> The personal biography of Wang, for starters. I do not give a shit when he was born or where he went to school. I'm only mildly interested in what he worked on.
It is highly relevant to the story. I was asking myself "So why was he even on this space mission?" You may not have had this question, but the main reason Wang gives for his state of mind around the incident is directly linked to his biography. He immigrated from China to the US at age 22, went into US academic science, and became a US citizen.
So he was in a position to be the first Chinese person in space, and he feels like a representative of all Chinese people. I see a lot of my father in him, who immigrated to the US around the same time and holds a lot of those conflicted feelings. The reason he threatened to not come back, in his own words, was not because he really cared about doing the science or because the result was really important even to him personally. It was because he would be failing in the eyes of the world. The words of his father (speaking in his head) to not bring shame to his family were more influential than the words of NASA mission command telling him to follow orders (speaking in his ear).
If you don't think where someone was born (China) and then went to school (USA) matters given this, then you have missed a big point of this article because you tried to speedrun long-form journalism.