As she left she spoke these final words to me: ‘I understand that I need to atone for my crime against Abing. Believe me, I will.’

On the following day, a few people saw Xiaofang leave Unit 701 with her toddler bundled in her arms. But no one saw her return, and no one knew where she’d gone. Years later, one winter I was in Shanghai on official business and I thought that I would pay a visit to Abing’s mother. Upon reaching Lujiayan, to my surprise, I learnt that after Xiaofang had left Unit 701, she had moved in with Abing’s mother. The strange thing was, I didn’t see the boy. I asked Xiaofang but she prevaricated, telling me that the child was simply not here. From the way she spoke and from the way she carried herself about the house, you could see that she considered this place her home. And what’s more, all the villagers were in agreement: she was the best daughter-in-law in all of Lujiayan. Everyone praised her for bringing good fortune to Abing’s house.

In 1983, Abing’s mother died of organ failure as a result of diabetes. The villagers told me that once the memorial services for Abing’s dead mother were complete, Lin Xiaofang left Lujiayan with the intention of returning to where Abing had worked. But we at Unit 701 knew that she had never returned. In the end, no one knew where she went. To tell you the truth, to this day we still don’t know. At first, some people speculated that she returned to her own home town, others said she went to Shandong. But these were all just rumours. Thereupon new stories were told. Some said that she had thrown herself into the Huangpu River; others said that they had seen her on the streets of Shanghai; there were even some who swore that they had seen her at Abing’s grave … Whatever the case might be, I feel that we will never really know what happened to her: her fate, just like the origins of Abing’s incredible hearing, will for ever remain a mystery.

WIND READERS

I remember that Anderov once told me that von Neumann was then the best cryptographer in the whole world, and it was as if he had two completely different ways of thinking, one Eastern and one Western … At that time he was the only person in the world who had cracked both European and Asian ciphers. He had accepted a number of Asian students, so that they would give him insight into the way that their minds worked … Some people said that he was even cleverer than Einstein, that he was the last of the great mathematicians.

An Angel with Problems

She was an angel, but she wasn’t perfect.

Yeah, she was an angel with problems.

She was Unit 701’s fifth Bureau Chief of the European cryptography division: Huang Yiyi.