Young Lillie

Young Lillie, the former chancellor of N University and Master Rong’s father, is the decisive sponsor of Rong Jinzhen’s passage from a precarious return to study into a new research career. He supports Jinzhen’s unconventional thesis despite its political risk, then makes an exception to his own strict rules against employing relatives when he helps recruit him for a computer research unit. The account presents him as principled but not immovable: Jinzhen’s work gives him confidence to pursue a scientific contribution of his own.

Identity and Institutional Position

Young Lillie appears chiefly through two retrospective accounts: Master Rong’s interview and the later recollections of Director Zheng. To Master Rong he is Daddy; institutionally, he is the former chancellor of N University. His authority gives his choices consequences beyond the household, from supervising a thesis to influencing the university’s research direction and recommending a candidate for specialized work.

His position is not portrayed as a license to favor his family. While chancellor, he refused to give a university job to any member of the Rong family, regardless of qualifications. When Master Rong’s department recommended her for promotion to assistant dean on more than one occasion, he rejected the recommendations. Her brother, who had returned from abroad with a PhD in physics, was also told to seek work elsewhere. He found a post at the Normal University in C City, where conditions and student preparation were inferior to those at N University, and moved to a university in Shanghai the following year. His wife was angry, believing he was deliberately splitting the family. These refusals establish the severity of Young Lillie’s rule before his later decision about Jinzhen.

Jinzhen’s Return to Study

After Jinzhen recovered from a life-threatening illness, Young Lillie and Master Rong discussed whether he should rejoin his original class or begin again as a freshman. Master Rong knew that Jinzhen had excellent grades but had spent only three weeks in class, and worried that joining the third-year students would impose too much pressure after his illness. She therefore proposed that he start over. In the end, N University allowed him to return to his original classmates, which was what Jinzhen himself wanted.

Master Rong remembers Jinzhen explaining his illness as a necessary interruption: he believed that time away from science books had kept him from becoming their prisoner and losing his creative direction. The reasoning unsettled her as nearly mad, but it also describes an idea Young Lillie did not dismiss: that intellectual achievement requires more than uninterrupted study. The episode makes his support practical as well as academic. Jinzhen is not simply sent back to the most advanced class; the decision follows discussion of his health, his capacity, and his own wishes.

The Thesis and Its Political Risks

Jinzhen chose to write on Georg Weinacht’s theory concerning the binary nature of certain constants, aiming to provide a mathematical proof. The choice carried a political charge that reached beyond the subject’s mathematical merits. Weinacht was known for his anti-communism, and during the Korean War had supported the American Army crossing the Yalu River. In several communist countries, his theories were rejected or treated with criticism; pursuing one of them therefore risked making Jinzhen’s academic work politically contentious.

At a moment when others were avoiding the topic or hoping Young Lillie would persuade Jinzhen to change it, he did the reverse. He became Jinzhen’s thesis supervisor and consistently encouraged him to continue. The resulting thesis, The Constant π as a Definable yet Irrational Number, ranged well beyond the material Jinzhen had studied in class and was more like a master’s-level subject. Master Rong connects the choice to the books he had been reading in the attic. The account also preserves a qualification about the work’s significance: its full mathematical value would depend on a proof that π is a constant, a milestone that had not been reached. Its immediate achievement was to display Jinzhen’s intelligence and daring, while the association with Young Lillie made some people doubt that the work was entirely his own.

Master Rong rejects that suspicion. She says Young Lillie told her that, apart from recommending a couple of reference books and writing the introduction, he had no part in the thesis’s contents. His introduction framed the work as a challenge to Weinacht’s influence in scientific research and argued that the theories should be put in their proper place. The contrast is important: Young Lillie publicly backed a politically sensitive project, but, as Master Rong recounts it, did not claim its mathematical labor as his own.

A New Research Opportunity

Not long after the thesis was published, Young Lillie left suddenly for Beijing without explaining his purpose. About a month later, decisions from the central authorities reached N University. They permitted him to resign as chancellor and provided the money needed to establish a computer research unit at the university. The sequence led Master Rong to understand the trip as connected to these decisions, though the account does not supply the details of his discussions in Beijing.

Young Lillie later explained why Jinzhen mattered to this undertaking. A letter from Jan Liseiwicz had influenced him, but Jinzhen’s thesis was the decisive evidence that changed his assessment. Young Lillie had long hoped to make a concrete contribution to science. He now believed that, working with Jinzhen, such an effort might still be possible; he also acknowledged that he had previously underestimated the young man’s genius. In recruiting Jinzhen for the new research facility, he set aside the principle that had kept his own family from receiving university positions. The exception was deliberate: he wanted Jinzhen to have a genuine opportunity to show what he could do.

That decision places Young Lillie’s institutional authority in tension with his earlier refusals. The evidence does not present the exception as a general change in policy or as a reward for family connection. Instead, it ties it to the thesis, to Liseiwicz’s influence, and to Young Lillie’s renewed belief that a scientific project could still be built around Jinzhen’s ability.

The Transfer and Its Unresolved Secret

When Director Zheng came seeking talent for specialized work, Young Lillie recommended Jinzhen. Zheng later recalled that he could not disclose the exact nature of the work, only the abilities required, and that he trusted Young Lillie’s judgment of character. Young Lillie introduced Jinzhen as Master Rong’s grandson, spoke readily about his intelligence, and told Zheng not to think of taking him away because the research institute needed him. Even so, Zheng continued pursuing Jinzhen; after a late-night visit, Jinzhen returned home for breakfast, and Young Lillie immediately recognized that the visitor had not given up.

The decision to let Jinzhen leave was made only after a private meeting between Zheng and Young Lillie. Master Rong went out to teach while they were in Young Lillie’s closed study. When she returned, her mother told her through tears that Jinzhen was going with Zheng and that her father had agreed. No one knows what the two men said. Master Rong reports that Young Lillie refused to answer questions about the conversation until his death and became angry if it was raised. Zheng, too, described the agreement as a secret between them. The narrator speculates that Zheng may have disclosed more about his mission than professional rules allowed, but that explanation remains an inference, not a confirmed account.

The withheld conversation marks a change in Young Lillie’s role: the man who had insisted that the research institute needed Jinzhen finally consented to his departure with Zheng. His recommendation helped bring the two together, but the terms of his agreement remain concealed. Director Zheng later called discovering Jinzhen his greatest contribution to Unit 701 and grieved the disaster that followed. In the account of Young Lillie, that future is not explained by a single disclosed motive or speech. It is foreshadowed by the secrecy surrounding the transfer and by the confidence he placed in Jinzhen before the consequences were known.