i don't know if this has been brought up before, but I can't stop thinking about yao and ilyukhina. about how they sacrificed their lives believing they were going to do it for the good of humanity. did what grace couldn't do at first, and volunteered for a suicide mission. said goodbye to every place and person that was in those photographs, all for the hope of having a hand in saving them all. and they didn't get to do it. they didn't get to do any of it, and they died young anyway.
i wonder if earth ever figured it out. i wonder if they hailed all three of them as heroes, without knowing they unwittingly killed two of them before they even had a chance to see the stars. i wonder if they named any of those stars after them, without realising that somewhere out there, their light still reflects off of ilyukhina's hair, motionless and floating forever, a sleeping ghost in the void of what could've been.
We’d like to add to this, and expand on our take on Yáo Lìjié. (Be warned: we are Chinese diaspora, sleep-deprived, and probably talking out of our ass.)
To put it bluntly: Chinese sci-fi can be communitarian and patriotic, even nationalist. Look at “Three-Body Problem” 《三体》 or “Wandering Earth” 《流浪地球》 - to die, to give up yourself for the greater good, is inherently glorious and worth celebrating. This is not an insult (although the nationalism of Liu Cixin, and the problems of eternal self-denial, are something to discuss later); this is merely a different definition of “civilizational survival”.
Cmdr. Yáo Lìjié 姚丽杰 is the perfect example of a good Chinese sci-fi protagonist: selfless, stoic most of the time, and dedicated to the cause of Human survival. He was probably one of millions of Chinese kids who grew up at the tail-end of the Cultural Revolution, when education triumphed over Maoist personality-worship. He had to have served in the military, since the China Manned Space Agency (中国载人载人航天工程办公室) is under the Central Military Commission (中央军事委员会, 中央军委会 for short).
He’s the model macho Chinese protagonist - proud, proper, no-nonsense; he only laughs after Ilyukhina chips away at his rough exterior. He had parents, grandparents, a whole extended family, the way Chinese people do. (In fact, he may have been born under the one-child policy 一胎政策, in which case his parents would’ve doted on him, their only son.)
He’s also dead.
His veins pumped with chemicals. His skin dehydrated. Watching with lifeless eyes as that great vessel, bearing a name from a faith not his own, speeds away to meet with a five-legged destiny. Yáo’s body won’t be buried with his ancestors. He’ll be forever consigned to a waterless interstellar grave, too fast to capture into the orbit of the star known to us as Tiāncāng-5 (天仓五, lit: “heavenly granary 5”, what we call Tau Ceti).
… anyway, that’s our take. Ken Leung was a bad choice for Yao; he’s too old, his primary Sinitic language is Cantonese (we envision Yao as a Northern Chinese, Mandarin-speaking man, but that’s just our bias), and he feels too Americanized. ok that’s enough bye
