ABOUTOne of the newest fun things about the Internet is the ability to make judgments about happenings in households that you would otherwise never hear about. On Redditfor example, there's a whole popular sub specifically for this purpose called “Am I an Asshole?”, where people describe conflicts in their lives and ask strangers to judge them.
This week, story on BBC threw in a particularly juicy piece of someone else’s business this sparked debate on Chinese social media. It will start in 2017 when Gui Junmin decided to cryogenically freeze his wife Zhang Wenlian after she died of lung cancer. She was the first person in China to undergo the procedure, which was paid for by a research institute in Jinan, eastern China, which agreed with Gui to preserve his wife's body for 30 years. Reports suggest Jean herself agreed to this process before her death.
But what has piqued the interest of curious people around the world is the discovery that Gui started dating again in 2020. Now he has a new partner, a woman named Wang Chunxia. People asked: Is this fair to any woman? Being a wife would be quite a journey: unfreezing from the land of the dead, slowly figuring out what happened, and then discovering that your husband found a new girlfriend while you were on the ice. The sheer social and ethical complexity of the situation led me to ask the doctors to put me back in the freezer.
My first reaction to the overall picture of this story was: leave the poor guy alone. His wife died, and many years after her death, he found love again. It's not a crime. But there are more intricate details. Gui apparently told Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly that his new partner Wang was not the new love of his life. Their relationship was only “utilitarian”, and he was prompted to look for a new partner after he suffered a severe attack of gout, which left him bedridden for several days. A cold wife is certainly good, but she will be of little use in making chicken soup if he gets sick again.
We, of course, do not have all the details here. Perhaps Wang is delighted with this arrangement. Maybe Gui loves her, but he doesn’t want to say it and dishonor the memory of his late wife. Who knows. But I find this story sad in every way from what little we know about it, because at the heart of this headline-grabbing story is that very human inability to know when to let go. If you read, you can find quotes from Gui that he agreed to the procedure because he fundamentally did not believe that his wife really died – that she just went somewhere to rest for a while. The fact that he started a new relationship, whatever his motives for doing so, suggests that the inexorable process of moving on has begun.
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All cryogenics gives me such a melancholy impression, and to a lesser extent biohacking efforts maximize human lifespan. I think it is no coincidence that the world's largest cryogenic laboratories, Alcor and the Cryonics Institute in the USA, were founded by people who wanted to save their loved ones. (An estimated 500 people are cryogenically frozen worldwide, mostly in the United States.) There is a tragically doomed side to this: after all, there is no evidence that it will ever be possible to bring someone who has been frozen back to life. Of course humanity can We'll figure out how to do it one day. But it seems more likely to me that we won't. Death is death. No matter how long it takes you to get there, that's the non-negotiable end of the road.
It's complicated. Of course it is. When someone you love dies, it's natural to feel like you'll do anything to keep them close. Persistently delaying these moments of painful loss or convincing yourself that these moments can be avoided through experimental science is a fool's game. May Jean rest in peace, may Gui find a nicer way to talk about his new girlfriend, and may my own trip to an unknown land be a one-way ticket without stopping at the glacier.
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Imogen West-Knights is a writer and journalist.
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