Character from three-body-problem by
Wenjie's closest friend at Tsinghua — a Cambridge-educated professor of European art and music who hid Western records and books behind a false wall, until the Red Guards found them.
Ruan Wen is the best of what the old intelligentsia tried to be. She studied at Cambridge, came home for love of country, and built herself a small private world inside her apartment — books, music, a piano, pictures. She mentors Wenjie like a sister. She tells her there is still beauty in the world even when the windows have to stay closed. When the Red Guards finally come for her, they hang her own high heels around her neck, smear her face with lipstick, and make her parade through the campus as 'a corrupt capitalist.' She walks back to her apartment afterward, washes her face, dresses in the clothes she wore at Cambridge, and ends her own life. She is one of the people Wenjie loses on the way to deciding that humanity cannot be trusted with itself.
A woman in her forties with cropped hair and the worn-down poise of someone who used to dress beautifully and no longer dares. Wears the plainest possible clothes in public; in her apartment, before the raid, a small phonograph sits on a doily and there are reproductions of Impressionist paintings tacked to the wall.
Also known as: Professor Ruan