Like Severance's Candace, we feel dis-ease with "coincidence," with being or having been in the "right place at the right time," as if it will have been advantageous, even devious to have found an area to think inside and around, a slice of research to take up, that suddenly becomes trendy for the very same reasons of systematic neglect and racial violence that brought us to these topics in the first place. Why is she there? By what right or trick or mandate? How did Ma predict the COVID-19 apocalypse? How did she document it before it happened?Īs Asians working on timely topics, we've become aware of a shady grove of language around timeliness over these last months. Candace's own uncannily "timely" documentary blog, NY Ghost, hosts photographs of a rewilding New York that some viewers see as lurid and distasteful. Much of the book interrogates the generic Asian's position, as the novel's assumptions about the world that swirls around her is changed by bodies like hers, the factories where they labor to make the world they're in but not of. Severance knows this, recognizes the Orientalist roots of this kind of literary instrumentalization: the heavy, persistent pathologization of the racial other.
She is what Jane would call a "generic Asian" - an Asian constituted by and through genre, an Asian of a recognizable type, and in this way, part of a typology that deflects depth and calls orthodoxies about literary subjectivity into question.
Her immunity - and thus her ability to narrate the end of the world - is circumstantial, a function of history and what it does to character, rather than of character per se. Severance's Candace appears to be the sort of blank, half-baked protagonist who would survive a global apocalypse by simply slipping through the cracks, not being in the wrong place at the wrong time. What does it mean to make "timely" work that stretches back years and years? Is the assignation of a certain kind of "timeliness" also a way of reminding arrivistes of their temporary and uncertain status in criticism? In letters? In the West? We wondered if this was a compliment or a dismissal. "Timely!" people twittered, about our various projects on race, capitalism, imperialism, disease, and immigration. Elated and annoyed, we were already obsessed with it.
The New York Times cited "booming sales" alongside Camus's The Plague four days before New York City went into lockdown. More than a few reviews, roundups, rec lists, book clubs, and group chats went wild over Severance in the early months of the pandemic. Severance, published in 2018, is about a fungal disease that originates in Shenzhen and takes down most of the world population in a few months.
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