The Three-Body Problem: Chapter 26 Summary & Analysis

No one ever suspected Ye of the murders, and life went on as usual. One day, near the end of Ye’s pregnancy, a group of local children showed up at her door; Ye was surprised to learn that the base had recently lowered its security clearance. The children had heard that Ye was a brilliant scientist, and they wanted her help preparing for the National College Entrance Exam, which had once again been opened to all.

After Ye helped those first children, more and more local kids came to visit Ye and seek her advice. One time, a teacher even came to her door, enthralled by this “bona fide scientist!” From then on, when Ye was overwhelmed by a sense of loneliness, her newfound community would usually surprise her with some homegrown vegetables or a pot of hot dumplings.

At last, it was time for Ye to give birth. There were complications with her pregnancy, so she had to be taken off-base, to the local hospital. While she was in labor, Ye hallucinated hot suns and flying stars. She lost a life-threatening amount of blood in childbirth, but the villagers volunteered over and over to donate their blood to replenish hers.

After Ye had the baby—Yang Dong—she was too weak to take care of herself, and she had no relatives who could take her in. Instead, a local man named Hunter Qi brought her into his home, and Ye lived with Qi’s peaceful family for      six months. Ye grew especially close to his daughter-in-law Feng, who helped Ye nurse Yang Dong. During this time, Ye found that she had a lot in common with the women in the village, and she was surprised and touched to see how much the men respected her.

This brief period of happiness felt almost foreign to Ye. Feng had a child around the same time as Ye, and the two women would watch their children play peacefully late into the night. Sometimes, Ye would dream that she herself was a child again, and she would awake with tears in her eyes. When Feng asked questions like, “Why do you think the stars in the sky don’t fall down?” Ye would give simple, soothing answers. In this quiet town in the Greater Khingan Mountains, “something finally thawed in Ye Wenjie’s heart.”

A few years later, Ye received notice that she and her father had both been politically rehabilitated. To ensure that Yang Dong got a good education, Ye found a job teaching physics at Tsinghua University and returned to Beijing with her daughter. Ye was amazed at the degree to which the Cultural Revolution seemed to be truly over, wondering if this was the end of “the madness.” At the same time, Ye could not forget the message she had sent to the Trisolarans, though at this point it seemed like that communication had been in another lifetime. Indeed, Ye was so shocked at her own betrayal that she forgot about it, distracting herself from her past.

Meanwhile, Ye’s mother, Shao Lin, had recovered and had married a man in the Education Ministry; as the Cultural Revolution ended, this man had risen in prominence, and Shao was now an important woman in her own right. One day, Ye brought Yang Dong to visit her grandmother. Though the visit was nice, Ye felt an “invisible wall” guarding her mother.

Before Ye could leave, Shao’s husband stopped her on the street, warning her not to talk about her father or “pursue historical debts” with her mother. When Ye looked up, she saw Shao’s face in the window, egging this new husband on. Ye picked up Yang Dong and left, never to return.

Eventually, Ye even managed to locate the revolutionary girls who had murdered her father. When Ye finally met up with them, the women were still wearing the uniforms they had worn on that fateful day decades earlier. At the same time, they all looked very different—they      had become old, battered, and ill. When the women saw Ye, they refused to repent, explaining that despite devoting their lives to the cause they, too, had suffered in the Cultural Revolution. Indeed, only three of the girls had survived; the fourth had lost her life working in a labor camp. This exchange renewed Ye’s resolve. Rather than feeling guilt about her betrayal of humanity, “she finally had her unshakeable ideal: to bring superior civilization from elsewhere in the universe into the human world.”