One thing that confuses me after reading Cixin Liu's book. The three body problem and watching its Netflix adaptation is a simple button away.
Spoilers for 3 Body problem continue.
I still have not been able to understand why Ye Wenjie, when faced with the choice of responding or ignoring the transmissions of the San-Ti, an alien race, decided to respond. Throughout human history, first contact events rarely go well and get even worse when the two sides are technologically out of balance. So why would a seemingly hyper-intelligent woman place her hopes in a race of beings who have already made clear their hostile designs on Earth?
In an interview with Ye actresses Rosalind Chao and Zine Tseng, who play the character through the different stages of her life in the Netflix series, I decided to ask them what they thought of Ye's actions and what they would do if confronted to his decision to press. the button.
“Naivety is what led to his fateful act,” Chao said. Before his election, Ye faced incredible trauma. She watched as his father, a prominent physicist and university professor, was beaten to death in one of the infamous fighting sessions of Mao's Cultural Revolution. That same revolution left Ye, herself a physicist, without a future as China transforms into a country where her expertise in the sciences is considered subversive: a threat to Mao's repressive, anti-intellectual regime. She is trapped, forced to serve as a scientific researcher for the government that killed her father. “She thinks that the whole world is experiencing what she is experiencing and that she has the opportunity to make it better,” Chao said.
But what does “better” mean in this context?
A sympathetic individual from San-Ti warned him that continued communication would cause the entire race to invade. Knowing this, he still presses the button. I asked Chao and Tseng if Ye's desire to make the world “better” was born from the hope of salvation or from the resentment of wanting to see the world that hurt her destroyed.
“There is resentment and there is hope,” Tseng responded. Although Ye inevitably presses the button, she pauses before doing so. “I felt that hope was (contained in) hesitation.” Chao sees The Great Button Press as a more neutral stock. “(Pressing the button) has the spice of spite,” she said. “But it drives her to keep going.”
Understanding Ye's actions means understanding someone who has been indelibly shaped by the events of China's Cultural Revolution. According to Tseng, Ye's survival in that period is due to his strength. “She's one of the strongest people in that time period,” Tseng said. “She has been through many life-threatening events, but she is alive.”
Tseng said Ye's ability to survive is what attracts her most to the character. For Chao, it's Ye's adaptability. “She adapts to circumstances based on what serves her and what she perceives as service to humanity,” Chao said.
Ye's choice has dire consequences for both humanity and herself. She loses everything and everyone she hoped to save from her, including her own life, behind her transmission to the San-Ti. It's hard to feel sympathy for someone suffering the consequences of a choice when those consequences were at least hinted at, if not clearly stated, from the beginning. But Chao feels that's where her biggest lesson comes from. 3 Body problem lies. “What I have really learned from 3 Body problem “It’s a certain kind of empathy,” Chao said. “There are so many shades of gray and you never know what leads someone to take an action that may be perceived as wrong or a mistake.”
Chao said that when he read The three body problem, she understood Ye as a character. But it was only through her interpretation that she was able to develop empathy for this doomed woman. “She opened my way of thinking,” Chao said.
His response caught my attention. I can't seem to have the same feelings for Ye, but I was wondering if her empathy for her would lead her actresses to make the same decision.
Tseng was matter-of-fact in her response, refusing to press the button. “I take advice,” she said. “Because they said, 'Don't answer.'” However, Chao did not agree. “If I had gone through everything you had gone through,” Chao said, “how could I not press the button?”
While I still can't understand Ye Wenjie and his choice and the choices of many other characters in 3 Body problemI understand better why.
“If someone tells me not to do it,” Chao said with a laugh, “I want to do it even more.”
