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Summary
Summary
One of China's bestselling novels, an unusual literary thriller that takes us deep into the world of code breaking
In his gripping debut novel, Mai Jia reveals the mysterious world of Unit 701, a top-secret Chinese intelligence agency whose sole purpose is counterespionage and code breaking.
Rong Jinzhen, an autistic math genius with a past shrouded in myth, is forced to abandon his academic pursuits when he is recruited into Unit 701. As China's greatest cryptographer, Rong discovers that the mastermind behind the maddeningly difficult Purple Code is his former teacher and best friend, who is now working for China's enemy--but this is only the first of many betrayals.
Brilliantly combining the mystery and tension of a spy thriller with the psychological nuance of an intimate character study and the magical qualities of a Chinese fable, Decoded discovers in cryptography the key to the human heart. Both a riveting mystery and a metaphysical examination of the mind of an inspired genius, it is the first novel to be published in English by one of China's greatest and most popular contemporary writers.
Author Notes
Mai Jia , who spent many years in the Chinese intelligence services, is one of China's bestselling and most famous writers. He is the author of four novels, three of which have been turned into television series and films. Mai has won almost every major book prize in China, including its highest literary honor, the Mao Dun Literature Prize.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
A bestseller in his native China, Mai's first novel translated into English opens with the introduction of the Rong family, as told in Chinese folklore: aboard a ferry in 1873, Rong Zilai leaves China to study dream interpretation in order to save his grandmother from her nightmares. After her tragic passing, Zilai decides on another course. On his return, he finds that his grandmother has willed him her silver, and with this inheritance, he opens Lillie's Academy of Mathematics, the predecessor of N University, around which the remainder of the narrative is based. We follow Zilai as he ages, and are introduced to generations of the Rong family, including Abacus Head, so named for her mathematical genius and her enormous skull; her son Killer Head, named for his even larger skull (which killed his mother during childbirth); and, finally, the protagonist of the novel, Rong Jinzhen, a descendent of Zilai's. As the novel traces Jinzhen's path through N University and the military-where he works as a code breaker, attempting to crack BLACK and PURPLE, the most sophisticated codes invented-the reader is steeped in the history of Chinese intelligence and mathematics. Mai's careful attention to pacing and the folklore-inspired narration make for a fascinating story, neatly interwoven with complex mathematical theory. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Yan Shi, an aging Chinese code-cracker, views his life labor as a sort of madness that pulls you close to insanity and to genius. Readers skate the line separating insanity from genius in Mai Jia's riveting tale of cryptographic warfare. At the center of Mai Jia's taut novel, the mathematical genius Rong Jinzhen is spirited away as a young man to China's secretive Unit 701, an elite cadre of code masters. There Jinzhen encounters the hero who broke WWII Japanese ciphers, now a helpless, chess-playing lunatic. Such is the peril Jinzhen faces as he launches his own lonely assault on PURPLE, the fiendish brainchild of his own former professor. In a narrative challenging readers to do their own decoding of its ruptures and inversions, readers see the brilliant protagonist survive daunting psychological dangers as he unravels PURPLE, inspired by a dream about the Russian chemist Mendeleyev. But when PURPLE's sinister sibling, BLACK, emerges as the new foe, Jinzhen ventures forth again, veering toward mental breakdown when he loses a research notebook. A denouement at once heartbreaking and thought-provoking leaves readers pondering the collective sanity of a world shrouding knowledge in enigmas. Gifted translators bring English-speaking readers a Chinese literary treasure.--Christensen, Bryce Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
MAI JIA is the pen name of Jiang Benhu, perhaps the most widely read writer you've never heard of. Jiang enrolled in a military college in China in 1981 and stayed in the Chinese Army after graduation, writing and editing. Since returning to civilian life in 1997, he has produced a number of novels with military intelligence themes that have sold millions of copies. Some have been made into popular television productions and films. Today Jiang is president of the state-sponsored writers' association in Zhejiang Province. "Decoded," a smooth English translation of "Jie mi," his first novel (and the first to appear in English), tells the story of Rong Jinzhen, whose freakishly large head kills his mother in childbirth. As an orphaned toddler, Jinzhen is withdrawn, unkempt and perhaps autistic, but he turns out to be an idiot savant whose mathematical talents are honed by another genius, a visiting professor named Liseiwicz, a Polish Jew who secretly writes anti-Communist tirades under the name Georg Weinacht and also secretly works as a military intelligence analyst for both Israel and "X-country," a euphemism for the United States, China's main adversary in the nefarious world of supercodes. In 1956, a mysterious Chinese agent sets Jinzhen to work at Unit 701, a secluded government campus devoted to cryptography. There he cracks the code PURPLE, without knowing it was invented by Liseiwicz, who by now has relocated to X-country. Jinzhen is cited as "a Hero of the Revolution" and a huge statue of him, resembling Rodin's "The Thinker," is built at Unit 701. The grateful Party also finds him a wife by assigning him female security guards, one by one, until a certain woman clicks. But Jinzhen is far from happy. Everything he says, writes or does is watched and recorded. He is aware that the purpose of this security cocoon is to protect not him but the state secrets that reside in his head. His human ties atrophy while his brain races on, spiraling ever inward. By age 37, obsessed by yet another code, he is a "shell of a man," and the "madman's work" that could lead him "close to insanity and to genius" pulls him to insanity. Mai Jia's novel shows us very little actual cryptography or spy work. Its consuming interest - and it truly is a page turner - comes from its psychological study of Rong Jinzhen as well as its gripping plot, otherworldly aura and flamboyant detail. Mai Jia inherits much from earlier Chinese storytelling, and scholars will enjoy uncovering the novel's layers. His narrator sometimes ends chapters with words meant to pique the reader's interest in what is coming next, as Chinese storytellers have done for centuries. Similarly, in the "public case" storytelling that dates from the 15 th century or earlier, dreams are known to reveal the truth - and so, in "Decoded," Liseiwicz has a dream in which he sees, from thousands of miles away, that Jinzhen has taken up cryptography. Mai Jia's fascination with the near-magical power of modern technology echoes China's "novels of ideals," published at the turn of the 20th century, when Chinese writers were imagining all kinds of inventions that might vault their country into the modern era. The psychological interest in "Decoded" seems indebted to China's May Fourth era, from the late 1910s to the 1930s, when writers explored the notions of Freud and other Westerners. Jinzhen's elephantine head and bizarre family background resemble descriptions in the present-day writing of Su Tong and Yu Hua, and the author's occasional play with metafiction imitates some recent postmodern fashions. The novel's most obvious debt, however, is to the "anti-spy" novels that entered China from the Soviet Union in the 1950s. These appeared originally as translations from the Russian, but Chinese writers soon began to write them too. During the Cultural Revolution, when even anti-spy stories weren't politically pure enough to be published, they survived in homemade, hand-copied volumes that circulated illicitly. The staples of this genre, all of which appear in "Decoded," include a gothic regard for national defense, wizardly foreigners, spiffy gadgets and many, many layers of hidden reality, only some of which are ever revealed. Given Mai Jia's personal experience in the Chinese military - including, apparently, some intelligence work - it's natural to wonder how much of his writing is realistic. Not much, I think. Secrecy and xenophobia are certainly strong in China's military subculture, but the spectacular storytelling in "Decoded" clearly owes more to literary tradition than to life. Consider one example: Jinzhen's postal address at Unit 701 is simply "Box No. 36." Fang Lizhi, China's dissident astrophysicist, wrote in his autobiography about being sent in the mid-1950s to work at a secret site (in his case, on an atomic bomb) and was instructed to tell everyone only that his address was "Box 546, Beijing." So far, the two accounts reflect a common reality. But while ethereal mystery surrounds Jinzhen's address, Fang writes that his fellow physicists had little trouble figuring out where Box 546 actually was and then took to using it as a joke. "Headed back to Box 546?" they would ask Fang when he got up to leave a room. "All of this went over the head of our security officer," Fang recalled. "He kept warning me, austerely, not to let the address leak." Fang, deadpan, always agreed. His account has the ring of truth; by comparison, Mai Jia's seems like an alluring yarn. IN ORDER TO BE PUBLISHED in China, Mai Jia needs to stay within bounds laid down by the Communist Party. He does this with skill, even if he must bend history here and there. (He shows, for instance, foreign professors freely entering and leaving China after 1949, which they certainly could not do.) Party-preferred terms are used for delicate matters (thus 1949 was a "Liberation") and for all the post-1949 years "Party" is conflated with "nation," making it clear that there is no room to be patriotic without loving the Party. Mai Jia does sometimes press the boundaries, as when he refers to the forced self-censorship that arrived after Liberation or when he offers stark accounts of persecution during the Cultural Revolution. Sentences like "To put it bluntly ... Rong Jinzhen was being used by the Party" no doubt drew attention in the censor's office. To my eye, though, the clearest evidence of his resistance to Party prescriptions is in what he chooses to omit. He mentions nothing of "Serve the People," Five Year Plans, Great Leaps and the like, even though this proud Communist language pervaded the period he is writing about. It's as if he has a silent pact with his readers to bracket the puffery and just tell a story. Near its end, "Decoded" addresses some profound questions about the human condition. There is even a mention of God. Here, though, the novel falls short of the best writing in modern China. Readable and enjoyable as it is, "Decoded" cannot compare in moral profundity to the short fiction of Lu Xun, the novellas of Eileen Chang or, more recently, the poetry of Liu Xiaobo. Mai Jia owes much to the Soviet 'anti-spy' novels popular in China in the 1950s. PERRY LINK is a professor of comparative literature and foreign languages at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent book is "An Anatomy of Chinese: Rhythm, Metaphor, Politics."
Guardian Review
It is hard to avoid the thought that the hero of Mai Jia's debut novel, Decoded, first published in China in 2005 and now translated into English, has more than a little autobiography in his makeup. The main character, Rong Jizhen, suffers a solitary childhood: he is an isolated outsider who is recruited to a secret military cryptography unit. Mai Jia (the pen name of Jiang Benhu) spent 17 years in an intelligence unit of the People's Liberation Army; and according to his publishers, he was so isolated as a child that he lost himself in keeping a diary which grew to 36 volumes, testament to a dramatic alienation and an obsession with writing. Both are in evidence in Decoded As his publishers put it, deftly combining mangled prose with a patronising attitude to their readers, "Mai Jia may be the most popular writer in the world you've never heard of." To decode the battered meaning of that sentence, it is useful to know that Mai Jia's novels sell well in China and have inspired both television and film adaptations, and that Decoded is the first of his works to be translated into English. Credit is due to the translator, Olivia Milburn, whose elegant prose serves the author and the reader well. Mai Jia is described as a thriller writer, though a reader who anticipates an action-packed page-turner may find Decoded disappointing: intriguing, certainly, but racy it is not. The author prefers to describe himself as concerned with "people who experience occupational alienation" - in this case, he is talking about cryptography, but the reference is equally applicable to his own lonely profession. The story begins in the 19th century, with the history of the Rong family, prosperous salt merchants in south China, who dispatch one young family member, Rong Zilai, to the US to learn the art of interpreting dreams from a US-based master. They hope that Rong Zilai will eventually be able to alleviate the tormented dream life of the family matriarch, but her early death renders his mission redundant. He studies mathematics instead, returning to China seven years later to found a school that will grow into a renowned university. As the Rong family's prosperity fades, their reputation for maths grows. The school, unusually, admits women, and a number of mathematically talented Rong women appear, notably "Abacus" Rong, whose brilliant career is cut short when she dies giving birth to her son. The child, promptly nicknamed "Killerhead", brings no credit to the family, and the author sends him, too, to an early grave. Killerhead's own posthumous and illegitimate son, reluctantly acknowledged by the family, is our hero Rong Jizhen, though he migrates through several names and nicknames before arriving at this one. The odd little outcast, whose mother, too, died giving birth, is taken in by a Mr Auslander, an elderly foreigner who has washed up in the family compound. On Mr Auslander's death, Rong Zilai, the family's mathematical pioneer, intrigued by the child's uncanny ability, carries him off to the university, where his talent is further fostered by Jan Lesiewicz, a Polish Jew and mathematical genius, who is stranded in China by the second world war. It is this relationship that is at the heart of the subsequent narrative, with its generally intriguing combination of loyalty and mistrust, mutual suspicion and fellow feeling, identity and shapeshifting. Lesiewicz hopes Jinzhen will devote himself to artificial intelligence, but instead, the young man is recruited to a top-secret Chinese cryptography unit and set to work on the two most difficult codes the enemy has produced. Liesewicz, who warns him that cryptography leads to madness, is now in the enemy camp, in the US, where he, too, has strayed into cryptography. The narrative arc of the book is the author's own quest for the truth about the secret lives of Jinzhen and Liesewicz, against a backdrop of state secrecy, deepening antagonism between the US and China, and the tightening grip of the communist state on the lives of its citizens. The narrator crisscrosses China, tracking down key witnesses, to reconstruct Jinzhen's life, and part of the narrative is told in the accounts of those who knew him. The novel is also, in its way, an exercise in ambiguity and coded references, and can be read as a lightly coded allegory of the troubled relationship of the citizen with an all-powerful state. It is also deft in its exploration of the world of mathematics and of cryptography, managing to evoke the labyrinthine uncertainties and paradoxes of the black art and the obsessions of those who practise it. Despite its shortcomings, it left this reader with an appetite for more from this unusual writer. To order Decoded for pounds 14.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0330 333 6846 or go to guardianbookshop.co.uk. - Isabel Hilton It is hard to avoid the thought that the hero of Mai Jia's debut novel, Decoded, first published in China in 2005 and now translated into English, has more than a little autobiography in his makeup. The main character, Rong Jizhen, suffers a solitary childhood: he is an isolated outsider who is recruited to a secret military cryptography unit. Mai Jia (the pen name of Jiang Benhu) spent 17 years in an intelligence unit of the People's Liberation Army; and according to his publishers, he was so isolated as a child that he lost himself in keeping a diary which grew to 36 volumes, testament to a dramatic alienation and an obsession with writing. Both are in evidence in Decoded As the Rong family's prosperity fades, their reputation for maths grows. The school, unusually, admits women, and a number of mathematically talented Rong women appear, notably "Abacus" Rong, whose brilliant career is cut short when she dies giving birth to her son. The child, promptly nicknamed "Killerhead", brings no credit to the family, and the author sends him, too, to an early grave. Killerhead's own posthumous and illegitimate son, reluctantly acknowledged by the family, is our hero Rong Jizhen, though he migrates through several names and nicknames before arriving at this one. - Isabel Hilton.
Library Journal Review
Published over a decade ago, prize-winning Chinese author Mai's first work of fiction has finally been translated into English. Here, readers meet Rong Jinzhen, a cryptographer for Chinese intelligence with a tragic upbringing. Mai presents the story in five segments, starting with the Rong family in 1873, then showing how mathematical excellence was seen throughout the generations until Jinzhen's story is fully realized in 2002. Jinzhen is an autistic math genius forcibly taken from his studies, and his journey moves from absolute brilliance in breaking code while working for Unit 701 to his ultimate mental decline. VERDICT Not a typical spy story, though those who enjoy the genre may be interested, this literary work offers both deft character study and a clear-eyed look at intelligence work, with intrigue and ample mathematical references. Mai's experience working in the Chinese intelligence service may have contributed to the story's realism. [See Prepub Alert, 8/26/13.]--Shirley Quan, Orange Cty. P.L., Santa Ana, CA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
1. The man who left Tongzhen on the little black ferry in 1873 with a view to studying abroad was the youngest member of the seventh generation of that famous family of salt merchants: the Rongs of Jiangnan. When he left, he was called Rong Zilai, but by the time he returned he was called John Lillie. Going by what people said later on, he was the first person in the Rong family to break from their mercantile heritage and become an academic, not to mention a great patriot. Of course, this development was inextricably linked with the many years that he spent abroad. However, when the Rong family originally picked him to be the one to go overseas, it was not because they wanted him to bring about this fundamental change in the clan's fortunes, but because they were hoping that it might help Grandmother Rong live for a little bit longer. As a young woman, Grandmother Rong had proved an excellent mother, giving birth to nine sons and seven daughters over the course of two decades; what is more, all of them lived to be adults. It was these children who laid the foundations of the Rong family fortune, making her position at the very top of the clan hierarchy unassailable. Thanks to the assiduous attentions of her children and grandchildren she lived much longer than she might otherwise have done, but she was not a happy woman. She was afflicted by all sorts of distressing and complex dreams, to the point where she often woke up screaming; even in broad daylight she would still be suffering from the lingering terrors of the night. When these nightmares tormented her, her numerous progeny, not to mention the vast wealth of the family, came to seem a crushing burden. The flames licking the incense in the brazier often flickered uncertainly with the force of her high-pitched shrieks. Every morning, a couple of local scholars would be invited to come to the Rong mansion to interpret the old lady's dreams, but as time went by it became clear that none of them were much use. Of all the many people called in to interpret her dreams, Grandmother Rong was the most impressed by a young man who had recently washed up in Tongzhen from somewhere overseas. Not only did he make no mistakes in explaining the inner meanings of the old lady's dreams, but sometimes he even seemed to display clairvoyance in interpreting the significance of individuals who would appear in the future. It was only his youth that led people to imagine that his abilities in this direction were superficial - or to use Grandmother Rong's own words, 'nothing good ever came of employing people still wet behind the ears'. He was very good at explaining dreams but his divination skills were much poorer. It seemed that if he started off on the wrong foot, he simply could not right himself again. To tell the truth, he was very good at dealing with the old lady's dreams from the first part of the night, but he was completely unable to cope with those that she had towards dawn, or the dreams within dreams. By his own account, he had never formally studied this kind of divination technique, but had managed to learn a little simply by following his grandfather around and listening in. Having only dabbled in this kind of thing before, he could hardly be classed as an expert. Grandmother Rong moved aside a sliding panel in the wall and showed him the silver ingots stacked within, begging him to bring his grandfather to China. The only answer that she received was that it was impossible. There were two reasons for this. First, his grandfather was already very wealthy and had lost all interest in making more money a long time ago. Furthermore, his grandfather was a very old man and the thought of having to travel across the ocean at his time of life might very well scare him to death. On the other hand the young man did come up with one practical suggestion for the old lady: send someone overseas to study. If Mohammed won't go to the mountain, then the mountain will have to come to Mohammed. The next task was to find a suitable person to go from among the old lady's myriad descendants. There were two crucial criteria for selection. It would have to be someone with an unusual sense of filial duty to Grandmother Rong, who would be prepared to suffer for her sake. What is more, it would have to be someone intelligent and interested in study, who could learn the complicated techniques of dream interpretation and divination in the shortest possible time and to a very high level. After a careful process of triage, a twenty-year-old grandson named Rong Zilai was selected for the task. Thus, Rong Zilai, armed with a letter of recommendation from the foreign young man and burdened with the task of finding a way to prolong his wretched grandmother's life, set out to cross the ocean in search of learning. One month later, on a stormy night, just as Rong Zilai's steamer was forging its way through the ocean swell, his grandmother dreamed that a typhoon swallowed up the ship and sank it, sending her grandson to feed the fishes. Caught up in her dream, the old lady was so horrified that she ceased breathing. The trauma of her dream resulted in cardiac arrest; the old lady died in her sleep. Thanks to the length and difficulty of his journey, by the time that Rong Zilai stood in front of his would-be tutor and reverently presented his letter of introduction, the old man handed him another letter in return which announced the news of his grandmother's death. Information always travels much faster than people do. As we know from personal experience, it is the fastest runner that gets to the tape first. The old man looked at this young man who had come from so far away with a sharp glance, so keen that it could have been used to shoot down a flying bird. It seemed as though he was genuinely interested in taking on this foreign student, who had come to him in his twilight years. Thinking it over afterwards, however, since Grandmother Rong had died, there was no point in studying this esoteric skill and so, while he appreciated the old man's offer, Rong Zilai decided to go back home. However, while he was waiting for his passage, he got to know another Chinese man at the college. This man took him to attend a couple of classes, after which he had no intention of leaving because he had discovered that there was a lot here that he needed to know. He stayed with the other Chinese man - during the day, the two of them attended classes in mathematics and geometry with students from Bosnia and Turkey. At night, he would attend concerts with a senior student from Prague. He enjoyed himself so much that he did not realize how quickly time was passing; when he finally decided that it was time to return, seven years had gone by. In the autumn of 1880, Rong Zilai got on a boat together with a couple of dozen barrels of new wine and began retracing his steps on the long journey home. By the time he arrived back, in the depths of winter, the wine was already perfectly drinkable. To quote the inhabitants of Tongzhen on the subject: the Rong family had not changed at all during these seven years - the Rong clan was still the Rong clan, the salt merchants were still salt merchants, a flourishing family continued to flourish and the money came rolling in just like before. The only thing that was different was the young man who had gone abroad - he wasn't so young any more, and he had acquired a really peculiar name: Lillie. John Lillie. Furthermore, he was now afflicted by all sorts of strange habits: he didn't have a queue, he wore a short jacket rather than a long silk gown, he liked to drink wine that was the colour of blood, he larded his speech with words that sounded like the chirping of a bird, and so on. The strangest thing of all was that he simply could not stand the smell of salt - when he went down to the harbour or to the shop and the stinging scent of the salt assaulted his nostrils, he would begin to retch or sometimes even to vomit bile. It seemed particularly dreadful that the son of a salt merchant would be unable to tolerate the smell of salt; people treated him almost as if he had contracted an unmentionable disease. Later on, Rong Zilai explained what had happened - when he was on the boat sailing across the ocean, he had accidentally fallen in, swallowing so much briny water that he very nearly died. The horror of this event had etched itself into the very marrow of his bones. After that he had kept a tea leaf in his mouth at all times when on the boat, otherwise he simply would not have been able to endure it. Of course, explaining what had happened was one thing, getting people to accept the news was something else entirely. If he could not stand the smell of salt, how on earth was he supposed to work in the family business? You can't have the boss going round with a mouth full of tea leaves all the time. This was a very thorny problem. Fortunately, before he left for foreign parts, Grandmother Rong had put it in writing that when he came back from his studies he was to have all the silver behind the sliding panel in her room as a reward for his filial piety. Later on, he used that money well, for it paid for him to open a school in the provincial capital, C City, which he called Lillie's Academy of Mathematics. That was the predecessor of the famous N University. Copyright © 2002 by Mai Jia Translation copyright © 2014 by Olivia Milburn and Christopher Payne Excerpted from Decoded by Mai Jia All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.