Character from remembrance-of-earths-past by
Ye Wenjie's mother — the physicist who saved herself in the Cultural Revolution by denouncing her husband, and who lived afterward in the small comfortable rooms of an apparatchik's wife, never once speaking her dead husband's name.
Shao Lin made the survivor's bargain. She watched her husband killed and lived, and lived, and lived, in a series of progressively more comfortable apartments, married to a series of progressively more comfortable men. She does not visit her daughter. She does not answer her daughter's letters. She is, as Ye Wenjie observes from a great cold distance, an ordinary woman who simply chose to live, which is the cruelest thing Ye Wenjie can think to say.
A neatly dressed woman in her fifties with carefully waved hair, conservative blouses, and the set jaw of a person who has decided not to think about something. She wears small jade earrings. Her hands are always doing something — pouring tea, folding a napkin, smoothing her skirt.
Also known as: 邵琳