Artificial Girl

After nine years, Gong Wanhui's first full-length masterpiece is released.
Tracing time, memory, trauma and loneliness.

▍If we could reveal the secret of time earlier,
▍Will you be tempted to take a peek at the mystery behind the last card?
▍Or cheat and put the bad cards back in.

This is a story of birth and will also be a story of escape.
Birth and destruction are actually very close.

When the artificial daughter Lilika was born, the city had already been destroyed by a plague. The father "I" took my daughter into the ruins of a bygone civilization, embarking on a journey of personal memory, trauma, and civilization.

They opened doors one after another, rewinding time at will. Each room became a container of time, a place filled with personal memories. A father taught his daughter to identify the memories and fragments left behind by humanity, and in this game of time, she identified the memories and traumas of herself, her wife, and even her contemporaries.

The story also evokes the catastrophic imagery of a plague, imagining a prosperous tropical city transformed back into a rainforest, depicting the apocalyptic image of humans confined indoors, a person facing the passage of time in solitude, the growth of a chrysalis, and the artificial splendor and emptiness.

After nine years, Gong Wanhui explores time, memory and loneliness in his first novel. The journey in the story will also become a key for readers to unlock their personal time and memory during the epidemic - if you can choose, which door will you open?

// Lilika, any attempt to hold back time is futile.
Just as we walked into room after room, we kept missing each other.
No one was left there any longer.
The room is no longer what it once was. //

This book was funded by the National Arts Council Malaysian Chinese Novel Creation and Publication Project.

Celebrity recommendations
Guided by Shi Huimin (Malaysian Chinese writer), this book is highly recommended by writers including Gan Yaoming, He Zhihe, Shen Xiaofeng, Chen Fangming, Huang Jinshu, Yang Jiaxian, and Han Lizhu.
"Only poetry and magic can redeem such heavy wounds. Gong Wanhui breaks through the time of the rational world and resists the harsh objective reality. Through the cracks at the intersection of reality and illusion, those unspoken and unresolved traumas are not hidden but made visible and understood in a strange and bizarre form, opening up a different way to view pain." - Shi Huimin (Malaysian Chinese writer)

2022-06-10

寶瓶文化

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