Ruan was sitting on the chair before her desk, her eyes closed. Wenjie stood next to Ruan and gently caressed her professor's forehead, face, and hands—all cold. Wenjie had noticed the empty sleeping pill bottle on the desk as soon as she came in.
This quote narrates Ye Wenjie finding her best friend's body after Ruan Wen commits suicide. It's a tragic moment, made more intimate by the use of Wenjie's first name (through the novel, she's usually Ye Wenjie or Ye, especially once she enters full adulthood and disillusionment).
This passage is particularly interesting because it's a small example of narrative delay, which Liu uses frequently in the novel, usually on a larger scale. Wenjie noticed the sleeping pill bottle as soon as she came in. However, the reader isn't told until after the description of her touching Ruan. Wenjie's process of realizing Ruan is dead is completely different from the reader's, because Liu chose to create a different experience for the reader by delaying the narration of a relevant fact. An example of this technique on a larger scale is the revelation that not only has Wang Miao heard of Red Coast Base already, he knows more about its actual purpose than the reader does.
Closed third-person perspective tends to position a reader "inside" a character's head, showing us what they see/know as they see/know it. Using techniques like this narrative delay, Liu subverts that expectation, which builds suspense and reminds the audience that they don't get to know everything about Ye Wenjie's psyche.
It was impossible to expect a moral awakening from humankind itself, just like it was impossible to expect humans to lift off the earth by pulling up on their own hair. To achieve moral awakening required a force outside the human race.
This thought determined the entire direction of Ye's life.
The narration of this passage is a combination of Ye's own thoughts (the first paragraph) and an omniscient narrator who reveals the importance of those thoughts for the story. These aren't idle musings; we are told, flat out, that this thought will result in action later in the story of Ye's life. This isn't precisely foreshadowing, since the narrator is directly telling us that this is important, but it tells us to be on the lookout for this thought's possible implications.
Ye Wenjie has just read Silent Spring and now believes that humanity is incapable of redeeming itself. The image she uses to express this—humans flying by pulling their hair—is absurd, the sort of concept a child might ask a teacher or mother about. The silliness of the image provides some levity; it also requires a belief in the universality of Newtonian physics, which sophons will later trick humans (including Ye's daughter) into thinking is variable. While some line could be drawn between "sophons mess with the apparent reality of physics" and "if physics were variable, humans could fly by pulling on their hair," it's not an especially fruitful line of thought; if anything, what we can learn from Liu using this comparison is that Ye Wenjie (and probably Liu himself) likes to use scientific comparisons to explain philosophical concepts.
In order to protect himself, he decided to sacrifice Ye Wenjie.
Half a century later, historians would all agree that this event in 1969 was a turning point in humankind’s history.
Without intending to, Bai became a key historical figure. But he never learned of this fact. Historians recorded the rest of his uneventful life with disappointment. [...] For the rest of his life, he never mentioned Ye Wenjie, and we do not know if he ever felt remorse or repented for his actions.
Liu’s use of an omniscient narrator in this quote suggests the grand scope of his Remembrance of Earth’s Past series. The narrator knows not only the collective position of 21st-century historians, but their "disappointment." This is compounded by the first-person plural pronoun in "we do not know if he ever felt remorse." The collective "we" tells us we should care, because many people already do. It expresses that the story unfolding is much larger than the fate of a low-ranking comrade, and that this is an integral part of that story, even if it never really affected Bai Mulin.
There is also a sense of irony here: the moment is insignificant for Bai, and he is otherwise insignificant, yet his actions place Ye exactly where she needs to be to become the most important person in the history of the planet, altering the course of humankind.
“To be honest, even if I were to look at the stars in the sky, I wouldn’t be thinking about your philosophical questions. I have too much to worry about! I gotta pay the mortgage, save for the kid’s college, and handle the endless stream of cases… I’m a simple man without a lot of complicated twists and turns. Look down my throat and you can see out my ass. […] You think that’s not enough for me to worry about? You think I’ve got the energy to gaze at stars and philosophize?”
For a large portion of the book, Wang Miao sees Shi Qiang as more of a crook than a friend. He grows especially frustrated when he finds Da Shi has no curiosity about outer space or the nature of humanity. In this quote, Da Shi presents his reasoning, and he explains the division between them without attacking Wang. The self-deprecating “look down my throat and you can see out my ass” is Da Shi’s recognition that he does not have the complex inner psyche of someone like Wang.
Shi Qiang’s vocabulary sets him apart—no other main character uses contractions such as "gotta," for example. The possessive "your" in “your philosophical questions” also separates the two of them. While Wang imagines all people (or at least all people worth knowing) share at least his level of philosophical interest, Shi calls these questions specifically your questions, not our or even a neutral these. Wang's questions aren't his; Shi's curiosity works in a different direction, which Wang grows to see the value of over the course of the novel.
"But, I did indeed invent an ultimate rule."
"Tell me."
"Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy."
"What...what kind of crappy rule is that?"
"I'm saying that there's always someone behind things that don't seem to have an explanation."
In the conversation between Da Shi and Wang after his breakdown, Liu Cixin sticks almost entirely to quoted speech, even avoiding dialogue tags (like "he said," "he asked," etc). The conversation reads quickly and casually, not broken by narration, but it leaves the reader to imagine the men's expressions and actions as they trade barbs.
Da Shi reveals his ultimate rule: Anything sufficiently weird must be fishy. Instead of a philosophy or ethical code, the police captain believes in an almost Scooby-Doo-like vision of the world, where if something seems impossible, it's always orchestrated by someone to seem that way. Wang's stumbling response ("What...what") is unusual for him (he's not really one to say "crappy"), perhaps indicating true shock or intoxication.
Liu Cixin has sometimes been criticized for his characters' lack of depth; however, exchanges like this demonstrate Liu's ability to develop relationships through simple lines of dialogue.
"Thank you," Wang said. He once again felt the warmth that he had missed. In his current state, his mental stability depended on two pillars: this old woman, who had weathered so many storms and become as gentle as water, and Shi Qiang, the man who feared nothing because he knew nothing.
In this quote, Wang Miao thanks Ye Wenjie for her guidance. In other sections of this study guide, we speculate on Wang Miao's mental state; here, he tells us directly that at this moment, his mental stability relies on two pillars: Ye Wenjie and Shi Qiang.
His perception of Ye Wenjie resonates with her upcoming quote about how a woman "should be like water"; his perception is also wrong. Ye Wenjie has indeed weathered many storms, but the leader of the ETO is not the gentle old woman Wang imagines. He's shocked to discover her true identity at the Three Body meetup. Perhaps his perception of Shi Qiang is wrong, too—Da Shi clearly demonstrates that he knows something as he dominates the Battle Command Center and plots the downfall of the Judgment Day.
Wang's misunderstanding of his two support pillars (especially Ye Wenjie) is a little ironic, and perhaps it has a bit of allegory in it for us: Relying on only others for mental stability, like relying on only theories, might leave us with a shaky foundation.
"I failed. Her world was too simple, and all she had were ethereal theories. When they collapsed, she had nothing to lean on to keep on living."
"Professor Ye, I can't say I agree with you. [...] she's not the only scientist to have stumbled down that path."
"But she was a woman. A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything."
The Three-Body Problem rarely provides direct commentary on womanhood, so this quote is an outlier in the book. Ye Wenjie clearly has beliefs about womanhood, which must color her interactions with women through the novel: the cadre Cheng Lihua, her mother Shao Lin, the women who killed her father, the women of Qijiatun, the women of the ETO (including the one Ye orders to kill Pan Han), and others indirectly, like her sister Wenxue and her best friend Ruan Wen. Here, she discusses her deceased daughter, Yang Dong, and she takes accountability for her death: "I failed."
Ye Wenjie contacted the Trisolarans, so she's more directly responsible for Yang Dong's death than she admits here. However, her concern for her daughter specifically was that she was unable to be how a woman "should be": "like water, able to flow over and around anything." This is interesting to consider in the context of the novel's end, when Ye Wenjie's own faith in the Trisolarans is broken, and she stops speaking; was she "like water" in this instance? Should she have been?
“To effectively contain a civilization’s development and disarm it across such a long span of time, there is only one way: kill its science.”
This quote provides the groundwork for the Trisolarans' strategy to take over the Earth, retroactively explaining many of the mysteries at the start of the novel. The Trisolarans have sent a fleet of ships to invade Earth, but the technological growth rate of the humans is staggering, so the Trisolarans fear that the humans might be stronger than they are by the time the fleet arrives to take over. In order to prevent this future, the princeps devises a plan to stop their scientific growth: kill science by discrediting it in the eyes of both the public and the scientists. Once the basics of science become unreliable, it is impossible to make any further progress. This strategy explains Wang Miao's mysterious countdown, the confusing results given by the particle accelerators, the scientists' suicides, and the general anti-scientific mood of the public.
In Ye’s memory, these months seemed to belong to someone else, like a segment of another life that had drifted into hers like a feather. This period condensed in her memory into a series of classical paintings—not Chinese brush paintings but European oil paintings. Chinese brush paintings are full of blank spaces, but life in Qijiatun had no blank spaces. Like classical oil paintings, it was filled with thick, rich, solid colors. Everything was warm and intense: the heated kang stove-beds lined with thick layers of ura sedge, the Guandong and Mohe tobacco stuffed in copper pipes, the thick and heavy sorghum meal, the sixty-five-proof baijiu distilled from sorghum—all of these blended into a quiet and peaceful life, like the creek at the edge of the village.
Ye Wenjie’s time in Qijiatun after the birth of her daughter is a stark contrast to the intense chapters before it. After Ye sends a message inviting Trisolaris to invade earth, murders Commissar Lei and her husband, and goes through the difficult birth of her daughter, the novel enters a pastoral section, during which Ye's status and outlook are partially, though not completely, softened by the care of the villagers in Qijiatun.
The images in this passage are a sensory contrast to the environment of the Red Coast Base and the Khingan Mountains, which Ye describes as "gray and indistinct" (p. 268). The people and the world are warm in Qijiatun. The tobacco and copper present earthy tones, while the references to paintings invite the reader to imagine the scene as a still image. This ekphrasis—typically defined as a literary description of a painting—with rich imagery of the room, the alcoholic drinks, and the heavy food, is not featured elsewhere in the book. Rarely does Liu dedicate as much attention to details insignificant to the plot, which implies their significance to Ye. Though the content is particularly Chinese, using regionally specific vocabulary (kang, Guandong and Mohe, baijiu), it's framed as a Western image, alien to Ye Wenjie's experience thus far. In both its content and its rhetoric, this passage emphasizes that Qijiatun drifts "like a feather" into Ye's world, which is otherwise cold and unadorned.
“I just want to ask the two of you one question: Is the technological gap between humans and Trisolarans greater than the one between locusts and humans?”
The question hit the two scientists like a bucket of cold water. As they stared at the clumps of locusts before them, their expressions grew solemn. They got Shi Qiang’s point.
At the end of the novel, after the whole Battle Command Center gets the message “You’re bugs!” (p. 383) plastered onto their vision simultaneously, Wang and Ding get drunk. Shi Qiang then takes them to his hometown to see a plague of locusts, demonstrating that while Trisolarans might be more advanced than humans, humans still have a chance—after all, humans haven't fixed their pest problems after centuries of trying.
It is difficult to tell how life-affirming this scene is. Both scientists grow “solemn,” as they recognize that Trisolarans may fail to eradicate them, regardless of their advantages. This thought is briefly encouraging, but their objectification of these locusts as “clumps” without value or individuality is a window into how a higher species may think of them. This quote is followed by a section break; the passage after, which closes the chapter, is much more hopeful about humanity's future.
