Severance by Ling Ma
Candace Chen is a routine-obsessed millennial drone who works alone in a Manhattan office building. She has experienced enough uncertainty after her Chinese immigrant parents recently passed away. She is content to simply continue: She works, fixes the Gemstone Bible, a book for teens, and watches movies in a basement in Greenpoint with her lover.
So when a scourge of biblical proportions sweeps New York, Candace hardly pays it any attention. Shen Fever then spreads. Families run away. Businesses stop operating. The subways come to a grinding halt. Her employers hire her as a member of a shrinking skeleton team with a significant end-date reward. As the fictitious blogger NY Ghost, she soon finds herself completely alone and unfevered as she captures the creepy, deserted metropolis.
Severance by Ling Ma
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Yet Candace won’t be able to survive by herself indefinitely. Here come the survivors, led by the ferocious Computer specialist Bob. They are headed to a location known as the Facility, where Bob assures them that they will have everything they need to rebuild society. Yet Candace has a secret that she is certain Bob would use against her. Does she need to flee from her rescuers?
Ling Ma’s Severance is a funny, deadpan satire that sends up and critiques the rituals, habits, and wasted opportunities of modern life. It is also a touching family narrative, an odd coming-of-age tale, and a quirky coming-of-age tale. Most importantly, it pays genuine homage to the relationships that motivate us to strive for more than only survival.
Severance switches back and forth between the narrator’s past, when she moved to New York City, met her partner, and found a job, her present as a refugee/survivor banding together with other survivors of the Shen Fever Pandemic, and her parents’ past when they immigrated from China to the US. Although I was initially a little perplexed, I truly loved the several narrative streams that focused on her background.
It’s interesting to note that each one of them deals with a different kind of severance, be it from home, culture, language, parents, loved ones, a job, material possessions, or the internet. At some point or another, Candace’s adventures were all cut short. Despite her mother’s wish to go back to China, even her parents went through a severance. It appeared that Candace’s father recognized the importance of starting over in order to forge his own identity.
