If you wanted to hide an anonymous and mysterious woman with an unsatisfactory background, you could not have found a better place.
Young Lillie really wracked his brains over how to make Mr and Mrs Rong accept this woman. All the members of the seventh generation of the Rong family were now dead, with the exception of Old Lillie living far away at the provincial capital. That made Mr and Mrs Rong the undisputed heads of the Rong clan in Tongzhen. Mr Rong was now well on in years and had had a stroke, which had destroyed his faculties and forced him to spend all his time in bed. He was reduced to the status of a cipher; all real power had long ago slipped into Mrs Rong’s hands. If it was indeed the Killer that had got this woman pregnant, then Mr and Mrs Rong were indisputably the baby’s aunt and uncle, but that didn’t mean that they were going to like it. Remembering that Mrs Rong was a devout Buddhist, Young Lillie started to feel the beginnings of a plan germinating in his mind. He took the woman straight into Mrs Rong’s prayer chamber and there, wreathed in incense and accompanied by the sound of her tapping a wooden fish, Young Lillie and Mrs Rong began their discussion. Mrs Rong said, ‘Who is she?’
‘A woman.’
‘Whatever it is that you want, you had better make it quick, because I want to get on with reciting my sutras.’
‘She’s pregnant.’
‘I am not a doctor, what do you want me to do about it?’
‘She is a very devout Buddhist and grew up in a nunnery. She isn’t married, but last year she went to Putuo Mountain to pray to the Buddhist statue there. When she got back, she discovered that she was pregnant. Do you believe her?’
‘Does it matter whether I believe her?’
‘If you believe her, then will you take her in?’
‘What happens if I don’t believe her?’
‘If you don’t believe her, I will throw her out onto the street.’
Mrs Rong spent a sleepless night, and the Buddha was no help at all in making up her mind. However, at noon, just as Young Lillie was pretending that he was getting ready to throw the woman out of the house, she suddenly made her decision. She said, ‘She can stay. Amitabha Buddha, bless his holy name.’
Taking Up The Burden
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.