Decoded by Mai Jia
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Educating Genius

Mai Jia is a Chinese Borges. Using documents presented as factual he constructs a fiction that is the truth of a culture. For Borges, it was European culture and its influence in South America that was a primary topic. In Mai's case the culture is that of China: driven, obsessive, clever, and secretive. The relationship between Europe and China is more complex than what Borges had to deal with, and Mai has come up with a brilliant metaphor in cryptography to investigate that complexity.

Some of the most interesting parts of Decoded are about what is presumed to need no explanation: the significance of family-relations, the necessity to sacrifice oneself for the national good, an acceptance of the fateful chance involved in life, the spiritualisation of chance as divinely sourced luck, and the reluctance to challenge authority as unjust, balanced by a profound sense of fairness. This is the sort of existential backdrop of things that just 'are' in China. These 'gaps' make the metaphor both more pointed and more compelling.

Ostensibly, Decoded is about the life and fate of an autistic mathematical savant, the bastard child of a family of intellectuals. He, like China itself, is passed from one controlling authority to another. Each transfer involves a renaming as well as new conditions of existence. He is even somewhat 'Christianised' into a distinctly Pauline view of the relation between life and after-life. Crucially, he is intellectually influenced most by a foreign mathematician who is married to a Chinese woman and enculturated deeply into the country. Through him, the savant is drawn into the life of the mind and into decades-long cultural as well as cryptographic warfare.

The Chinese ability to temporise about their history is presented as a rule of the game of cryptography. Knowing history is only confusing for a cryptographer, the author contends. It makes progress difficult by trapping one's thinking in the past, in the patterns that have already been established and discarded as obsolete. The invasion by Japan and its horrors are, therefore, footnotes to the main story; the Korean War mentioned en passant; the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution are asides; the emergence of entrepreneurial China doesn't merit even a comment.

The other "Iron-clad rule" in ciphers, according to Mai, is that one should never attempt to be on both sides of a code. A good encryptor risks not just his talent but also his sanity by engaging in decryption; and vice-versa. The message, perhaps to Chinese authority, is plain: the ability to confuse others is incompatible with an ability to understand what others are really up to. The attempt to do both provokes cultural madness. Pointedly, the key to the most profound cipher of the time is that there is no key: The cryptographic key was the number zero! It was nothing! Absolute nothing! ... a cipher with no key."

The protagonist's internal state, his personality, is never revealed. He is incomprehensible, inscrutable even, to everyone he has known and worked with, including government officials. He is admired for his achievements, but also feared for his unpredictable behaviour. He is intimate with no one, among other reasons because his intelligence is so oppressively off-putting. One of his notebooks shows him to be a hidden religious obsessive. The protagonist's doctoral thesis considers mankind as the irrational number Pi, an eternal constant but ultimately indeterminant. China anyone?

Mai summarises his cultural perceptions in the mouth of one code-breaker,

"With respect to those working in cryptography, our collective fate is naturally tied up with the various games of chess – especially those with commonplace lives. Finally they will all be seduced by the art of chess, just like pirates and drug pushers are seduced by their own wares. It is just like how some people become interested in good works in their old age."

With this, Mai signals, subtly but clearly, a recognition of the generational differences that exist in China, as well as the tension between the Party-insiders and the rest of the population.

"Genius and madness issue forth from the same track; both are brought about by bewitchment," says the same decoder. Perhaps this is Mai's central message to his compatriots. As one of the main symptoms of democratic politics, this warning about bewitchment seems particularly apt at the moment to European culture as well.

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