Di Li’s removal of passages from Rong’s notebook

Di Li’s removal of passages from Rong Jinzhen’s notebook preserves the privacy of their relationship while making its emotional history impossible to recover in full. The missing sections are more than absent pages: they mark the limit between what the notebook reveals about Rong Jinzhen and what its readers are allowed to know.

The Notebook and Its Missing Sections

The notebook is jumbled and at times obscure, yet its surviving entries allow a reader to trace how Rong Jinzhen’s love for Di Li grew and changed. The most revealing material appears in the later sections, where his feelings become especially apparent. The narrator reasons that the passages Di Li removed probably contained intimate emotions and may have been even more obscure than the rest. This is an inference, not a description of the missing pages themselves: their contents remain unavailable.

The circumstances of the notebook’s arrival help explain Di Li’s access to it. On the afternoon of the third day after his hospital discharge, Rong Jinzhen brought it to her office. As a security guard, she was responsible for checking submitted notebooks for missing or surplus pages. He told her that it held no work-related secrets, only personal ones, and invited her to read it, adding that he hoped to receive her reply. Di Li finished reading after sunset. The narrator’s account places the later removal against this sequence of official inspection, personal invitation, and private reading, without establishing exactly when or why particular passages were taken out.

A Love Left Partly Unspoken

When asked whether Rong Jinzhen had declared his love directly, Di Li said that he had not—or perhaps had, since some of his words carried that meaning. After repeated questioning, she identified the words as a quotation from the final verse of the fourth song in the Song of Solomon. The allusion offers a trace of intimacy rather than an unambiguous explanation: his feeling appears through borrowed language, and Di Li’s recollection does not settle how directly he meant it.

That uncertainty resembles the notebook’s obscurity. Its surviving pages chart the development of his affection, but the removed material may have contained the closest account of their private exchanges. The narrator accepts that it is not really right to criticize Di Li for taking out intimate passages. At the same time, their absence frustrates any attempt to reconstruct the relationship completely. What is withheld matters precisely because what remains points toward a deeper attachment.

The Notebook as Cipher

The narrator describes the notebook as a kind of cipher that encrypts Rong Jinzhen and Di Li’s relationship and closes it off from outsiders. The comparison turns the act of removal into a problem of interpretation: the surviving text contains signs of love, but the missing sections prevent readers from assembling a complete account. Unlike a code that can be solved from its available clues, this record may have been deliberately made incomplete, leaving some meanings permanently inaccessible.

The narrator can grasp Rong Jinzhen as a genius and formidable cryptanalyst, but admits being unable to see the whole of his emotional life. Knowledge of his public abilities does not unlock his private exchanges. The removed passages sharpen that divide: the more clearly the notebook shows that his love developed, the more conspicuous the absent evidence becomes.

Uncertain Responsibility and Privacy

The narrator wonders whether the missing passages were taken out because someone did not want Rong Jinzhen’s intimate feelings, friendships, or private life exposed to outsiders. The narrator also considers the possibility that Rong Jinzhen himself tore them out, or that someone else found a way to do so for him. These possibilities remain conjecture; the available account does not identify who removed the sections or establish a motive.

That uncertainty prevents the act from becoming a simple accusation against Di Li. She is associated with the removal, but the narrator recognizes the legitimate privacy claim in keeping intimate details from public view. At the same time, the act has an interpretive consequence: it protects the couple’s private life by making the narrator—and the reader—depend on fragments. The notebook thus records affection while withholding its fullest expression, preserving both evidence of the relationship and the secret that keeps it from being fully known.