Decoded by Mai Jia

hand-axe and a tree standing in the forest and turned them into a beautiful piece of furniture. We were that amazed, we could hardly believe the evidence of our own eyes. It was completely unbelievable!
    After this, we felt that it would not be a good idea to keep him on at primary school, so Daddy decided to enrol him in the middle school attached to N University. The school was only a couple of doors down from our house, so if he went there as a boarder, it would quite possibly be even more damaging to Zhendi’s fragile psyche than if we had just thrown him out onto the streets. So, at the same time as Daddy decided to enrol Zhendi in the first year at middle school, he also decided that he would have to continue living with us. The fact is that after Zhendi came to live with us that summer, he never left until he got his first job . . .
[To be continued]
    Children like giving each other nicknames; any child in the least bit peculiar will find himself being given a nickname by his classmates. When the other pupils at the school first caught sight of Jinzhen’s huge head, they called him ‘Big-head’. Later on they realized that he had all sorts of peculiar habits – like he really enjoyed counting the hordes of ants that marched backwards and forwards across the playground and was completely oblivious to anything else while he was doing it, or that in the winter he would always wear a tatty old scarf trimmed with dog-fur (apparently this had been a present from old Mr Auslander), or that he would fart and belch in class, without the least sign of restraint, just letting it all hang out as it were. People really did not know how to take him. Another thing: he always wrote his homework in duplicate – once in Chinese and once in English. What with one thing and another, people felt that there was something wrong with him, that he must be stupid. But at the same time his grades were fantastic, really impressive, better than what the rest of the class could achieve put together. So they came up with a new nickname for him, ‘Idiot-savvy’ by which they meant ‘idiot savant’. This nickname was particularly apposite because it encompassed his behaviour both inside and outside the classroom. Like many nicknames it seemed to denigrate its possessor, but at the same time it had an element of praise – a perfect mix of contempt and respect: everyone felt it was the right name for him. Everyone called him that.
    ‘Idiot-savvy!’
    ‘Idiot-savvy!’
    Fifty years later, when I went to visit the university, there were plenty of people who had no idea who I was talking about when I mentioned Jinzhen, but the moment I said ‘the Idiot-savvy’, it was like putting a match to the train of their memories – this nickname brought a whole host of stories to mind. One of the people I talked to, an old gentleman who had once been Jinzhen’s class teacher, was happy to share the following memories with me:
    I remember one interesting thing. During break in class, one of the other pupils noticed a line of ants crawling along the corridor and called him over. He said to Jinzhen, ‘You like counting ants, don’t you, so why don’t you come and count how many ants we have here?’ I saw it with my own eyes – he came over and counted a couple of hundred ants walking along – just like that. There was another time that he borrowed a book off me, a dictionary of proverbs and aphorisms, and he gave it back to me a few days later. I said he could keep it but he said that he didn’t need it, since he had already memorized the whole thing. Later on, I found out that he could recite the whole damn thing from memory! I can tell you, of all the many, many pupils that I have taught during my career, there was no one else who came even close in terms of basic intelligence or academic ability. His memory, creative ability, comprehension, his ability to calculate, to extrapolate from the evidence, to make a summary, to come to a decision .