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China's 1st astronaut was space fan even a teen
2003-12-04
BEIJING - China's first astronaut, a national hero since his orbits around the Earth in October, showed interest in space even in high school and would stay after class to study it despite a lack of books at his suburban high school.Yang Liwei's childhood in a well-off family also helped him get ahead socially, and later into space, his teachers said. He shared class information with other students and paid the medical bills of two poorer classmates, they added. His grades were not the highest at the No. 2 High School in Suizhong County in Huludao, Liaoning Province, but they came close. Although Yang has made a series of public appearances to stimulate pride and patriotism since his Oct. 15 voyage on the Shenzhou No. 5 spacecraft, he has not met with foreign media, leaving much of his life a mystery to people outside China. But his teachers and the Suizhong County government are eager to discuss him to give a name to the otherwise obscure light-industrial town of 620,000. The school is preparing a Yang Liwei memorial exhibition hall and has applied to change the school's name in his honor. The astronaut, 38, wanted to know more about space as a high-school physics student, said his physics teacher, Luo Zhiguang. He sat in the second row in a class of 60, where he was sometimes hard to spot because of his lack of height, but after lessons he would stay behind or go to the library to read more, Luo said. Following up lectures, Yang wanted to know more about geography, airplanes and American space history, Luo said. But there was not much material for him to research, he added. ''The facilities were behind, not like now,'' said Luo, 57, who has taught since 1981 at the school of 2,000 students. He said impacts of the Cultural Revolution, during which intellectual symbols were purged, had left the school with a dearth of books. Although at first Luo had no impression of Yang except that he was small, he noticed the boy liked physics experiments, which most students did not. ''It's hard to study physics, and most of the grades were poor, but he studied especially hard,'' Luo said. He scored a 92 in physics. Yang's relatively well-off family background -- his mother taught school and his father was an economist and mid-level company manager -- helped him get on at school, said chemistry teacher Yang Mengxian. Yang Liwei gave 8 yuan ($0.96), a lot at the time, to a student whose father was ill and paid for the medicine of a student who broke bones during a school sporting event, Yang Mengxian said. He also took instant noodles and eggs to that student in the hospital, but he seldom got sick himself. Yang Liwei, who often raised his hand to ask questions during lectures, would also discuss class content with fellow students, the chemistry teacher added. He recalled that astronaut Yang also tried to turn himself in for cheating on an exam only to find out he was doing everything properly. He got a grade of 98 on that exam. The student's family background and influences from teachers at school gave the young Yang his personal qualities, said Yang Mengxian, 57 and on the faculty since 1980. ''He was rather honest, and he had a lot of ethics,'' the teacher said. ''Every student and every teacher liked him.'' After graduation in 1983, a military unit selected Yang Liwei for pilot training and he became an outstanding aviator, according to an article on the popular Web portal Sina.com. He was never discovered dating in high school but married a Suizhong woman in 1990. She followed Yang to postings in Xian and in Sichuan Province, then moved with him to Aerospace City, a restricted military area in the Beijing hills where Yang trained for all but 10 days out of the year with 10 other people intent on visiting outer space, according to the Sina.com article. He also trained in Russia, which Chinese officials call the space program's ''teacher.'' Yang's son goes to school in central Beijing, and his parents have moved from Suizhong into the larger urban area of Huludao where his older sister and younger brother work. After beating out two other finalists for the Shenzhou No.5 launch, Yang became China's first man in space on Oct. 15. His spacecraft, the result of 11 years of secretive military testing, blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province and it carried Yang around the earth 14 times in 21 hours. He landed safely in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Kyodo
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