"The city was so big. It lulled you into thinking that there were so many options, but most of the options had to with buying things."
Ling Ma, like most of the debut novelists nowadays, sets her
story in a post-apocalyptic world. But unlike the authors jaunting through that
particular genre, Ma eschews standard ‘fall-of-civilization’ action and
predestined social messages. She rather offers an intimate portrait of a lonely,
rootless millennial girl and her relationship with an old, daunting capitalist
city. The story-line of Ling Ma’s Severance actually made me remember Emily St.
John Mandel’s emotionally gripping end-of-the-world novel Station Eleven (it
won the Arthur C Clarke award for best sci-fi novel, although it transcends
such classifications). Station Eleven was sprinkled with certain functional
elements of genre fiction, but eventually Mandel triumphantly used the
post-apocalyptic setting to create a memorable literary fiction. Severance may
not possess the profundity and thrills of Station Eleven; I felt Ma’s
post-apocalyptic narrative was dull and the author’s preoccupations about
capitalism, immigrant experience, and millennial angst often fizzles out due to the disjointed structure. Nevertheless, Severance is an interesting literary
novel to have explored dystopia from a personal, micro level.
In Ling Ma’s novel, the world is infected with a deadly
fungal infection called Shen Fever (originates from China’s Shenzhen). Candace
Chen, a millennial first-generation Chinese-American, is the novel’s
protagonist. She works for a giant New York publishing house, and her
specialty is Bible production. While she longs to be one of the ‘Art Girls’,
who are involved in the fields of photography and fashion, Candace Chen is very
good at packaging the world’s best-selling book according to her clients’
needs. Brief interludes showcase Chen’s early life with her parents (both
now-deceased) and their struggles to be successful in the land that has adopted
them. In the post-apocalyptic narrative, Chen is pregnant and gets acquainted
with a band of plague survivors, led by the weirdly religious IT professional
named Bob. They are moving towards a mysterious facility in the Chicago
suburbs, hoping to start anew.
Those who are stricken with Shen Fever don’t instantly die,
only to come back alive with a taste for human flesh. The 'Fevered', as called
by Chen, aren’t zombies although the victim’s brain are taken over by the
fungal infection. The infected are simply caught within a behavioral loop,
doing the quotidian tasks they did before the end of the world. They are
engulfed within the hell of mundanity, slowly exhausting themselves to death. Although
the infected are harmless (it’s a non-communicable disease!) and their brains
don’t even register the presence of others, Bob and his crew during the stalks ‘mercifully’
kill the Fevered. The solitude-loving Chen, who had caught between the cultures
of two worlds, doesn’t get suddenly friendly with the group. Chen’s normal life
in the pre-disease world offers more insights on her choice to keep the human
contact minimal.
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| Ling Ma |
Before New York starts to crumble, Chen’s life has
collapsed. Her father has died in an accident, her mother gradually lost
herself to Alzheimer. Chen’s parents have always advised her to ‘be useful’,
to ‘make something of herself’ in the country which has provided them a better
life-style. This might partly be the reason why Chen decides to stay loyal to
her work which she isn’t interested in doing, even when all of the workers and
employers start to flee the city. She has rejected her boyfriend Jonathan’s
offer to shift from New York in order to cling to the stability. But the
stability and luxury of job only unexpectedly heightens the girl’s isolation.
In the beginning of the end, Candace Chen also made her useful in a different
way: she takes photos of deserted city and posts in her blog, which she
operates under the pseudonym NY Ghost.
Severance isn’t much of a story about post-apocalypse, but a
clever critique on late capitalism and the decadence of being creature of
habits. Ling Ma makes shrewd observations on the Western economy that depends
on labor outsourced to China and other countries with low-wage workers. But
very often the critique is broached from the central character Chen’s personal
experience. Unlike white-collar workers of 20th century, we aren’t obsessed
over the meaningfulness of sacrificing one’s life for the job. We, the drones
buzzing inside cubicles, know there isn’t any meaning to our desk jobs,
although we still keep going with it in order to reap the monetary rewards –
the only standard to make ourselves worthy in the teeming society. And by persistently
glimpsing into the past, Chen seems to have eventually understood what’s
important in her life thus leading to a sort of ‘hopeful’ escape. Further
adding texture to Ling Ma’s predominantly personal take on capitalism is her paean to the life and spirit of New York plus the ruminations on internet. The
comfort and menace of religion plus the perplexing immigrant experience also
adds many layers to Candace’s story.
Overall, Ling Ma through Severance warns us about confining
ourselves to a life of routine and rituals. In that sense, this isn’t an
end-of-the-world fiction, but a snapshot of our present ‘fevered’ state.
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