Character from dark-forest by
Brilliant string theorist whose suicide opens the Crisis Era — Ding Yi's lover, Ye Wenjie's daughter, the woman whose grave is where cosmic sociology is first spoken aloud.
Yang Dong is dead before The Dark Forest opens, but her absence shapes the people the book follows. Her suicide note about physics 'no longer existing' set the tone for the despair that produced the Wallfacer Project. Ding Yi visits her grave and so does her mother; Luo Ji, drinking nearby, becomes the third party to a conversation he was not meant to overhear.
Glimpsed only in photographs and grave-side memory: a young Chinese woman with long straight hair, fine features, the deliberate stillness of someone who lived inside equations. Buried in a small Beijing cemetery under a simple stone.
Also known as: 杨冬