Some news stories live a little bit of life on your behalf. What I mean by that is, someone else out there made a series of, let’s say, fascinating life choices that you, someone who has nothing to do with the story whatsoever, can learn from as if you were in the story, so you know never to make those choices yourself.
For instance, as detailed by the BBC, back in 2017, when Gui Junmin’s wife, Zhan Wenlian, died of lung cancer at 49, he decided to freeze her cryogenically. She became China’s first person preserved in liquid nitrogen, suspended in a 2,000-liter tank at –190°C, guarded by a 30-year contract with the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute.
Cryonics is all about hope: the hope that one day someone will find a cure for whatever was killing the person being frozen, and the hope that the person will even wake up feeling normal after essentially being suspended in antifreeze.
The body is cooled, infused with cryoprotectant chemicals, and stored until a bright and shiny future comes along, thus providing them the opportunity to groggily say “WHAT YEAR IS IT?!”.
More than 500 people worldwide have signed up to be frozen, but no one has ever been revived. This isn’t a hard science. It’s all speculative.
For two years after Zhan’s death, Gui lived alone, clinging to the idea that his love could be cryogenically preserved and potentially revived at a later date. But in 2020, after a gout attack left him immobilized in his apartment, he reconsidered his life as the solitary guardian of a frozen, dead wife. So, he started dating again. He found companionship with a living, fresh, never-frozen woman named Wang Chunxia.
And that’s when the denizens of China’s Internet culture went nuts.
When the Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly reported the relationship in November, social media reaction was fierce. People immediately took sides in a ferocious ethical debate. Some users argued that after seven years, Gui deserved companionship. Others were far less forgiving, accusing him of the emotional equivalent of hedging his bets by trying to preserve the past while having a fling in the present, with many wondering if it was fair to either woman involved, particularly Wang, who, in a hypothetical scenario, would be dumped to the curb if Gui’s frozen wife were to be revived.
Gui didn’t help his case when he called his new relationship “utilitarian,” insisting that his living girlfriend hadn’t yet truly “entered” his heart. That’s a statement that makes him seem like the cold one.
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