Character from three-body-problem by
Slender journalist for the Inner Mongolia Production and Construction Corps who befriends young Wenjie at the logging camp, then betrays her when his protest letter against deforestation backfires.
Bai Mulin reads Silent Spring in English, lends it to Wenjie because he wants to seem worldly and progressive, and listens with practiced sympathy to her thoughts about deforestation in the Khingan range. When he decides to write a protest letter to Beijing he asks her to copy it out in her cleaner handwriting, claiming his own hand is unsteady from chainsaw work. She does. The letter is read as seditious, and he does not hesitate for a second before naming her as the author. He is not a monster — he is something more ordinary. He is a man who would rather a 26-year-old physicist take ten years in a labor camp than risk his own neck. After 1975 he is reassigned, drifts through provincial science offices, eventually emigrates to Ottawa and dies of lung cancer, never seeing Wenjie again. He never knows what his small betrayal set in motion.
A thin man in his late twenties, ink-stained fingers, a camera around his neck and a notebook in his pocket. Wears the construction-corps uniform with the cuffs rolled up and a city-boy's wire-rim glasses. Smiles easily and often, especially at women he wants something from.
Also known as: Reporter Bai