A man who arranged to have his wife frozen until science advanced enough to cure her lung cancer has now moved in with a new partner.
Gui Junmin, 57, made headlines in 2017 after agreeing for Zhan Wenlian, 48, to be frozen for up to 30 years, making her the first woman to be cryogenically frozen in China.
He planned to reunite with her after this contract was up, hoping her terminal cancer diagnosis would no longer apply due to new treatments.
But he now faces backlash, after it was revealed that he has moved in with a new girlfriend.
Wenlian was frozen free of charge, after the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute appealed for volunteers as they experimented with the technology.
Chinese media reported that for the first two years, her husband stayed single.
But after struggling to cope with daily life alone, he decided he couldn’t manage the single life.
Southern Weekly reported that in 2020, he suffered an attack of gout so severe that he couldn’t get up or reach his phone, and lay helpless until family members broke down his door and realised what had happened.
He told the paper: ‘If something really happens to a person when they are alone, there is nothing they can do. You could die at home and no one would even know.’
So when a mutual friend introduced him to a woman called Wang Chunxia, he didn’t shut down the idea of romance.
He told the paper that he saw their relationship as ‘utilitarian’, saying: ‘She has not entered my heart yet. I feel a sense of responsibility towards her, but this is a complicated matter.
‘She can never replace my wife. I cannot just forget the past, but I still need to move on with life.’
Chunxia now acts as his carer, as he needs help even to cross the road after having coronary stent surgery.
After readers accused him of ’emotional polygamy’, the reporter asked him how he felt about public anger towards him.
He replied: ‘You don’t need to worry about me. I was mentally prepared when I accepted the interview. I have a clear conscience, so what is there to fear?’
Gui Junmin had already faced criticisim for the original decision to freeze his wife, with one Weibo user writing: ‘What will he do in his old age if his wife is resurrected after 30 years? Or, when his wife wakes up, he will no longer be alive, and she will be all alone, facing a new and unfamiliar world.’
But some responding on the Chinese social media site said they understood the man’s reasoning, with one writing: ‘The past is the past, and the living must continue to live.’
Another wrote: ‘This man is an honest and good person. First of all, he must have loved his deceased wife very much, otherwise he wouldn’t have wanted to preserve a last vestige of memory through cryogenics, just as he said, so he could visit her whenever he missed her; he didn’t truly want to forget her.
‘But humans are emotional beings, and it’s normal for people to develop feelings through interactions with others, so finding a new partner isn’t surprising. Life goes on, but his deceased wife still holds a place in his heart; these aren’t contradictory.’
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