Chapter 2 of The Three-Body Problem begins with an account of the government's deforestation efforts, of which Ye Wenjie is unwillingly part. Forced to do manual labor, Ye's mind naturally wanders, fixing on her trauma with nothing else to distract her. She uses a metaphor to contextualize her trauma within her current physical work:

She picked up her ax and saw and began to clear the branches from the trunk. Every time she did this, she felt as though she were cleaning the corpse of a giant. Sometimes she even imagined the giant was her father. The feelings from that terrible night two years ago when she cleaned her father’s body in the mortuary would resurface, and the splits and cracks in the larch bark seemed to turn into the old scars and new wounds covering her father.

In this metaphor, Ye in the process of stripping a large tree of its branches. She compares the tree to Ye Zhetai, her deceased father. Both Ye Zhetai and the tree share in common their victimhood, slain to serve the needs and ideology of an oppressive government system. Liu's use of metaphor here forms an important connection between ecological destruction and the destruction of human bodies as concurrent projects of empire.