FEMMES FATALES: on the portrayal of women in Liu Cixin's "Remembrance of Earth's Past"

After reading the first two books (The Three-Body Problem and The Dark Forest) of Liu Cixin's Hugo Award-winning trilogy, Remembrance of Earth's Past, back in 2016, I was finally able to devour the final volume's (Death's End) 720 pages over two glorious days upon coming home from my first term at uni.

So I've been saying this for a year now, but I can now reiterate it here with authority: You have not truly lived until you've read Remembrance of Earth's Past. So if you haven't read it, do it now. Naturally, this post will contain spoilers. You do not want spoilers. I accidentally glimpsed a huge spoiler for Death's End while trawling across Wikipedia and it took away some of the absolute awe I would have otherwise experienced. Overall I truly don't think my life will be the same now that I've been exposed to Liu's genius. (Oh, and, props to Ken Liu for achieving the Angsty Diasporic's dream: translation of Chinese literature, especially books that contain so many complex technical terms. Ken, you made me cry all over my toast with The Paper Ménagerie, and I've just ordered your novel on Amazon. I love you, Ken.) Everything from the human computer in Three-Body to his resolution of the Fermi paradox in Dark Forest, to the ten-dimensional universe proposed in Death's End had me completely overwhelmed. We humans are as insignificant in this vast space and infinite time as a speck of dust. Science is beautiful and the universe is terrifying. And if you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.

me the entire time

But although I'm absolutely in love with this series and have been recommending it left and right (including to my Chinese teacher, for whom I suspect it was paradigm-shifting), reading Death's End, I found myself increasingly interested in Liu's portrayal of women. Despite a great amount of intelligent, capable female scientists being included, I am troubled by the equation of femininity with frailty, as well as the three great romances in the narrative to be represented as passionate obsession that cannot be truly understood by the women who are recipients of this love.

Of course, I've only read these books once each, and choose not to devote too much time or research to this analysis. This is merely a topic that I wanted to discuss a bit after reading such a profoundly impactful book. I also didn't plan it ahead so the structure is basically nonexistent. I welcome comments and would love to read a real essay on this subject!

Again, major spoilers ahead!

Eve

Let's begin with the idea of woman bringing forth the apocalypse, which is exemplified in two characters: Ye Wenjie, who triggers all of the events by being the one who contacted the Trisolarians, and Cheng Xin, the last woman left in the entire universe, who twice irrevocably changed the course of human history (leading up to the end of the Solar System) by failing to do 'the right thing'. Although these women can be seen as the antithesis of one another, with the 'evil' Ye at the beginning and the 'good' Cheng at the end, both of them are akin to Eve, who bit the apple and caused mankind to be exiled from Eden.

Both Ye and Cheng are fatherless, where a lack of masculine presence in their life pushes them towards femininity. Ye's loss of her father (who was betrayed by her mother) in the Cultural Revolution drives her to the despair that eventually causes her to betray Earth to the Trisolarians. The resilience that arises within her due to her hardships are associated with femininity: she tells Wang Miao, "A woman should be like water, able to flow over and around anything." (1:125) She uses her femininity as a shield to protect her from outside forces, and as a shell to contain her disillusioned soul. She embraces "women's topics" (1:318) and begins taking care of children, but these are merely a cover for the sinister ETO work she is doing in private.

As punishment for Eve's actions, all women for the remainder of history must experience pain in childbirth. In 1:316, Ye Wenjie is described to have experienced extreme pain when giving birth to Yang Dong, the product of an emotionless marriage––a pain that is literally "punishment for her betrayal [...] that exceeded all others." (1:316) This furthers her comparison to Eve, where both have committed the Original Sin and doomed humanity.

While Ye Wenjie's agonising childbirth is a result of the hatred inside her, the pain that causes Cheng Xin to go blind is born out of pure love. This again reinforces the inherent opposition between the two women.

Interestingly, Cheng Xin's mother never experienced pain to have her, because she was found abandoned. What does this mean for Cheng Xin? Perhaps this hails her god-like status, a painless birth who broke Eve's curse then reinterprets Eve, mother of humanity, as the Madonna, mother of Jesus (3:161): pure, virginal, sinless. Although Cheng Xin has no children of her own, she feels a maternal responsibility towards all of mankind in the future, partly because of her having been born in the Common Era and thus being technically older than everyone else. It is this maternal love that is her fatal flaw; it is the epitome of emotion (as opposed to logic) and consumes her entire being –– "maternal instinct," Liu writes, "was not subject to rationalisation." (3:162)

Similarly, a brash, brave, violent (i.e. masculine) woman ("a girl like that" (1:306)) is shown to have "mother issues." (1:306) This implies that the absence of either feminine or masculine presence in a child's life causes them to veer towards the other; an imbalance. This is likely to arise from the Daoist idea of yin (feminine) and yang (masculine) being in constant balance.

As the Swordholder, Cheng Xin constantly repeats the idea that she will be the soft, feminine leader, the opposite of Luo Ji's outdatedly masculine leadership. Crucially, Liu writes that "she was a protector, not a destroyer; she was a woman, not a warrior." (3:201) This creates a Manichean opposition between femininity and masculinity, stating that women are peaceful rather than war-like. Even ignoring the fact that such a statement reinforces gender stereotypes, this peaceful femininity is constantly represented as negative, a weakness that Trisolarians exploit in order to gain the upper hand. Whereas the violent, hypermasculine, "black leather jacket"-wearing (3:490), prosthetic-refusing-because-he's-just-that-tough-and-uncaring-about-personal-appearance "devil" (3:216), Thomas Wade, had a 100% degree of deterrence and, if elected as Swordholder, would have made the correct decision at the time, Cheng Xin's degree of deterrence was but a pathetic 10%, "like a worm wriggling on the ground". (3:216) It is her femininity that makes her stand out from Wade and the other candidates (all Common Era masculine men) and causes her to be elected by a feminised, complacent Deterrence Era society. Cheng Xin is soft like a worm, and the men and women of the Deterrence Era have "soft bodies––as if their bones were made of bananas." (3:135) A peaceful era results in the hard edges of war-like masculinity becoming redundant; whereas AA thinks that such a society is more "fully evolved" (3:135) compared to "savage" (3:135) men of the Common Era and that they are the pinnacle of human progress, it is this self-satisfaction that allows the Trisolarians (who have learned deceit and subterfuge from Earth while Earth's own society let themselves forget these things) to betray them. Their fragility is shown when they are all forced into Australia and "regress" (3:241) into rioting, cruel savages. Feminine Cheng Xin follows them to Australia and quietly, passively suffers, but the masculine Swordholder candidates become leaders in the resistance, actively fighting back against the Trisolarians and even giving up their lives for the cause.

When Cheng Xin reawakens in the Bunker Era, she sees that this new society has stripped itself of most of the Deterrence Era material comforts that made it weak; thus, "this was another age capable of producing men." (3:500). This phrase's harshness really bothered me when I was reading it––I think it's the words "capable", which makes so many judgements about competence and thus worth, and "producing", with all of its artificiality, and finally, of course, "men", which implies that Deterrence Era men were not 'real' men because they didn't have beards, low voices, or aggressive attitudes. Furthermore, "capable of producing men" links back to times when it was of the utmost importance for a family to 'produce' male heirs; Henry VIII wasn't a real, potent man, and his wives weren't real women, unless they could make sons. Does this mean, then, that the Bunker Era is the direct heir to the Common and Crisis Eras, with the feminised Deterrence Era being just an anomaly, a tangent of humanity that was reset?

Despite the two major mistakes that Cheng Xin makes (where Liu sets up hypermasculine Wade both times as the man who would've done the 'right thing'), she is forgiven because it is understood that she did so out of love and caring for humanity, unlike Wade, who only wants to advance without regard for consequences. Throughout Death's End, Cheng Xin is constantly portrayed as a divine selfless mother. Unlike Ye Wenjie, for whom feminine motherhood is but a cloak, Cheng Xin is nothing but feminine motherhood––it is the essence of her character. She reinvents wicked Eve by combining her with the saintly Madonna when she (along with Guan Yifan, aka Adam, and Sophon, aka the snake, who provides them knowledge through the computer, aka the apple) willingly leaves the Garden of Eden (Universe 647) to populate a world that is likely very dangerous. Although she and Yifan are unable to literally be Adam and Eve in the new universe as they'd originally intended, Cheng Xin's final act is to selflessly give up her ideal agrarian life to perish with the universe, allowing it to eventually reset––destroying the world, but in a good way. Cheng Xin is the ultimate woman, one to redeem them all.

Infatuation

I'm 80% sure that Liu Cixin fell head over heels in love with some girl in university but she didn't like him back and he's now either remained a bachelor or has married, but will still only really love her, and pines after her every day, fantasising about their beautiful perfect life. As wish fulfillment, he therefore makes it so that the male heroes of his books do end up with the absolutely ideal girl of their dreams. That's a perfectly reasonable explanation, I think, for the three weirdly obsessive romances in Remembrance of Earth's Past: Wang Miao to Yang Dong in Three-Body, Luo Ji to Zhuang Yan in Dark Forest, and Yun Tianming to Cheng Xin in Death's End. Note the use of 'to' instead of 'and'.

In all of them, the woman is first introduced not in her own right but through the perspective of the man (which is weirdest when it comes to Cheng Xin, who turns out to be the protagonist of the novel but first appears in Tianming's fantasies), who sees her as the one thing that will truly complete their life. She has a quiet, subdued, but still striking beauty; she is soft-spoken, extremely kind, and very feminine. Her very existence gives the man meaning.

She is often associated with nature, or more specifically, an ideal natural scene that the man conjures in his head––his 'happy place'. Wang Miao imagines Yang Dong in each of his landscape photographs, allowing them to achieve ultimate beauty: "Wang had always thought that his photographs lacked some kind of soul. Now he understood that they were missing her." (1:61) When she dies, so do the worlds inside him. Yet even in death she isn't left alone: her suicide is one of the mysteries that Wang Miao must solve, and her mother Ye Wenjie's story is told throughout Three-Body. Yang Dong is Wang Miao's motivation, and thus she drives the story forward.

Yang Dong never knew about Wang Miao's love for her though, and never returned his affections––instead, she loved another man, Ding Yi. Her punishment for this is death. Cheng Xin, in her turn, realises too late that everything Yun Tianming had ever done was for her, and spends her entire life repaying this 'debt' that she has towards him. Similar to modern-day friendzoned bros who complain that the girls they like won't sleep with them for being 'nice guys', there's the implication that, because Tianming loved Cheng Xin more than anything in the world, she owes it to him to love him back. In university, Cheng Xin had been kind to Tianming out of pity, but had never been attracted to him because, due to his withdrawn personality, he was "the very opposite of her type" (3:99). Although Tianming knew that he wasn't special and that she was nice to everyone, he allows himself to become obsessed with her, creepily trying to "feel the warmth from her body" (3:54) and wishing that "the breeze would shift direction so a few strands of her hair would brush against his face." (3:54) He allows all of his happiness to hinge upon one woman who had completely forgotten his existence. This is quite disturbing, but is framed as "romance!" (3:48) When Cheng Xin discover's Tianming's devotion, rather than thinking, That's kind of weird. I don't even know him, she realises that "what she had seen before were mere shadows; only now did life's true colors reveal themselves" (3:105). Repaying this love becomes her life purpose. Their love story then extends across billions of years, a Niulang Zhinü (the Cowherd and the Weaver, China's most famous mythological romance) for the space age. Despite all this, though, she is never able to love Tianming back the way he loves her, because his emotions are inextricably complex.

Weirdest, however, is the story of Luo Ji and Zhuang Yan. Luo Ji literally creates the woman of his dreams, an impossible, tender beauty, who is then actually found by Da Shi in real life and brought to his house to be his wife. Like Pygmalion, he falls in love with his own creation who had started out as a character in a novel but ended up consuming his whole life (and for whom he gives up his real-life girlfriend). Zhuang Yan is the ultimate manic pixie dream girl: with no agency of her own, she is plucked out of thin air for the sole purpose of fulfilling Luo Ji's own life and catering to his every desire. As Luo Ji says, she is "pure and delicate [...] everything around her can hurt her! Your first reaction when you see her is to protect her." (2:157) Most disturbing is the following exchange:

Da Shi: "Education: She's got at least a bachelor's, but less than a doctorate."

Luo Ji: "Yes, yes. She's knowledgeable, but not to the point where it calcifies her. It only makes her more sensitive to life and to the world." (2:158)

As Da Shi points out, tongue in cheek: "Dream lovers are basically the same for men of a certain type" (2:159)––young, beautiful, and submissive; 'not like other girls' (2:168). Because Zhuang Yan arrives in Luo Ji's home "for work" (2:166) and starts out by addressing him as 'Mr. Luo', there's an obvious power imbalance arising from the fact that she's his employee and thus must do whatever he wants her to do. She is obligated to be kind to him. This, and her childlike characterisation ("My dad said that..." (2:173), and Luo Ji even calls her by the extremely infantilising nickname Yan Yan on occasion), further perverts their relationship.

The fact that Zhuang Yan does indeed fall in love with Luo Ji and that they have a child together is creepy, but I seem to remember that she takes the child and leaves him at some point, which is pretty cool. I also don't seem to remember Luo Ji ever revealing to Zhuang Yan the truth behind how they really met, which is also very disturbing. Overall, Zhuang Yan's character serves but to show that Luo Ji is a selfish, self-centred, misogynistic man. Her appearance is a way to convey the hedonistic, indulgent life that Luo Ji leads while he ignores his Wallfacer duty. Yet at the end of Death's End, Luo Ji's love for her is portrayed as something beautiful but lost as he speaks to her through the Mona Lisa that she had admired in the Louvre at the beginning of their relationship.

Love in Remembrance of Earth's Past is represented not as something built out of mutual trust and communication, but a rather dangerous ideal felt by the man for the woman, who appreciates his feelings but will never be able to return them with as much intensity.

These representations of women aren't necessarily all bad. While Liu expresses flawed, outdated views on gender, he also creates places women at the center of science-fiction, which is important for a genre that often forgets it was invented by a woman (Mary Shelley). I haven't discussed two major women: the Trisolarian robot Sophon (and her lowercase-letter namesakes, the sophons) who exudes feminine grace yet can also be cold and cruel, and 艾AA. Do they conform to, or break, tropes? What is their role in the story? Perhaps they have none––why does the representation of women even have to be such a big deal all the time? In some cases, such as the ones I've discussed here, it's quite obvious, but do we really need to analyse AA in terms of her gender? Why can't she just be a character who exists in her own right? This is getting really long so I'm just gonna end it here. Nobody's probably read this far but I had a lot of fun writing this! Bye!