Race & Capital in Ling Ma’s ‘Severance’
Severance by Ling Ma revolves around Candace Chen, a twenty-something first-gen Chinese American working a Bible production job in New York, before and after a fungal infection of biblical proportions called Shen Fever sweeps the world. The “fevered” are not your everyday Dawn of the Dead zombies. On the contrary, “they don’t try to attack us or try to eat us.” Although saying that the “fevered” are zombies is not entirely accurate, Ma uses the overlap to create a compelling commentary on race and capitalism. As pointed out by Fredric Jameson in The Seeds of Time, it is easier for us to picture the end of the world than the end of late-stage capitalism. We see this play out in Severance. Even as Shen Fever spreads rapidly, Candace, no less a creature of habit than the “fevered”, continues to go to work every single day. Her commitment to capital flow in combination with her Asian-American identity raises the point that racialized exploitation and the accumulation of capital are mutually reinforcing.
In the very first chapter of Severance, we see that the gemstone supplier that is in business with Spectra, the company Candace works at, closes due to workers developing lung diseases originating from poor working conditions. Candace explains to the production editor that this isn’t just an isolated incident, rather an “industry-wide problem” that “almost all” suppliers are facing. The production editor, an oiled cog in the machine himself, does not even recognize the name of the Chinese province where this cheap labor is sourced from, and urges Candace to find a solution, threatening to look elsewhere in a country like India, which, like China, is a victim of capitalist exploitation. The gemstone factory workers are treated not as humans, but as a force, seen by and useful to the system only as long as they feed into the system, discarded as soon as they are turned useless by the system itself. This, having been placed in proximity to Bob’s comments on the “fevered” in chapter two, makes a wider claim about Shen Fever, Severance, and capitalism in general: “This narrative, then, is not about any individual entity, per se, but about an abstract force: the force of the mob, of mob mentality.” The racial lens of capitalism merges Asian labor and the Asian laborer and sees the two as one and the same.
When Candace googles Shen Fever, she finds out that the “reigning theory” was that it had originated from the spread of fungal spores in special economic zones due to factory conditions. This can be seen as a callback to the conditions of the gemstone factory workers in chapter two who must have labored in “dusty areas” and inhaled “large amounts of dust”; capitalism itself can lead to the end of the world, but the apocalypse has nothing on capitalism. The New York Times reports an American ban on citizens of Asian countries, with Chinese citizens at the top of the list, even though the Fever is fungal in nature and “is not contagious between people.” This goes hand-in-hand with the racialization of coronavirus and the general sense of epidemic-lased xenophobia.
On the surface-level too, Candace is representative of the difficulties faced by her Chinese parents who wanted to realize the American Dream. Candace’s father, “a man from a poor background who wants a better life,” immigrated to the United States of America. He conducted a “severance from China,” and, like many immigrants, worked day and night to prove his productivity and value to this country. The American economy demanded their usefulness even as Candace’s mom was on her deathbed: “No matter what, we just want you to be of use.”
Such is the cyclical and dehumanizing nature of capitalism that the American Dream conceals. It relentlessly exploits the world in direct and indirect ways for its economy’s survival. Is this something we can do away with? Anecdotal experience tells us that it must be eternal. None of us know anything about living in a society that is not an exploitative capitalist society. If we were to, however, accept this as fate, it would be due to, as Fredric Jameson said, “some weakness in our imaginations.”
