Severance by Ling Ma
“To live in a city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless. To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?”
Severance (2018) is the debut novel from Chinese American novelist, Ling Ma. Severance won a 2018 Kirkus Prize, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book of 2018, and shortlisted for the 2019 Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. It’s also a near-perfect book to round out the year that was 2020.
Candace Chen, our narrator, is a quiet, somewhat lost twenty-something living in New York when the epidemic known as Shen Fever hits. Thought to have originated in China, the global manufacturing processes built on cheaper labour and production costs, have meant the disease has spread rapidly across the world. The fever sends the inflicted into a mindless, zombie-like state, where they repeat actions familiar to them over and over again. They forget self-care and lose their sense of self-preservation, succumbing to their repetitive tasks until they die. The infected pose no threat to the uninfected, except for the potential to pass on the disease.
The infected numbers escalate rapidly in over-populated places like New York. When it seems there is no cure, the city-dwellers begin a mass exodus, seeking safety in rural areas. Except for Candace, who insists on carrying about her life with as much normality as she can inspire, documenting the ever derelict city and her thoughts via her blog "NY Ghost:”
“It is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.”
Severance is much more than a zombie apocalypse narrative. Through Candace, Ma offers a new spin on the genre. Candace, we learn, is an immigrant and an orphan, both her parents having died in her teenage years. Her parents moved to America from Fuzhou, China, and once established, moved her to live with them at the age of six. She works for a publishing house, covering the production of Bibles. The insights into her work add to the look into our capitalist society and marginalised immigrant narratives in the Western world.
The combination of a complicated cultural identity, mixed with the loss of the two anchors who might have been able to give her a sense of home in a place where she is continuously identified as an outsider, keeps Candace removed from those around her. Jonathan, her white boyfriend, aspiring writer and odd-job-doer, leaves New York at the start of the epidemic, but more out of disgust against the consumerist society he finds himself a part of. Having watched how her mother enjoyed participating in her new city’s shopping culture, Candace is hesitant to agree with him. Instead, she offers the idea of consumerism as a way to connect and feel part of a place, by becoming a part of its economic system and establishing a connection that is easy and gratifying, if only briefly:
“Jonathan had become increasingly disillusioned with living in New York. Something along the lines of: the city, New York fucking City, tedious and boring, its charms as illusory as its facade of authenticity. Its lines were too long. Everything was a status symbol, and everything cost too much. There were so many on-trend consumers, standing in lines for blocks to experience a fad dessert, gimmicky art exhibits, a new retail concept store. We were all making such uninspired lifestyle choices. We, including me.”
Candace is one of the last to leave New York and is found by other survivors. As in most apocalypse stories, this is when her troubles begin. Other survivors are always the ones to look out for in a now seemingly lawless society, and Ma offers her version of the unlikeable self-imposed leader in Bob.
Ma covers a breadth of essential themes: mother-daughter relationships, late-stage capitalism, consumerist society, immigrant experiences and exploitation, global economic narratives, finding a sense of self, home, purpose, heritage, connection, and, of course, love.
The prose is sparse, restrained. It isn’t sensationalist, and it allows the reader to take on the story, but with so many hidden wells of deeper thought plotted throughout. The story of the afflicted is told with care, without gruesome details, and provides the perfect sense of bleakness for the real story at the heart of this book.
I finished Severance immediately wanting more. I felt a bit incredulous at the point in time in which Ma chose to end this story, but on reflection, it was the perfect point. Candace enters into an unknown world, and yet somehow seeming to find a place for herself governed entirely by her creation, for the very first time. She makes a shaky peace with uncertainty.
And that’s something that feels incredibly familiar right now.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in Hobart, Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under @wordswithelaine.
