Born in War, Raised in Faith: A Life in Mathematics

He was born on Gulangyu Island, Xiamen, in the 1930s, into a relatively well-off, intellectually oriented, Christian family. Looking back on his life, one sees not only the story of an individual, but also a compressed history of modern China: war, displacement, the first national college entrance exam, political campaigns, university teaching, reform and opening, and, in later years, migration abroad to reunite with family.

If his life has a central thread, it may be this: in a century of upheaval, he held tightly to thinking, to mathematics, to faith, and to humility.

A Family Formed at a Crossroads of Cultures

He grew up in Gulangyu at a time when the island was one of the most internationally connected places in China. From the mid-19th century onward, foreign consulates, churches, schools, and hospitals had been established there, and the island developed a distinct cultural landscape shaped by both Chinese and Western influences.

His family’s story was deeply shaped by that environment. A grandparent converted to Christianity in the late 19th century, and that decision became a turning point for later generations. Family members received education in mission schools and institutions influenced by Western educational traditions.

In his telling, the family combined practicality and aspiration: rooted in farming and business, yet deeply committed to education, discipline, and moral formation. His father’s generation included well-educated teachers and professionals, some of whom studied at prominent universities in Republican-era China.

One family story remained vivid in his memory: as a young student, his father loved the piano but could not afford the extra fee for lessons. He secretly climbed over a wall at night to practice in a classroom and was discovered by a teacher. Instead of punishing him, the teacher was moved by his passion and offered to teach him for free. To the professor, this story captured something precious about an earlier generation of educators: strict, but generous; demanding, but capable of recognizing sincere love of learning.

Childhood in Wartime: Flight, School Transfers, and a Near-Drowning

He was born in Gulangyu, but his childhood was quickly overtaken by war. During the anti-Japanese war, Xiamen fell, and his family eventually left the island to avoid danger, moving to relatives’ hometown under a different local authority. Life there was organized in the old style: family living upstairs, shop downstairs.

These early years were marked by disruption—relocation, school changes, and constant uncertainty. Yet what stayed with him most vividly was a near-drowning accident when he was eight.

One winter day, while playing near a river with a cousin, he fell into the water. Many decades later, he still remembered his thoughts underwater with startling clarity. First, he thought he would miss choir practice that evening and might die. Then he thought of his parents, who loved him dearly, and how heartbroken they would be. Then, silently in his heart, he prayed for Jesus to save him.

What happened next became one of the defining memories of his life. He recalled seeing a bright light and noticing gaps in a stone embankment underwater. He grabbed the cracks, pulled himself upward, and when the wall became smooth, kicked hard and broke through the surface. He saw a rope, caught it, and was pulled out.

He later returned home soaked but unharmed. Even in old age, he spoke of this incident with conviction: he believed he had been preserved by God.

A Mind Drawn to Patterns

As a child, he was known for thinking quickly and deeply. One story he liked to tell involved a classroom number game in which students took turns calling out numbers, and the person forced to land on a certain number would lose. One by one, the students challenged the teacher and lost. He sat on the side, quietly studying the pattern. A few minutes later, he stepped in, called out a key number, and the teacher immediately stopped the game.

“I know you understand it,” the teacher said. “I’m not playing with you anymore.”

That moment stayed with him because it expressed something essential about how his mind worked: he loved finding the hidden structure behind surface appearances.

That same instinct drew him to mathematics. He loved it not only because it required logic, but because it offered certainty. As he put it, mathematics does not lie. If 1 + 2 = 3, it cannot become anything else just because circumstances change. In a turbulent world, that kind of reliability mattered.

He also loved teaching mathematics. During his school years, classmates began coming to his home at night to ask for help. At first there were only a few; later, more and more students arrived from farther away. His family had no large blackboard, so he used the backs of calendars and wrote with a brush to explain problems. Even then, he found joy in understanding a problem and then helping someone else understand it too.

He was equally candid about what he did not like. He disliked subjects that required heavy memorization, such as history and political study, and admitted—without excuses—that as a student he sometimes cheated in those classes. He also recounted mischievous childhood incidents: secretly reading exam papers his father had prepared, stealing money from his father’s coat as a toddler to buy candy, and then confessing when confronted. In old age, he interpreted these memories through a moral and religious lens: human beings, he said, do not need to be taught every form of wrongdoing; many impulses arise naturally.

That honesty gave his recollections unusual depth. He did not present himself as a prodigy without flaws, but as a gifted and complicated child who later learned to examine himself.

Gulangyu and the Birth of a Builder’s Imagination

Before mathematics became his life’s work, architecture first captured his imagination.

The Gulangyu of his childhood was filled with consulates, churches, schools, gardens, villas, and residences in a wide range of styles. Chinese and Western design coexisted in ways that fascinated him. The island’s urban management was also strict and orderly, and he remembered clean streets, disciplined public behavior, and a sense of civic beauty.

As a boy, he was captivated by buildings. At eleven, he designed and drew a two-story house, assigning rooms to family members. He also studied the iron gates of large homes, noticing how they were assembled with rivets rather than welding, and sketched their structures in detail.

Even in these early interests, one can see the same mind at work: drawn to form, order, and internal structure—whether in a building or a mathematical proof.

The First National College Entrance Exam and a Changed Path

In 1951, he graduated from high school at a historic moment: China’s first national unified college entrance examination. Before then, universities largely handled admissions independently. The new system represented a major shift in educational organization and state authority.

He applied to study architecture at a university in Shanghai, motivated by his love of buildings and harbors, and was admitted. Once he arrived, his instructors quickly recognized his mathematical strength—he had earned a perfect score in mathematics on the entrance exam.

Then his life turned unexpectedly.

Unaccustomed to the winter climate and local living conditions, he became seriously ill and required expensive imported penicillin treatments. The cost consumed all the money he had brought. In poor health and under severe stress, he left school and returned home without completing the required formal procedures. The university later ordered him to suspend his studies for a year and barred him from taking the exam or working during that period.

For a young man who had been admitted to his preferred major, this was devastating. He later recalled writing in his diary and, in anger and frustration, complaining bitterly to God. Why had he been made ill and forced away from the field he loved?

Yet this interruption, which felt like a disaster at the time, became the beginning of his future as a teacher.

The Young Substitute Teacher

During his period of recovery, a local girls’ school suddenly needed substitute mathematics teachers. Because of his strong reputation in mathematics, he was recommended to fill in. He became the youngest teacher in the school.

His first class was observed by school leaders and other teachers. He taught the concept of symmetry, drawing geometric figures by hand on the blackboard with unusual precision and confidence. He had learned from a former geometry teacher who could draw circles and triangles freehand beautifully, and he had practiced the skill himself by collecting discarded chalk pieces and sketching.

That first lesson went so well that the principal encouraged him to continue teaching.

At one point, the school also assigned him library duties. Young and proud, he objected, insisting that he had come to teach, not to work as a librarian. He stopped going to class. The principal then came to his home personally, listened to his complaint, and adjusted the arrangement so he could continue teaching and even take on more instruction.

The school later invited him to stay on as a regular teacher and eventually teach at a higher level. But he had already decided: he would take the college entrance exam again.

When he reapplied in 1953, he filled all three preferences with the same university and the same major—mathematics. He knew exactly what he was good at, and he knew he could get in.

In hindsight, this period revealed both his strengths and his weaknesses: talent, clarity, and teaching ability, but also pride. He would later reflect on both.

University Years: Excellence, Pressure, and a Spiritual Turning Point

At university, he quickly distinguished himself in mathematics. His instructors noticed him from the beginning, and his coursework was often publicly recognized. Yet in that era, strong academic performance did not guarantee an easy path.

He later described repeated pressure over his faith: questions about why he would not join certain organizations, whether he had brought religious texts to school, and why he persisted in belief in “such a time.” At the same time, he excelled in his major courses, including oral examinations under the Soviet-style academic system then used in Chinese universities.

One of the most important episodes of his university years was not academic but spiritual. He recalled that several classmates regularly prayed for him. After one New Year return to campus, he suddenly could not sleep for three consecutive nights—highly unusual for him. Lying awake, he felt that scenes from his past sins—lying, cheating, stealing, pride—played before him “like a movie.”

At last, he knelt on his bedding and wept. He had heard the teachings of Christianity all his life, he said, and understood them intellectually. But in that moment, he felt them personally and deeply for the first time.

This experience became a lasting foundation for how he interpreted his later life.

Graduation in a Time of Political Campaigns

His graduation years coincided with intense national political campaigns. In universities, students were judged not only by grades but also by political attitude and organizational conformity. Classmates and colleagues could quickly become accusers, and public criticism sessions carried severe consequences.

He remembered that while his academic record was excellent, he was viewed by some as politically suspect because of his faith and because he would not conform. During a graduation political evaluation, fellow students and organizers criticized him for hours, using the ideological labels of the time to condemn his views and attitudes. He tried to respond at first, but later was not allowed to speak.

Because they could not establish evidence for more severe charges based on political speech, he was not formally assigned to the most dangerous category. However, his political evaluation was still marked negatively, affecting his graduation outcome and future placement.

For a student with top academic performance and the potential to remain in a university mathematics department, this was a major blow. Yet his academic ability still mattered. He was ultimately assigned to work in Beijing at an institution linked to the industrial education system, where he began his long career in higher education.

What stands out in his recollection is not self-dramatization, but complexity. He did not cast himself as a hero, nor did he flatten the period into a simple story. He described it as a time when personal fate could be redirected by forces beyond one’s control—and when survival often depended on silence, caution, or the protection of others.

Early Teaching Career in Beijing and the Great Leap Forward

After arriving in Beijing, he worked in higher education, assisting in advanced mathematics teaching and supporting senior faculty. Some of his colleagues had very strong academic backgrounds, and he continued to grow in a serious intellectual environment.

But national upheaval soon entered the classroom. During the Great Leap Forward, teachers were sent to labor assignments, institutions were reorganized, and campaigns such as backyard steel production swept across schools and communities. He personally participated in makeshift steelmaking efforts, working through sleepless nights repairing furnaces and feeding them with metal objects collected from homes.

He remembered the absurdity clearly: pots and household metal were melted down, yet no one could say with confidence whether the final product was even steel.

More tragically, he recalled a young colleague who privately remarked that the effort was futile. Those words were reported. The man was publicly denounced and later died by suicide. The memory remained one of the darkest in his account, a lasting reminder of how dangerous honesty could become in a politicized environment.

For him, these years reinforced a painful truth: in times of mass campaigns, ordinary people became extremely vulnerable. A single sentence could cost a person everything.

He later said that surviving war, political movements, and serious illness was not proof of his cleverness, but of God’s protection.

A Life in Mathematics and Teaching

Despite early disruptions and political setbacks, he spent most of his professional life in university teaching and was repeatedly recognized as an outstanding professor. In the end, the identity that remained most stable and meaningful to him was simple: he was a teacher of mathematics.

He loved the certainty of mathematics, but he loved just as much the act of explaining it. Even late in life, when he spoke about his happiest and most vivid memories, they were often scenes of teaching: standing at a blackboard, drawing figures, unfolding a proof, watching a student understand.

Political language changed. Institutions changed. Standards and slogans changed. But the logic of a mathematical argument, and the moment of intellectual clarity shared between teacher and student, remained real.

Later Years: Reuniting with Family Abroad

In the second half of his life, he witnessed China’s reform and opening and the country’s rapid economic transformation. In old age, he moved to the United States to reunite with his children and help care for grandchildren, entering a quieter family-centered chapter.

The man in the interview carried the clarity of an old-school mathematics professor, but also the humility of someone shaped by war, illness, political upheaval, and self-examination. He did not hide his youthful pride. He did not deny his weaknesses. He spoke openly about his talent in mathematics, his resistance to studying English, and the many times he believed he had been spared from danger.

What He Wanted Young People to Remember

Near the end of the interview, he offered several pieces of advice to the younger generation—simple in wording, but weighty in meaning.

1) Keep a sense of reverence

In his view, human beings are small. Intelligence, invention, and wealth do not mean full control over life. After everything he had seen, he believed that people need humility before something greater than themselves.

2) Do not be proud

He admitted that he had been proud in youth and paid a price for it. Pride, he believed, blinds people to their own weaknesses and makes life harder than it needs to be.

3) Study seriously, but understand why you struggle

When young people encounter academic difficulties, he advised them not to stop at “I can’t do it.” Instead, they should ask: Is this a thinking problem? An emotional problem? A personality problem? Or am I resisting the subject? He used his own poor English as an example—not simply inability, but resistance.

4) Know your gifts and your limits

Everyone has strengths and weaknesses, he said. Not everyone is suited to the same path. The key is to understand your own talents honestly, address your shortcomings as best you can, and avoid forcing yourself into a direction that does not fit.