Read Online Decoded by Mai Jia - Free Book Online

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