Of course, if all of these people were Chinese and if they all spoke Mandarin then I would have absolute faith in Abing’s ability to choose the right person. But the reality was far from this because the test involved using Morse code, something completely alien to Abing; he had perhaps never even heard of it. It would be the same as having twenty people speaking some unknown foreign language to him. Needless to say, this was an exceptionally hard test. You could even say, in fact, that the real test was more complicated than even my description, more abstruse, since a test involving a foreign language still meant people speaking to him, still meant listening to the way words came out of a person’s mouth. Abing could manage such a test. It would have been the same with a dog. In the evenings in Lujiayan, Abing would sound the alarm whenever a thief attempted to steal into the village, because he could interpret the changes that occurred in the barking of the dogs. He was quite familiar with the sounds made by dogs. But radio signals were something beyond his understanding, something completely alien to him, something he perhaps had never even thought of before, certainly something he had never encountered. As a result, I was deeply pessimistic about Abing’s prospects in this test. I thought it was pointless.

But Abing was something special!

Perhaps, if you were to speak of exceptional people, you would imagine that their daily lives are filled with extraordinary events, not the mundane humdrum things that most of us endure. However, we ordinary people still find it very difficult to comprehend how they can cope with these extraordinary things, just like poor people cannot comprehend the way that the rich can simply march in and buy expensive stuff. You get worried on their behalf, but all that this proves is that you and I are not, and never will be, men of exceptional talent or indeed of great wealth.

At any rate, even though the manner by which the exam was carried out was somewhat complicated, its result was clear: Abing was victorious. He didn’t get only one right, and he didn’t get three out of five right: he won every round. A perfect score in each of the ten tests that he was set. During the test, save for smoking one cigarette after another, it seemed that Abing relied on no special or mysterious tactic – he just plain won.