Rong Jinzhen–his father relationship

Rong Jinzhen’s relationship with his father rests on a distinction between biological origin and the bond made through care. Killer is presented as the child’s biological father, but the father who brings Rong Jinzhen into a family and remains present in his later memories is Daddy. The novel makes that bond concrete through an act of welcome, the household’s shifting names for the child, and his recollection of his father’s imprint on his body.

Birth and uncertain belonging

Rong Jinzhen’s mother arrived at the Lin family after Killer’s death, saying that she carried his child. The family rejected her claim and turned her away. At N University, Old Lillie took her in and arranged for Young Lillie to bring her to Tongzhen. She also described herself as a devout Buddhist who had visited Putuo Mountain to pray and discovered her pregnancy afterward. Her account did not settle the question of the child’s place in the family: after the birth, his resemblance to Killer made him appear to be the dead man’s son, and the Rongs did not readily accept him as one of their own.

This origin left Rong Jinzhen with a complicated inheritance. His birth connected him to a father he never knew and whose reputation preceded him, while his survival and upbringing depended on others deciding to shelter him. The account of his father therefore begins not with a relationship between two people, but with a contested claim of descent and the family’s eventual decision to keep the child.

The decision to make him family

Rong Jinzhen’s sister recounts that she and her mother learned of his existence only after her own younger sister had died. Their father had kept the boy elsewhere, and the news reached the household through Cheng, a school headmaster. Once the family learned of the hardships Rong Jinzhen had already endured, his intelligence, and the old foreign gentleman’s request, his mother urged his father to bring him home. Her grief for the daughter she had lost met the knowledge that this boy needed a family; she responded by asking that he be welcomed into their household.

The welcome did not erase the family’s uneven language of belonging. His mother called him Zhendi, and his sister did too; his father alone called him Jinzhen. He called his mother Mummy, his father Professor, and his sister Sis. These everyday names show a relationship being lived rather than simply declared: his father gave him the name by which he would be known, while the child’s title for him reflected the household’s particular habits and his place within it.

A father remembered through the body

In a later reflection, Rong Jinzhen addresses his stomach as something he might resent, but cannot separate from his father. He understands it as bearing his father’s imprint: Daddy had forged it, and it had become harmful and exceptionally fragile, like a pear blossom. When the stomach hurts, memory turns toward pear blossoms and then toward the old man. The father is thus recalled not only as a person in the family past but as part of Rong Jinzhen’s physical experience, present in an ailment that repeatedly draws him back to the man who raised him.

The image of the pear blossom binds tenderness to vulnerability. Pear blossoms recall the setting of his father’s care, yet they also give shape to the fragility of the stomach he associates with him. Rong Jinzhen’s recollection refuses a clean division between affection and bodily suffering: the same paternal imprint that makes his father enduring in memory is joined to a condition that causes pain.

Kinship through care and memory

The contrast between Killer and Daddy defines the relationship’s central tension. Killer supplies the story of biological descent, but he is absent from Rong Jinzhen’s life; Daddy becomes the father through the decision to take the child home and the lasting place he occupies in his son’s memories. The novel’s separate account of Mr Auslander and Duckling also gives fatherhood a form built through care: Duckling’s first attempt to call someone father leads Mr Auslander to take him in. Set beside Rong Jinzhen’s story, that episode reinforces the book’s attention to family bonds formed through acts of recognition, not lineage alone.

For Rong Jinzhen, the bond endures after his father is gone as an inward presence associated with both pear blossoms and his own vulnerable body. His recollection that Daddy lives in his heart and stomach makes memory inseparable from embodiment. Fatherhood in this relationship is therefore not a settled fact of ancestry; it is a connection made possible by shelter and sustained by the marks a loved person leaves behind.