Character from three-body-problem by
Ye Zhetai's wife and a physicist in her own right, who saved her own life during the Cultural Revolution by climbing onto the struggle-session stage and denouncing her husband as a reactionary.
Shao Lin survives by performing. She calls Ohm's law 'the resistance law,' Maxwell's equations 'the electromagnetic equations,' Planck's constant 'the quantum constant,' because the words 'Ohm,' 'Maxwell,' and 'Planck' belong to dead Western men whose names are dangerous to say aloud. She declares that all scientific accomplishments come from the working masses. She accuses her husband of teaching Einstein, who, she informs the crowd, was a money-grubber who fled to capitalist America. She is a true believer in nothing except continuing to exist. After her husband's death she drifts deeper into denunciation — of colleagues, of friends, eventually of her own elder daughter — and she is rewarded with thinner and thinner rations of safety. She cannot quite hide that her father once accompanied Albert Einstein in Shanghai. Even her loudest performances are not loud enough to bury that.
A trim woman in her forties in 1966, hair cut short under the unisex cap of the era, wearing the plainest possible Mao suit even though she once taught classes in a qipao. Her gestures on the struggle-session platform are theatrical and rehearsed — pointing, stabbing the air, eyes wide with practiced fury.
Also known as: Mother Ye