Following her college graduation and their premature death, she moved to New York and became a liaison for a book production company, which required her to spend much of her time in Hong Kong and Shenzhen.
After her parent’s emigration, she was left behind in China for several years during her early childhood while they saved enough money to buy her a plane ticket to Salt Lake City. The alienation and displacement experienced by all people amidst the Shen Fever pandemic is merely a continuation, for Candace, of what has come before. Now Candace is learning that these things can matter to one’s very core.
In her lifetime, her mother had told her that what she does every day matters. Her tether to both family and family history gone, Candace learns to appreciate the ritualistic habits that connect us to people, places, and the work of being human. This repetition of her mother’s lifestyle echoes Candace’s mother’s obsession with daily rituals (and especially personal care rituals), which Candace only learns to appreciate after her mother is gone. Before the outbreak, Candace was living like a kind of clone of her mother, wearing her old dresses and attempting to mimic her careful skincare regimen. Repetition, too, features in the life of Candace, Severance’s protagonist and the daughter of deceased Fujianese immigrants who came to the United States from China to fulfill her father’s academic and career dreams shortly after the Cultural Revolution. Shen Fever is an airborne fungal infection that turns the ill into zombie-like human shells who repeat certain everyday actions-setting the table, reading a book, driving a taxi-over and over again, ignorant to their surroundings and physical state, until finally they perish from hunger or exposure or are killed by uninfected looters. But beyond the immediate comparisons, Severance is a story about what it means to make a life when one has been removed-whether willingly or by force-from one’s familiar surroundings, and the faith and perseverance required in order to call a new place home.
She even touches upon the race and class divide that has characterized the toll COVID-19 continues to take. It is indeed impossible to read the book without shuddering at the accuracy with which Ma depicts the initial frivolous attitude and skepticism people hold about masks-a frivolity that is soon followed by terror, alienation, unraveling, and displacement, all of which have come to pass in the real world. A lot has already been written about the eerie propheticism of Ling Ma’s 2018 debut novel Severance, in which a pandemic originating in China shuts down facilities and services and fells entire societies around the world.
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