The Future of Family: Yang Wanqing's "A Doll's House"

Synopsis

Included in "The Returnee" (published in 2021).
A family of four lives in a certain city. On her fourth birthday, the eldest daughter, Anna, loses her sight in a traffic accident. The cause of her blindness was brain damage. Her mother, Kaila, is deeply shaken and presses her husband to cure their daughter.
Mu-xian, the father, who specializes in artificial nerve research, succeeds in developing a "Teddy"—an external CPU equipped with limbs that connects to his daughter's brain to assist with physical responses. Thanks to carrying around Teddy, which looks like a simple teddy bear at first glance, Anna is able to see again.
However, one day at kindergarten, Anna has her Teddy taken away by a mischievous child. The action Teddy takes in that moment is to conduct electricity through its hands, shocking the child. Upon hearing this, Mu-xian is shocked to discover that Teddy has developed a sense of self that should not exist.
Time passes, and Anna grows up and finds a marriage partner. With Anna's marriage, the outdated Teddy is replaced by a hummingbird-shaped device. From then on, having lost its master, Teddy spends its days ruminating only on memories of Anna.
Meanwhile, entities like Teddy, now called "symbionts," are widely used, and Anna's younger brother, Allen, walks around with a dragon-shaped symbiont. However, Allen, who felt stifled in a family that only paid attention to Anna, loses his life pointlessly while enjoying a car chase. His father uses Allen's symbiont to resurrect his son in his childhood form. Anna, who had once married, also returns to her parents' home, unable to let go of Teddy. Once again, the life of four people and one machine begins, but...

Impressions

All of Yang Wanqing's works capture human relationships in great detail, and this work also left an impression with its delicate worldview.
The entire story is structured by alternating between Teddy's perspective (second person) as it speaks to Anna, and excerpts from an autobiography titled "Pygmalion: Observations of a Creator" (first person), which is set as having been written by the father in later years. While Teddy's narrative forms the storyline by following the passage of time, the father's recollections often involve scenes where he wavers, questioning whether his actions as "Pygmalion" were correct. In the Teddy parts, Mu-xian is depicted as trying to be a scientist and a father above all else, but from the autobiography parts, one can read the inner workings of his "human" heart, full of worry and regret.
Furthermore, Teddy is not just a role for explaining the story; by speaking in the second person, which can be taken as a long letter to Anna, it gives us a glimpse into what kind of self-awareness Teddy has developed from somewhere. Also, from the appearance of a teddy bear, I was reminded of the Teddy from the movie "A.I." The author might actually be conscious of this, but I feel a mysterious attraction that makes me want to watch "A.I." again after reading this work.

About the Author

I have already introduced Yang Wanqing several times on this note. This year, she published the full-length novel "Golden Peach," which is said to be silk-punk set in the 8th century during the Tang Dynasty. Although I have an image of Yang Wanqing as someone who writes many near-future short stories, my expectations are growing for what kind of story unfolds in "Golden Peach."