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.
That evening, when Jinzhen mentioned at the supper table that Professor Liseiwicz had lent him a couple of books and agreed that in the future he could borrow whatever books he wanted whenever he liked, Young Lillie suddenly felt his heart thud. He now realized that in spite of his assurance that he was ahead of the rest, in fact Liseiwicz had already left him far behind. More than anything else, it was this that made Young Lillie realize quite how important Jinzhen was in Liseiwicz’s eyes: he was irreplaceable. Liseiwicz was hoping for great things from Jinzhen, much greater than Young Lillie could even begin to imagine.
7
Of the two wierdos of the mathematics department, Master Rong’s story was very sad and people felt a great deal of respect for her. Professor Liseiwicz on the other hand seemed to be making a mountain out of a molehill, and it caused a lot of talk. Under normal circumstances, where there is a lot of talk, you end up with endless gossip. Hence, of the two wierdos, there were a lot more rumours about Professor Liseiwicz than there ever were about Master Rong. Pretty much everyone at the university had some sort of story to tell. Because everyone had heard about him refusing to lend anyone his books, they also heard about the fact that he was now lending books to one person — this is the effect you get when some little thing is done by someone famous. This is like the mathematical conversion of mass into energy. People gossiped constantly, asking why Professor Liseiwicz was so kind to Jinzhen, and only to him? It was practically as if he were letting him sleep with his wife. One explanation was that the foreign professor appreciated his student’s intelligence and hoped for great things from him — but the theory that he was doing it purely out of friendly motives was not particularly popular. Eventually those who said that Professor Liseiwicz was taking advantage of Jinzhen’s genius out-shouted the rest.Even Master Rong mentioned this in my interview with her.
[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]
The very first winter after the end of the Second World War, Jan Liseiwicz went back to Europe. The weather was terribly cold, but I guess that it was even worse in Europe, because he didn’t take any of his family with him — he just went on his own. When he came back, Daddy borrowed a Ford car from the university and told me to go down to the docks to collect him. When I got there I was stunned to see that Professor Liseiwicz was sitting on an enormous wooden packing case, about the same size as a coffin, with his name and address at N University written on it in both Chinese and English. The size and the weight of his packing case made it impossible to get into the car. I had to get a cart and four brawny men to transport it back to the department. On the way, I asked Liseiwicz why on earth he had brought so many books back with him and he said excitedly, ‘I have a new research interest and I need these books!’
Apparently on this trip to Europe, Liseiwicz had recovered the interest in research that had been dormant in recent years: he was feeling inspired and was going to make a new start. He had determined to begin research on an enormous new topic: artificial intelligence.
Nowadays, everyone has heard of the subject, but at that time the world’s first computer had only just been built.* That was what had given him the idea — he was way ahead of most people in realizing the potentials of the field. Given the massive scope of the research project that he had in mind, the books that he brought back were just a tiny part of the whole; but it is not surprising that he was not prepared to lend them to other people.
The problem is that the blanket ban applied to everyone except Zhendi, and so people started making wild guesses about what was going on. There were all sorts of stories circulating in the mathematics department anyway about what a genius Zhendi was — how he completed four years of study in the space of two weeks, how cold sweat broke out on Professor Liseiwicz’s face at the mere sight of him; and before you knew it, some people who didn’t understand the first thing about how these things work were saying that the foreign professor was using Zhendi’s intelligence to advance his own research.