Guangxi

Guangxi occupies two sharply different places in the narrative: its mountains supply an image of exchange so unlikely that it strains belief, while Lingshan County is where the narrator visits his dying father. The contrast brings the fantastical account of Rong Jinzhen’s work into contact with the narrator’s family experience.

Mountains and the Unbelievable

In describing how events can seem unreal precisely because they are too real, the narrator invokes a mountainous area in Guangxi where, the story claims, a sewing needle could be exchanged for a cow—or even a pure silver broadsword. The example makes the extraordinary sound almost impossible to credit, yet the narrator insists that the discovery of the secret to cracking PURPLE is no less firmly part of the story: Rong Jinzhen reached it in a dream of Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev, who was himself said to have conceived the periodic table in a dream. Guangxi thus anchors an image of the improbable without serving as the location of that discovery.

Lingshan County and the Narrator’s Family

The narrator’s personal route into Rong Jinzhen’s story leads to Lingshan County in Guangxi. In the spring of 1990, after a paralysing stroke left his seventy-five-year-old father in need of hospital care, ineffective treatment led to his transfer to a nursing home there. The narrator describes the institution as closer to a hospice, where the concern was for patients to wait quietly and peacefully for death.

That winter, the narrator visited his father and found him changed by a year of pain and torment: kinder, more loving, and eager to talk. He seemed to hope that repeating expressions of affection would persuade his son of his fatherly love. The narrator, however, understood that this late tenderness could not undo the earlier absence: when he had needed his father, his father had not been there. He nevertheless refused to turn that history into revenge, and resolved to love and respect him in his final days. In this account, Guangxi is not merely a faraway setting but the place where the narrator’s duty to his father and his account of Rong Jinzhen’s life meet.