Rong Jinzhen’s illness and recovery turned a promising academic future into a prolonged struggle for survival, while making care at home a daily, exacting practice. Renal failure brought him close to death just as he was preparing to leave China for Stanford University; after nearly two years in hospital, his recovery depended on careful treatment and the relentless attention of Mrs Lillie. His return to the classroom marked a hard-won reversal, not the erasure of what illness had cost him.

Renal Failure and the Abandoned Future

Rong Jinzhen became gravely ill during the summer before he was due to leave for Stanford. The diagnosis was renal failure, and the doctor initially gave him no more than six months to live. His condition altered his appearance even as his weight continued to fall, and the prospect of death accompanied the family throughout the illness. He remained in hospital for close to two years, with salt forbidden because it could threaten his recovery.

The illness dismantled a specific future. Funding sent by Stanford University to cover his journey was redirected to medical expenses, while the scholarship, diploma, and student life that had seemed within reach receded. The Rong family could not replace the $110 needed for the journey. For Jan Liseiwicz, who had worked to secure an opportunity for his most promising student, the collapse of that plan also came amid suspicion: people on whom he depended for his future security, including the person recounting the episode, had doubted his motives.

The crisis changed how Liseiwicz’s support could be understood. His efforts to send Rong Jinzhen abroad were evidence against the idea that he had been using the younger man for research results. The account presents his regard as genuine and selfless: he had become convinced that Rong Jinzhen possessed exceptional mathematical ability and cared for him with a tenderness connected to his own childhood. The failed journey thus revealed not only the cost of illness, but the depth of a mentorship that had previously been misread.

A Recovery Managed at Home

When Jan Liseiwicz and his family left for X Country, Rong Jinzhen was still in hospital, though he appeared to be out of immediate danger. Because the medical bills were mounting, the hospital accepted his request to continue recovery at home. On the day he was discharged, Master Rong and her mother came to collect him. The doctor mistook one of them for his mother and asked which woman it was; Mrs Lillie answered at once that she was. Her response established the practical responsibility she was about to assume.

The doctor warned that Rong Jinzhen’s condition was stable but not fully resolved. More than a year of special treatment would be needed, and a relapse remained possible if he was not cared for closely. The plan required strict limits on his food, waking him at set intervals during the night so he could empty his bladder, and administering medicine, including injections, at scheduled times. His recovery was therefore organized around repeated acts of attention rather than a single moment of improvement.

Mrs Lillie took notes as the doctor explained the regimen, checked that she had understood each instruction, and then copied the directions onto a blackboard placed in the stairwell. She arranged the household around the work: because she had to wake Rong Jinzhen during the night, she and Young Lillie began sleeping in separate bedrooms. Two alarm clocks, one for shortly after midnight and another for the early morning, made the night-time schedule part of the home’s routine. After the early-morning call, Rong Jinzhen could return to sleep; Mrs Lillie stayed up to prepare his first meal.

Salt, Care, and the Return to Class

Food presented the most difficult continuing problem. Rong Jinzhen needed an exceptionally restricted diet, but the permitted amount of salt was to increase gradually as he recovered. The family had no sufficiently accurate scales, so Mrs Lillie began by relying on careful judgment. She later brought different dishes to the hospital for the doctors to assess, keeping track of how many grains of salt had gone into each one. Once the doctors identified suitable dishes, she measured the salt grain by grain, five times a day. Cooking became a form of precision work, with too much salt risking relapse and too little potentially slowing recovery.

She also learned to give injections. Her experience making cloth shoes by punching holes through thick felt had made the physical task less difficult to learn than the repeated, exacting work of feeding him safely, though she was nervous at first. The narrative places this domestic care beside the medical instructions without making them interchangeable: the doctors set the treatment, while Mrs Lillie carried it out through an exhausting schedule of meals, medication, and interrupted nights.

During brief rests, Mrs Lillie looked at a slip of paper bearing a letter Rong Jinzhen had written in his own blood. She had found and kept it without initially knowing why. In the period of caregiving, the letter became a reason to continue, renewing her resolve when the daily labor wore her down. The account credits her patience and diligence with helping draw him back from the brink of death. The following spring, he was back in the classroom. That return was the clearest sign that the long treatment had succeeded, even though his abandoned Stanford plans and lost years could not be restored.

A Later Hospitalization

The account also records another serious episode, distinct from the renal failure and home convalescence. In mid-June 1966, after breakfast, Rong Jinzhen lost consciousness in a hallway and fell. He was taken to hospital, where examination showed that a stomach ailment, judged severe by the doctor, had caused the fainting. The visible injury from the fall was not the central medical problem; the diagnosis led to his admission for treatment.

This hospital was attached to Unit 701 and located in its Southern Complex. Its equipment and physicians were described as comparable to those of a large-city hospital, but the site did not share the Northern Complex’s degree of secrecy. Rong Jinzhen’s identity was not supposed to be disclosed during his stay, although his importance was already widely understood within the unit. The later admission therefore placed illness within both a medical setting and the organization’s guarded working life. It does not undo the earlier recovery: instead, it shows that returning to the classroom had not made Rong Jinzhen invulnerable to further illness.