Character from three-body-problem by
Astrophysics professor whose father was beaten to death by Red Guards in 1966 — the quiet old woman at Tsinghua who, decades ago at a secret radio installation, made a decision the rest of the human race does not yet know about.
Ye speaks softly and asks more questions than she answers. She is patient in the way of people who have nothing left to lose and very little left to want. With students she is generous, attentive, almost maternal. With colleagues she is courteous and impossible to read. She does not raise her voice. She does not argue. She listens, and then she nods, and then she does what she had already decided to do. She carries the Cultural Revolution inside her like a stone she has learned to walk with. She watched her father die on a stage in front of his own students. She was betrayed, sent to a labor camp, and then to Radar Peak, where she discovered that the sun could be used as an antenna and that humanity, when given the chance, would do to itself everything she had already seen done. She does not believe people can save themselves. She has, in private, decided that they should not have to. In this book she is the spiritual leader of the ETO, though almost no one knows it yet. To Wang Miao she is just a kind retired professor who once knew his mother.
In her sixties now, slight and white-haired, with the watchful stillness of someone who has spent most of her life either being watched or not wanting to be seen. Glasses. A cardigan that has been mended. The kind of face students describe as 'kind' and never as 'open.' When she walks the Tsinghua campus she keeps to the shaded paths, and she stops sometimes to look at the sky as if checking that it is still there.
Also known as: Wenjie, The Commander, Professor Ye