Artificial Girl

A representative novel by Gong Wanhui. A story of imagination, ruins, desire, and the cruelty of youth in the post-epidemic era.

When the plague strikes and the city becomes deserted, a father and his daughter Lilika walk into the ruins of the once prosperous city. They dig into the prehistoric past from their own memories and growth experiences, and embark on a journey of chasing time and memory.

Lilika, an artificially created girl, is filled with curiosity and confusion about the world before her. In different rooms, like a father teaching his daughter to read, she identifies the fragments of civilization left behind by humanity—from the Renaissance work "The Birth of Venus," the 1990s video game "SimCity 2000," the Japanese anime "Neon Genesis Evangelion," to cameras, zoos, and silicone sex dolls... These man-made objects, sealed in time, each gained meaning as she points them out.

Artificial Girl, Gong Wanhui's first novel, approximately 150,000 words, received a 2017 Taiwan National Arts Council Malaysian Chinese Novel Creation and Publication Grant. The novel's twelve chapters are organized into "rooms," like the scales of a clock; opening a door opens one into a compartment of time.

Through the stories of a couple who repeatedly try and fail to conceive, a young girl named Keiko experiencing growing pains, and a young boy named Naoki, uneasy about his gender, the novel explores the eternal questions of creation and destruction, reality and fiction. If life can be artificially created, can we also freely fill the blank with memories and imagination? Is cloning life like cloning time, allowing us to relive the past?

Artificial Girl continues Gong Wanhui's signature style of depicting brutal youth stories, imbued with unbridled imagination and poetic, surreal imagery. Written during the pandemic, the author also captures the ravages of the plague over the past two years, delicately describing the apocalyptic scenes of deserted streets and shopping malls, and the loneliness and self-harm of people cocooned in their rooms.

Writer Shi Huimin's article introduction:

"Gong Wanhui breaks the time in the rational world and resists the cruel objective reality.
The pain is too heavy, only poetry and magic can redeem it."

Gong Wanhui

Born in Batu Pahat, Johor, Malaysia, he studied at the Kuala Lumpur Academy of Fine Arts and the Department of Fine Arts of National Taiwan Normal University. He is currently engaged in writing and painting.

He has won the United Daily News Literary Award, the Huazong Literary Award, the Seagull Literary Award, and the Malaysia Outstanding Young Writer Award. He was a visiting writer at the International Writers' Workshop (IWW) of Hong Kong Baptist University.

He has written the novel collections "The Age of Egg-laying" and "The Room Next Door", the essay collection "Morning School Bus" and the picture collections "Like Light and Shadow" and "Lighter than Loneliness".

Introduction. Fictional Reality ◎ Shi Huimin

Prologue. A Journey. Room 1. The Black Room. Room 2. The Exchanged Child. Room 3. Cat Talk. Room 4. Cousin Sakura. Room 5. Pause Time in SimCity. Room 6. Venus in the Bathtub. Room 7. Natsumi's Clock. Room 8. Underground Commando. Room 9. Ragnarok. Room 10. Light in the Darkroom. Room 11. Pokémon Old Man. Room 12. The Rainforest in the Room. Postscript. The Invisible Daughter and the Invisible Father. Appendix. The Girl as a Method.