By: Liu Cixin
Translated by: Jessie Field
Abstract
International Children’s Day, set as June 1, is celebrated in China with school performances, lectures, and guest essays in newspapers and magazines, all on the theme of appreciating the nation’s children. “Letter to My Daughter” is acclaimed Chinese science fiction author Liu Cixin’s 2013 contribution and has quickly become a classic of the genre.
To My Dearest Daughter,
This is a letter that you might never receive. I am putting it into storage in a bank deposit box, along with instructions to give it to you two hundred years after my death. And yet, I do think there’s some chance you might receive it.
So, now you’ve opened the letter, I suppose? By the time you see this, paper must surely be a rare sort of thing. Surely, writing with pen on paper has disappeared long ago. When you see the letters on this sheet, your Dad will be long gone, lost in the time’s long night these two hundred years. I don’t know how human memory will have changed over the course of two centuries, but given that length of time, I can hardly hope you’ll even remember my face.
But if you’re reading this, then at least one of my predictions has come true: during your generation, humanity has conquered death. As I write this letter, some are already saying that the first person to live forever has already been born. And I happen to be among the few who believe it. I can’t say how you all did it—perhaps with gene editing, turning off the switch that causes aging and death. Or maybe memory can be digitized, and then uploaded and downloaded at will, with the body only one receptacle for consciousness, to be swapped out upon aging . . . I can also think of many other possibilities, but one thing’s for sure: whatever leaps life has taken, you are still you. And given what a long future you have, you must still think of yourself as a child.
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