Ling Ma

Station Eleven meets My Year of Rest and Relaxation - or, perhaps more accurately, Dawn of the Dead meets Office Space. An incredibly powerful satire which I would recommend heartily to everyone, this book is brilliant on our sense of belonging, be it in a relationship, a workplace or a city, while having all the pulpy enjoyment of a post-apocalyptic thriller. I’ve deducted one star for the ending, which I wasn’t wild about, but that’s really nitpicking.

'Severance' is not your typical post-apocalyptic thriller. If you're after a plague-based version of 'The Walking Dead', this isn't the book you're looking for. If you're looking for a book that explores being rootless, severed from your past, barely invested in your present and unable to imagine a future more satisfying than the habits and routines of your daily life, then 'Severance' will resonate with you.

'Severance' is a first-person account of the life of Candace Chen, who immigrated to show more America from China with her parents when she was a child and who, when the virus that changes everything hits the world, is in her twenties, working for a publishing firm in NYC, managing the logistics of outsourcing the printing of specialist Bibles to China.

'Severance' was published in the summer of 2018 but it reads eerily like a book written after having lived through the first wave of COVID in 2020. It imagines something called Shen Fever because it is believed to have originated in China. The early symptoms are very similar to those of COVID, so are just as hard to pin down. Ling Ma's description of the reaction of the government, companies and the general public to the fever now read like a summary of recent history. The fever she imagines is worse than COVID, not just because its rate of infection is very high but because what it does to people is cruel and deeply disturbing. She captures the slow slide from normalcy, through this-is-a-manageable-problem, through until-things-get-back-to-normal-we're-going-to-do-this-to-stay-safe, to the-world-we-knew-is-gone-and-it's-not-coming-back is lubricated by denial, self-deception and the persistence of hope even as people begin to drown in despair.

Yet, the plausible depiction of the apocalypse, chilling as it is, is not where the power of the book comes from. Ling Ma uses the global discontinuity produced by the Shen Fever pandemic as a large scale example of how we can become severed from the life we've always told ourselves we would have. That we can deny or ignore a 'severance' on the scale of the pandemic and tell ourselves that things will get back to normal shows the strength of our attachment to the lives we've imagined for ourselves in the face of evidence that it's not a life we will be able to lead. The pandemic reminded me of Michelle Obama's assertion that 'Being President doesn't change who you are, it reveals who you are.' 'Severance' recognises that we don't become new people in the face of discontinuous change. Rather, we reveal the essential reality of who we are as the dreams of who we might become and the pretences of daily life fall away.

'Severance' refuses to sink into the comfort of post-apocalyptic tropes in which crisis brings out the best and the worst in people, transforming them into heroes or villains. Instead, it blurs the lines between life before and after the apocalypse. It shows Shen Fever as just the biggest of a series of 'severances' in the life of Candace Chen and her parents. Her parents are severed from their culture and family and history in China. Candace's life in NYC is completely discontinuous from her childhood in Salt Lake City. Even before the pandemic hit, Candace was starting to recognise the gap between the NYC life she'd imagined and the one she was actually living. She's also aware that while she is good at the work she does and it in a place where that work is valued, she doesn't value what she does and this makes her life feel hollow.

Candace's story is told as a series of non-linear descriptions, driven forward by a growing sense of threat in her post-apocalypse life. A threat that will force her to abandon her habitual passivity and make difficult choices about how she will live.

We learn of Candace's childhood as the daughter of immigrant parents, one of whom embraces living in America while the other constantly mourns what has been left behind. We see how her life in NYC is not the dream she had hoped for but is rootless and unsatisfying. We watch the slow normalisation of loneliness and isolation. We see inertia slipping into apathy and then into terminal depression in a life held together by a mixture of distraction and routine and a denial of the possibility of choice.

I liked that Candace was the same person, with many of the same challenges, before and after Shen Fever hit and she found herself one of a handful of survivors.

Over the course of the book, Candace slowly starts to understand how adrift she had been. How she had become a passive observer of her own life. Even her blog of NYC photographs, her only real passion, is titled NYGhost, a name that comes to apply both to her and the city she is photographing. The post-apocalypse plotline puts Candace in a situation where she can remain passive, surrender agency, let go of identity and do what is required of her or she can take a risk. It struck me, as I'm sure it was supposed to, that many of us have found ourselves in that situation but without the stark light of an apocalypse to make the dilemma visible.

'Severance' is not an exciting book. The pace is gentle. The tone is passive. There is no escapism, only an unflinching look at how things are. I found the combination to be chilling and compelling. show less

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***

Severance is a blend of literary fiction and post-apocalyptic fiction that doesn't get either right. It starts with a lot of promise: an organized timeline shifts back and forth between the present-day, post-apocalyptic life of corporate drone Candace Chen, to the recent past, when she first learns of "Shen Fever" and watches it bloom into a deadly pandemic. The lack of development, though, shows how confused author Ling Ma was in how, exactly, to tell this complicated show more story. Her careful organization quickly fell apart as she veered into tangents. She found her way again toward the end, but it’s too little too late, and the book ends inconclusively.

The bleak new world Candace moves around in is hard to understand. New York City has become a ghost town with a palpable eeriness. The same seems to be true of the few other cities mentioned. But how, in detail, did this disease turn life upside down? How wide is Shen Fever’s reach? How many people have died worldwide? Aren’t some countries managing better than others? Candace travels with a found-family group of nine survivors; where are the other groups that surely must be out there?

With so many unanswered questions, it’s obvious Severance isn’t really about a pandemic. It’s about Candace and a deeper message. All other characters, especially those in her found family, are just names, given no defining features or anything to do. An intimidating group leader gets the most attention out of the nine, but here the story doesn’t flash back where it counts: to show how he became the leader everyone is a little scared of, or, for that matter, how these people banded together in the first place and how Candace found and joined them. Her group enters the present-day storyline complete and fully functioning, so Ma didn’t show any of the dramatic conflict that would naturally arise in a group of traumatized survivors. Any tensions among these people were resolved a while ago. The desperate work of gathering supplies, food, and vehicles has been done. Actual survival scenes showing the group in dire straits or scrounging and worrying or even just…mourning their pre-pandemic lives and deceased loved ones is missing.

This story is stoic to a bizarre degree. Only one scene shows the real, human, primal panic and sadness readers would expect a post-apocalyptic story to be overflowing with. Otherwise, characters are aimlessly present, surviving with Shen Fever lurking in the background as a mere nuisance, not the imminent threat it actually is. Two or three compelling scenes show the creepy personal devastation of the illness, but these are too few, too quick, and anti-climactic because Candace and her group are never in real danger.

Readers are inside Candace’s head the whole time, but it doesn’t matter because she has the emotional intensity of a rock: She breaks up with her beloved boyfriend without any second thoughts or period of grief; isn’t alarmed shortly afterward to find out she’s pregnant by him; shows no fear of contracting Shen Fever (a terrifying illness with no cure or even adequate treatment), despite seeing lots around her succumb; robotically continues working at her boring corporate job long after everyone in the building has left or died; doesn’t grieve the sudden, violent deaths of two in her found family; and isn’t scared when the leader imprisons her upon learning she’s pregnant. Her mind is a frighteningly unperturbed place.

The literary fiction aspect is strongly evident where Ma tried to add feeling and depth by digging into Candace’s past as she grapples with her Chinese-American identity. For this the author wove in anecdotes about this character’s mom, dad, and each of her four uncles. A work visit to a Chinese factory hints that Severance’s pandemic storyline exists only to emphasize the West’s reliance on Chinese labor. If so, this is an inspired vision, but Ma then confused matters by adding unnecessary details about the printing of Bibles and Candace’s shame over her parents’ uncultured hometown. This character’s ethnicity is irrelevant, and these background bits are boring. The social commentary is weak—never moving beyond the complaint phase, stuck in mere acknowledgement of a problematic situation.

I’m left feeling that the author was overly ambitious. It’s as if she was trying to make a profound statement about a few different things but ended up getting none of it across well or at all. I found myself longing for so much more from this sedate story: more world-building, more drama, more atmosphere, more vigor.

Ma’s writing style is enjoyable; however, she hasn’t mastered the art of plotting a story, and as a post-apocalyptic work Severance is breathtakingly undeveloped. She had only the most simplistic, tiniest germ of an idea yet forced it into the complex post-apocalyptic genre. As a literary fiction, the book is too meandering and slight to have emotional impact or to make a provocative social statement. Severance would have been better had Ma committed to either thought-provoking literary fiction or thrilling post-apocalyptic fiction, not a muddled combination that doesn’t succeed as either. show less

I really liked Ling Ma's debut novel, Severance, which was an odd blend of everyday observations and utter weirdness and I'm happy to report that her collection of short stories shares those traits. There are odd situations, presented matter-of-factly, like the woman who lives in a mansion with her husband and children and all one hundred of her ex-boyfriends, and also astutely observed ordinary moments, like a woman meeting a man in a bar.

He bought me a cocktail without asking, and show more proceeded to explain, casually, that he lived in this neighborhood, just a few blocks away. Actually, what he said was six blocks. No, five and a half blocks. That's what he said, five and a half blocks, as if he were afraid that at six blocks I would say no. I didn't tell him that actually, I liked him up to eight blocks. In our city, that equals a mile. I liked him up to a mile.

These stories are full of young women figuring out life, how to move on from the things their mothers taught them, working out how love and life work in the world as it is. Sometimes the worlds these women exist in are different from this one, other times the author stays with this one.

What I wouldn't give to escape these late winters in Chicago. Especially the deep, post-holiday extremes of January and February, when, no longer buoyed by festivities and merriments, you're confronted with the empty expanse of a new year, discarded resolutions in your wake, resigned to your own inability to change.

I really like how Ling Ma writes, both on a sentence level and in the way she views the world. I ended up liking each story in this collection a little more than the last and would have liked it to be much longer. show less