Wen Lin is nineteen years old, from northern China, and studying philosophy alone in Europe.
She has a pale and quiet face, a hand that is always holding a pen, and a heart that has never been truly stable. She reads theology, psychoanalysis, Deleuze, Lacan and Kierkegaard; she writes emails to her tutors, to psychoanalysts, to the university administration, and to a god who never responds.
Until one morning, she received an email without a sender.
The theme only has four words: God does not reply.
Wen Lin thought that was just the beginning of an attack. She has mental illness, a history of mental illness that has been buried in silence by her family, and she has also been unable to distinguish between reality and revelation amid hallucinogens, white lights in hospitals, exotic winter nights and the sound of trams. She once believed that medicine, love, mentors, academics, religion, there was always one thing that could save her.
She later discovered that nothing automatically saves a person.
She lacks money, lacks love, lacks language, and lacks legitimacy. In order to survive, she approached older men and was besieged by desire, power and money; but she never really gave herself over. She can be embarrassed, dangerous, misunderstood, and stand on the edge of the abyss, but she will never admit that she is just a girl waiting to be consumed, diagnosed, and pitied.
Her love story is a theology of failure: she has loved people who were like her father, people who were like her mentor, people who were like God, and she has also loved people who would not save her at all. Every love brings her closer to collapse and closer to herself.
Her growth is not about becoming normal, but about learning to name her abnormalities.
This is a novel about foreign countries, poverty, mental illness, hallucinogens, lust, academic ambition and female self-generation. A girl who was repeatedly diagnosed by the world finally decided not to wait for God's reply.
She wanted to write the verdict herself.
God doesn't answer emails.
So Wen Lin began to reply to the world.
Concept: youthful ignorance