Ye Wenjie

Ye Wenjie is a central character of Liu Cixin's The Three-Body Problem. She is introduced as a young astrophysicist in Beijing during the Cultural Revolution, the daughter of a physics professor persecuted for refusing to renounce his science. The upheaval of those years costs her nearly everything: her family is destroyed, her education is cut short, and she is sent to a remote labor corps in the mountains of the northeast, where she rebuilds her inner life around books rather than people. Her scientific talent draws official attention, and she is brought to Red Coast Base, a secret military installation on a mountain called Radar Peak, for classified research work. Decades on, in the present day, she appears as a quiet, gentle retired professor whose composure carries the weight of all her generation lived through.