I'm not into pining, especially if it lasts unhealthily long, and the longer he's been awake/conscious, the sadder the thought of Shen Wei as a character becomes.
For me, it depends on the needs of the story. I'm much happier thinking Shen Wei slept through it all (really, I'd be happy believing Shen Wei was asleep right up until ZYL became chief of the SID, much as that clashes with his professorial backstory), but if the story I'm writing works better with him awake for some of that time, or dreamwalking, or drowsing but feeling time stretching out, or just waking up roughly twenty years pre-series but still feeling that vast temporal dislocation, then that's how I write it. I may have one preferred headcanon, most of the time, but I also tend to generate a lot of theories and I like to write based on several of them.
Plus, I just can't shake both what Shen Wei says about waiting 10,000 years for ZYL, and the way he says it. While that's explicable by him waking up around twenty to twenty five years ago (the time of the expedition to find the Hallows), realizing how much time has passed, and not actually knowing what happened to "Kunlun" or how soon he'd see him again--though desperately clinging to ZYL's reassurance that he would--it's also explicable by some form of awareness, at least some of the time, while he's buried.
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For me, it depends on the needs of the story. I'm much happier thinking Shen Wei slept through it all (really, I'd be happy believing Shen Wei was asleep right up until ZYL became chief of the SID, much as that clashes with his professorial backstory), but if the story I'm writing works better with him awake for some of that time, or dreamwalking, or drowsing but feeling time stretching out, or just waking up roughly twenty years pre-series but still feeling that vast temporal dislocation, then that's how I write it. I may have one preferred headcanon, most of the time, but I also tend to generate a lot of theories and I like to write based on several of them.
Plus, I just can't shake both what Shen Wei says about waiting 10,000 years for ZYL, and the way he says it. While that's explicable by him waking up around twenty to twenty five years ago (the time of the expedition to find the Hallows), realizing how much time has passed, and not actually knowing what happened to "Kunlun" or how soon he'd see him again--though desperately clinging to ZYL's reassurance that he would--it's also explicable by some form of awareness, at least some of the time, while he's buried.