What happens when a disease that originates in China spreads across the entire world, bringing society to a halt? Before the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 this situation was imagined, with eerie prescience, in Ling Ma’s 2018 novel, Severance. The novel is a generic mashup—part office satire, part zombie horror, part post-apocalypse dystopia, part immigrant Bildungsroman—featuring a Chinese American protagonist, Candace Chen, who joins a small band of survivors after a global pandemic caused by a fungal disease has decimated the world. It follows the group’s attempt to get to a safe site, known as “the Facility,” which turns out to be a suburban mall in Evanston, IL. Their quest is interwoven with flashbacks to Candace’s pre-apocalypse life in New York City, where she works for a publishing coordination firm that outsources its production. In briefer glimpses, we also get the backstory of her immigration to the US from the Chinese city of Fuzhou as a child.
In interviews Ma has stated that she conceived of Severance as a “work novel, with the global supply chain as the setting,” driven by the question, “why does Candace Chen keep working at her job” even as the world collapses around her?1 Both before and after the apocalypse, Candace’s task is to stay afloat within a range of toxic environments: a deadening office job, an increasingly unaffordable city, an airborne disease, and, later, a hierarchical structure within the band of survivors. Clear-eyed about the effects of global capitalism on people (increased migration, increased inequality, poor working conditions) and the environment (climate change, toxic pollutants, airborne diseases, global pandemics), the novel offers an astute portrait of our inextricability from exploitative systems in spite of our awareness of them. During a visit to the Shenzhen factory that manufactures the bibles she is in charge of producing, Candace reflects on the system of offshore manufacturing that has created a glut of inexpensive goods subsidized by cheap foreign labor. “I was a part of this,” she thinks, “I was just doing my job.”2 The latter statement forms something of a refrain throughout the novel, both apology and shrug. But what does it take to stay alive, both before and after the end of the world?
I want to think about the question of surviving toxic environments through the figure of atmosphere. The last decade or so has witnessed something of an atmospheric turn across the humanities and social sciences. Much of that research has involved documenting modernity’s roster of aerial violences, such as Peter Sloterdijk’s argument that the use of poison gas in WWI inaugurated a new era of “atmoterrorism” in which war is waged not primarily on the enemy’s body but on their “total environment.”3 As anthropologists Timothy Choy and Jerry Zee write in a recent survey, “increasingly explicative attunements to the air track its defilement from gas warfare and gas chambers through a roster of toxic airborne events wherein atmospheres are forced into explicitness in a thanatopolitics of compromised life: Cold War mushroom clouds, windblown radioactive isotopes, chemical leaks, nuclear accidents, tear gas assaults on an agitating crowd.”4
Joining this list of aerial hazards comprising the “thanatopolitics of compromised life” is the just barely fictional situation depicted in Severance. Set in a slightly alternate 2011, the novel was written during 2012–15 and published in 2018. It was well received when it first appeared, winning the 2018 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and appearing on many of the year’s “best of” lists, but it gained a new surge of attention after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. In details like the shift to remote work, shuttered Broadway shows, daily death tolls on newspaper front pages, and the adoption of N95 masks (Candace’s company magnanimously distributes two masks and a few protein bars to all its staff), the novel reads retrospectively like an uncanny prophecy. Whereas SARS-CoV-2 is viral, Shen Fever, the novel’s fictional disease, is fungal, but it also originates in China and gradually spreads across the globe, carried by the traffic of commodities and people. In particular, it is the aerosolized diffusion of microscopic spores in the environment that makes Shen Fever so contagious, much as the airborne transmission of COVID-19 makes simply breathing in proximity to an infected person a potential hazard.
As suggested by the figure of airborne contagion, scholars have also turned to atmosphere in order to think more expansively about connection and relation across time and space. This is true in the term’s material senses—in the circulation of everything carried in the air, like gases, pollutants, particulate matter, odors, and so on—as well as in its figurative ones, since the atmosphere of a situation, a neighborhood, or an epoch is co-constituted by a variety of elements in shifting and unpredictable ways.5 It seems to be particularly apt now, as a globalized economy and the climate crisis have called forth what Neel Ahuja calls “atmospheric intimacies,” “minerals, mosquitoes, settlers, gases, solar rays, and other bodies…crossing scales, species, and systems.”6
Such intimacies are amply evident in both Severance’s fictional and our real global pandemics, where pathogens speed across the world through the now routine transnational interchanges of commerce, tourism, and education. Both pandemics also result, in more and less direct ways, from the intimacies of global capital and its web of political, economic, and ecological relations. In the novel, Shen Fever is, straightforwardly, a byproduct of industrial manufacturing. In the case of COVID-19, scholars have argued that zoonotic spillovers like the novel coronavirus, which likely developed first in bats, have become increasingly common with the expansion of global agribusiness and its accompanying destruction of regional environmental complexity as well as its use of highly pathogenic farming methods.7 Attention to the atmospheric politics of Severance, read alongside our real-life pandemic, brings into focus the unevenly distributed global environmental risks of late industrialism.8
At the same time, I draw on the work of Lauren Berlant in order to think about what it means to survive an apocalypse that manifests—and is felt—not as a traumatic event but as “crisis ordinariness,” a heightened threat to be managed in the context of living.9 In spite of the melodramatic potential of the novel’s apocalyptic premise, Severance works in the mode of realism with its focus on the everyday, telling a story of ordinary, routine “drama[s] of adjustment to a pervasive atmosphere of unexpected precarity” characteristic of contemporary life.10 Atmospheric intimacies, in this sense, refers not only to routes of circulation, transmission, and contact traced across continents but also to a problem of crisis subjectivity: the question of what it means to survive—materially, psychically, and affectively—when an environment becomes unlivable.
Finally, even as the parallels between Shen Fever and the COVID-19 pandemic have prompted renewed attention to Severance, the novel contains some important, and less remarked, differences from real-world events, particularly in its incomplete convergence of racialization and epidemiology. Discussions of Asian American racialization in Ma’s novel have focused, for good reason, on its economic and labor-related dimensions, but I want to linger on what it means to read both the fictional and the real disease as a “Chinese virus,” a label that ostensibly names a point of origin but also implicitly assigns blame while stigmatizing a racial and ethnic group.11 In real life, the conflation of people and disease contributed to a rise in anti-Asian sentiment and xenophobic attacks during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US.12 But in the novel, these terms don’t quite stick together in the same way. The responses to Shen Fever depicted in Severance stem from the same historical legacies of racialized atmospheres that played out during the COVID-19 pandemic, but, in its departures from real life, the novel also offers a counterfactual alternate reality that, although not reparative, provides a kind of reprieve from the burdens of racialization.
Toxic Environments
In a fictional FAQ sheet from the CDC, we learn that Shen Fever is a “newly discovered fungal infection,” whose first case was reported in Shenzhen, China. It is “contracted by breathing in microscopic spores in the air. Because these spores are undetectable, it is difficult to prevent exposure in areas where it is in the environment” (149). First dismissed in the US as a minor blip, akin to West Nile virus, or as something happening only in faraway places, Shen Fever, which has no cure or treatment, gradually comes to kill almost everyone around the world. Those who are infected, the “fevered,” become zombie-like, carrying out routine tasks on a loop—interminably folding the laundry, washing the dishes, typing at the keyboard, changing the channel—as their bodies slowly deteriorate until they eventually die from a fatal loss of consciousness.13 It is a disease of repetition and habit, and, the novel makes clear, it is a disease of capitalism. The distance is short between the unthinking actions of the fevered and the recurrent rhythms of an average day at the office, to say nothing of the deadening repetitions of a factory assembly line. Observing a worker pulling a lever that punches holes through cardboard boxes during her visit to a printing factory in Shenzhen, Candace is mesmerized. “It was such a rote, mechanical movement, the punching in of measurements, the pulling of the lever.…He did this same thing over and over again, on a loop” (89). Indeed, in an interview Ma states, “In a way, Shen Fever, which is named after Shenzhen, inflicts that [assembly-line labor] on the rest of the world, and you see that inflicted on New York.”14
As a disease of capitalism, Shen Fever is more specifically atmospheric. Although it first spreads through fungal spores that live on objects, it is the spores’ airborne nature that accounts for the disease’s infectiousness, since environmental exposure is hard to control or contain. This aerial transmission that takes over whole cities, regions, and eventually the world, underscores the fact that capitalism is not only metaphorically like the air we breathe, a total system governing our lives that we often don’t even notice; it is also literally poisoning our air, filling it with all manner of greenhouse gases and toxic particulate matter. The permeability of air and its resistance to segmentation and compartmentalization make it an apt figure for the globalized world that Severance depicts, with its transnational network of supply chains and circuits of capital.
The atmosphere also serves to register the interconnectedness of industrial modernity in the novel in more subtle ways. When Candace attempts to pinpoint the beginning of “the End,” she thinks about the way the New York sky looked one morning. “It was yellowed, some kind of yellow I’d never seen before, an irregular jaundiced chartreuse like a bruise trying to heal” (191). This jaundiced sky recalls the “yellow fog” and “yellow smoke” licking “its tongue into the corners of the evening” in T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” (1915) and, before that, the dense “fog everywhere” that saturates the beginning of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, both allusions to the smog that pervaded Britain as a result of industrialization.15 We could read these images as atmospherically connecting two global centers of capital and empire, London and New York, across a century and a half, in both cases suffused by industrial pollution whose “tincture infected everything” (192).16
Shen Fever is also the product of a temporally extended ecological crisis: the disease leads to New York City’s collapse only after “Hurricane Matilda,” a Hurricane Sandy-like event that accelerates infrastructural breakdown. The subways flood and never get fixed, replaced by slow and unreliable buses. Wi-Fi becomes patchy, eventually limited to certain neighborhoods of the city. Grocery stores start closing until only sparsely stocked bodegas are left. The pandemic and the climate change with which it is bound up can thus be read as forms of what Lauren Berlant calls “slow death, a condition of being worn out by the activity of reproducing life,” or the protracted wearing out of populations.17 Living in New York City in the mid- to late 2000s, first in a haze of post-college un(der)employment and then as an office worker pushed into ever further neighborhoods by rising rents and cost of living, Candace’s existence is precarious.18 This precarity in work, housing, and healthcare is the result of the long decline since the 1970s of the welfare state and “the economic and political structures that had previously carried, at least for select populations, some of the burden of life’s self-perpetuation.”19 In fact, any ambition Candace has for life-building seems to extend no further than maintenance, that is, the continuation of routine, at least until she manages to escape the Facility in a final decisive act.20 Even as the last of her few remaining coworkers leave, she stays, both because, as she says, she has nowhere to go (her parents are both dead and all extended relatives are in China) and because the routines of work provide an important anchor.21 She is unencumbered by friends or relations and she does little outside her job; but her work is sufficient, giving her a “nothing feeling” (65) that is the closest she comes to pleasure. Once the infrastructural collapse of the city is such that she is forced to simply move into the office, she finds she can survive on the snacks she finds in abandoned desks and the vending machine, combining water and coffee creamer to make a milk substitute. She survives because she withstands being worn out, because her requirements for living are already so minimal.
Slow death, Berlant writes, “prospers not in traumatic events, as discrete time-framed phenomena like military encounters and genocides can appear to do, but in temporally labile environments whose qualities and whose contours in time and space are often identified with the presentness of ordinariness itself.”22 Here Berlant makes a useful distinction between “event” and “environment”:
An event is a genre calibrated according to its intensities and kinds of impact. Environment denotes a scene in which structural conditions are suffused through a variety of mediations, such as predictable repetitions and other spatial practices that might well go under the radar or, in any case, not take up the form of event. An environment can absorb how time ordinarily passes, how forgettable most events are, and overall, how people’s ordinary perseverations fluctuate in patterns of undramatic attachment and identification.23
The unfolding of the apocalypse in Severance exhibits the temporal lability and forgettable ordinariness of events that Berlant ascribes to an environment. “New York became an impossible place to live. It seemed to happen gradually, then suddenly” (210). Changes are incremental and often registered only retrospectively. The first unusual pandemic-related occurrence in the novel appears in a detail, when Candace goes out to buy a pregnancy test and finds both Duane Reade and CVS closed, bearing signs announcing newly curtailed hours—hardly an event, barely enough to attract notice (she finds an off-brand test in a Koreatown general store), and yet retrospectively a herald. In the early days of the pandemic, when its effects are patchy and uneven, tourists roam through Times Square in scattered flocks, attracted by plummeting costs; but at some point Candace looks around and realizes the streets are empty. Buses get slower and more irregular until one day they stop showing up. The diffuseness of atmosphere serves to figure the nonpunctuality and eventlessness of this most dramatic of plot points. The opening of the first chapter reads, “The End begins before you are ever aware of it. It passes as ordinary” (10).
Severance is in this way not only a novel about an environmental crisis, but also a novel about what happens when a crisis becomes an environment. For Candace, the structural conditions of neoliberal precarity are suffused into and mediated by daily routines, which she continually adapts in response to worsening conditions. When the subway stops running, for instance, she simply wakes up earlier so that she can take the bus from her apartment in Bushwick to her office in midtown Manhattan. Then when the bus stops running, she simply moves into the office. Candace feels little wonder or outrage as each part of the city’s infrastructure creaks, groans, and eventually collapses. She faces each new change with the stoic pragmatism of the need to survive, not in the heroic mode of someone running to escape an explosion, but with the undramatic “ongoingness of adjudication, adaptation, and improvisation.”24
Uneven and Total
Shen Fever is a disease of industrial capitalism, but it is also specifically a Chinese virus. Its place of origin is no accident. Shenzhen, a major manufacturing hub on China’s Pearl River Delta, was the first of China’s Special Economic Zones (SEZs). These areas, designated for economic liberalization and foreign investment under the country’s “reform and opening-up” policy beginning in the 1980s, have been crucial to the growth of the Chinese economy and its integration into the global market. Late in Severance we learn of Shen Fever’s rumored industrial origins:
The reigning theory, first disseminated by a prominent doctor in the Huffington Post, was that the new strain of fungal spores had inadvertently developed within factory conditions of manufacturing areas, the SEZs in China, where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals. To predict the transmission of the fever, the blogger claimed, wind patterns may be analyzed. Not only that, but the holiday traffic surrounding the mass commute of migrant factory workers back to their home villages, such as during Chinese New Year, should also be limited. Traffic carries spores. (210)
The conspiratorial style here resembles the “lab leak” conspiracy theories surrounding the origins of SARS-CoV-2. In another of the novel’s uncanny coincidences with real life, the first COVID-19 lockdown occurred in Wuhan just before the Chinese New Year in 2020. During the two-week period of Chinese New Year, China’s biggest holiday, travel is widespread, especially as the masses of domestic migrant workers who leave their rural villages to work in urban factories return home to see their families. These workers have no permanent residency status in the cities in which they work, often living in accommodations provided by the factories.25 During Candace’s tour of the printing factory in Shenzhen, she glimpses “nearby buildings that looked like apartment complexes, with air conditioners sticking out of the windows, leaking rust stains, and nightgowns hanging out from clotheslines” (85), from which strains of Chinese pop music and Peking opera can be heard. These workers’ dormitories are not a part of her visit and she—and the novel—quickly moves on. The path of disease follows both the domestic migrations of labor and the international export of its products.
Shen Fever’s origin in manufacturing processes points to the environmental and health costs of easy access to cheap consumer goods that have been disproportionately borne by Chinese workers since the country became “the world’s factory.” In an early flashback, Candace tells an American client publishing a “gemstone Bible” marketed at adolescent girls that their Chinese supplier of gemstones has closed because many of the workers have contracted pneumoconiosis and are now filing a class-action lawsuit. “The workers who grind and polish semiprecious stones, they’ve been breathing in this dust and developing lung diseases, without their knowledge, for months, even years,” Candace explains to the unmoved client, who is displeased with this hiccup in the supply chain. “Apparently, from what Hong Kong is telling me, the lawsuit claims that the workers have been working in rooms without ventilation systems or any sort of respirator equipment” (24). The industrialization that so heavily polluted London’s air in the nineteenth century, registered in Dickens’s smog and Eliot’s yellow fog, has a greatly compressed counterpart in the rapid decline of China’s air quality in the late twentieth century. As sociologist Victoria Nguyen sums up, “Caught between both the historic speed of its industrialization and the country’s prolific urbanization, China ha[s] managed to combine the toxic potency and chemical unpredictability of what had been two separate eras of pollution for Europe and North America.”26 Breathing is a condition of existential vulnerability, exposing us to everything in our ambient environment, but we are not all exposed to the same air.27
Although the pollution resulting from China’s rapid industrialization is concentrated domestically, the SEZs are fueled by foreign investments, and many of the toxic particulates pumped into the Chinese air are byproducts of manufacturing consumer goods that are then shipped to Europe and North America. Shen Fever is thus at once a Chinese virus, created from “the highly specific mixture of chemicals” used in manufacturing in Chinese SEZs, and a product of global capitalism. The lung disease suffered by the workers at the gemstone factory anticipates the more crippling infection that will trigger a global pandemic, but it also offers a contrast. For the workers, the problem is enclosure: the factory’s lack of ventilation and air circulation concentrates the metallic particulates that cause the disease and limits the reach of harm to those in the immediate environment. Shen Fever, on the other hand, is characterized by its diffusion. Transported via shipments of goods, carried by the wind, and permeating the environment, its spread around the world is facilitated by the uncontainability of atmospheric diffusion. Unlike the pneumoconiosis suffered by the Chinese workers or other localized occupational diseases, Shen Fever is indiscriminate in its exposure.
The transboundary migration of pollutants and toxins across national borders and both human and nonhuman bodies is one of the hallmarks of late industrialism.28 To be sure, these toxins do not affect everyone equally, but they are also liable to exceed any efforts at containment. Indeed, more so than other forms of waste, air pollution is difficult to quarantine, localize, disperse, or ship away (at least permanently) elsewhere. Clearing smog, for instance, depends on the weather and the season. Thus, municipal or national governments may try to export bad air, for instance, by relocating industrial zones, but the bad air is liable to come back, blown by unpredictable weather patterns.29 Recalling Ma’s comment about factory labor as the inspiration for the disease, we might say that, as it radiates out from a Chinese manufacturing center, where goods are made, to the West, where they are consumed, the uncontainability of Severance’s fictional disease effectively functions to redistribute the geographically unequal burdens of sickness and environmental risk under capitalism. In this way it exemplifies what Ulrich Beck called the “boomerang effect” of modern risk societies. “Risks of modernization sooner or later also strike those who produce or profit from them. They contain a boomerang effect, which breaks up the pattern of class and national society. Ecological disaster and atomic fallout ignore the borders of nations. Even the rich and powerful are not safe from them” (original italics).30 Created as a byproduct of manufacturing processes, a disease ordinarily suffered invisibly by low-paid Chinese factory workers spreads around the world and comes to eventually decimate the center of American commerce and culture. To be clear, this redounding of risks or hazards should not be understood as equalizing or somehow erasing differentiation. As we know all too well from the case of COVID-19, the costs are still disproportionately borne by those who are economically and racially marginalized. Nevertheless, it is possible to read Shen Fever as a form of what Mel Chen, citing Beck, calls “‘involuntary environmental justice,’ if we read justice as not the extension of remedy but a kind of revenge.”31
Chinese Virus
Like Shen Fever, at once a disease of global capitalism and a product of its specifically Chinese conditions, COVID-19, too, was widely called a “Chinese virus.” But in the novel, the localized origin of Shen Fever does not lead to the same atmosphere as COVID-19 did in our own world. In an essay where he “lean[s] into the crevice between China and Virus and hold[s] open the possible meanings and terms of their relating,” Jerry Zee hopes “we might yet reconfigure the relation between the phrase’s constituent terms—and the relations between bodies, entities, airways, and nations that they encompass and eclipse.”32 In the remainder of this essay I follow suit, situating Severance within a longer history of the convergence of racialization, epidemiology, and toxicity, and reading the novel in terms of schisms within those alignments.
First, however, I want to note a small but revealing difference concerning the origin points of the fictional and real diseases. Like Shen Fever, SARS CoV-2 originated in China, but in Wuhan. A metropolis of 11 million people in the middle of the country, Wuhan is a so-called second-tier city, with many fewer international ties than cities like Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen. It is thus surprising that the novel coronavirus emerged in this inland city rather than in the coastal hubs that have been more closely linked to world supply chains and international finance. As historian Andrew Liu observes, “It would make perfect sense if the coronavirus had broken out in the Pearl River Delta, encompassing Guangdong and Hong Kong, as SARS did.” Instead, the fact that it broke out in a hardly cosmopolitan city six hundred miles north indicates “the latest stage of globalization, in which international capital continues to extend further inland in pursuit of cheaper land and labor markets.”33 The difference between the more plausible location of the fictional outbreak (the novel was written between 2012 and 2015) and the more surprising location where the real pandemic broke out in 2020 stands as a record of the rapid march of global capital across China, and the increased vulnerability in its wake. As Liu notes, “during the ‘high socialist’ era of the 1950s through the ’70s, the rapid spread of a COVID-19-like virus from a fishmonger in Wuhan to hundreds of countries in a matter of weeks would have been unimaginable.” Today, “the best safeguard against the novel coronavirus is the ability to voluntarily withdraw oneself from capitalism. Therein lies the problem.”34
Just as Shen Fever is simultaneously a disease that arises from specific conditions in China and a product of global capital, locating a single “origin” for a disease can obfuscate the larger conditions that lead to its emergence. In the case of COVID-19, Robert Wallace and his colleagues note that its economic geography must extend back from its ostensible origin in Wuhan’s Huanan Seafood Market “to the hinterlands where exotic and traditional foods are raised by operations bordering the edge of a contracting wilderness. As industrial production encroaches on the last of the forest, wild food operations must cut farther in to raise their delicacies or raid the last stands.” At the same time, expanded periurban commodity circuits propel the spread of newly spilled-over pathogens, carried by livestock or the people tending them, from the hinterlands to dense population centers, and from there to the world stage.35 A macroeconomic look at the virus’s “structural origins” destabilizes the common practice of “pin[ning] responsibility for outbreaks on indigenous populations and their so-deemed ‘dirty’ cultural practices,” in the case of COVID-19, the ostensible appetite of the Chinese for exotic foods.36 Citing a recent map of likely outbreak zones for new pathogens that located hotspots in China, India, Indonesia, and parts of Latin America and Africa, Wallace argues that if we look at the financial interests that fund deforestation and pathogenic farming practices, a different map emerges. “Plotting relational geographies,” thinking atmospherically, we might say, “suddenly turns New York, London, and Hong Kong, key sources of global capital, into three of the world’s worst disease hotspots instead.”37 For this reason Wallace advocates renaming viruses according to their political-economic origins, for instance, “NAFTA flu” for swine flu, and “Neoliberal Ebola.”38
The nomenclature of COVID-19, of course, has been fraught. Although the World Health Organization warned media against associating the disease with a geographical origin or ethnic group, many Republican government officials, including then-president Donald Trump, repeatedly used the terms “Wuhan virus,” “China virus,” “Chinese virus,” or “kung flu.”39 These slurs conflate race, geopolitics, and epidemiology, stigmatizing people through the association of a place with disease. Some of that stigmatization is on display in Severance’s pandemic, even though Shen Fever, similarly named for its geographical origin, does not appear to have the same stigmatizing force. In the novel, Congress passes a ban first on Chinese export goods, and then on all travelers from Asia. Since Shen Fever is not transmitted through human-to-human contact, the novel’s travel ban is less like the ones issued during COVID-19 and more like the Trump-era “Muslim ban” in 2017, which, in nakedly racist fashion, barred entry to travelers from seven predominantly Muslim countries under the guise of national security. Candace learns that the new policy has passed when she googles “Shen Fever” and finds “a list of the banned [Asian] countries was provided, China at the top of the list” (210).
The governmental response to Shen Fever in the novel throws into relief a longstanding association of Asian bodies and living environments with disease and contamination that Hsuan Hsu calls “atmo-orientalism.” This term “encompasses not only how Asiatic subjects are framed in association with atmospheric toxicity, but also how Asiatic atmospheres are perceived as biochemical threats to the integrity of white bodies and minds.”40 Hsu traces this discourse to nineteenth-century miasma theory, uncovering an atmospheric dimension to representations of Yellow Peril, where the fetid, disease-ridden air of Pacific Coast Chinatowns was decried as a public health threat to surrounding (white) neighborhoods. Whereas the poor, cramped living conditions of these urban neighborhoods were produced by discriminatory housing and labor practices, the Chinese inhabitants themselves were blamed for producing toxic, malodorous atmospheres. Atmo-orientalism thus names “both a process that disproportionately exposes Asiatics to noxious air and a discourse that naturalizes those exposures by racializing noxious air as Asiatic.”41
More recently, this racialization is evident in the context of moralizing concerns over environmental pollution, especially China’s notoriously bad air quality. In their analysis of Western critiques of Chinese pollution, especially after China overtook the US as the world’s largest contributor of carbon emissions in the mid- to late 2000s, Michael Ziser and Julie Sze argue that these critiques often elide the fact that China’s growth has been fueled by Western consumption and Western economic interests while ignoring the West’s historic contributions to climate change. The disavowal of historical responsibility only intensifies the sense that it is we who are being contaminated by a problem produced by an other. “Fear about China’s ability to touch distant polities—exemplified by the soot that crosses east over the Pacific to affect the western United States—is amplified by its ability to stand in for Western concerns about our culpability in polluting ourselves.”42 As the New York Times noted in an investigative series on the environmental effects of China’s economic growth, “China’s problem has become the world’s problem. Sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides spewed by China’s coal-fired power plants fall as acid rain on Seoul, South Korea, and Tokyo. Much of the particulate pollution over Los Angeles originates in China, according to the Journal of Geophysical Research.”43 Like the soot that floats over the Pacific or the particulate pollution that shows up as LA’s famous smog, Shen Fever belongs in a long lineage of fears about “China’s ability to touch distant polities” through its uncontainable atmospheric spread.
This racialization of environmental pollution is part of what Mel Chen calls “a ‘master toxicity narrative’ about Chinese products in general,” produced by the 2007 panic in the US over reports of toxic lead in children’s toys made in China, as well as recalls of Chinese-made lunchboxes in 2005 and reports of heparin in Chinese-made medicines and industrial melamine in pet food.44 As Chen writes, “Mass media stories pitched Chinese environmental threats neither as harmful to actual Chinese people or landscapes, nor as products of a global industrialization that the United States itself eagerly promotes, but as invasive dangers to the U.S. territory from other national territories.”45 The outrage in the US media about lead in Chinese-made toys and other products was less about the manufacturing processes that produced such toxins, or the failure of regulatory agencies to protect consumers from them, than about this harmful matter being out of place. “These environmental toxins were supposed to be ‘there’ but were found ‘here.’”46 We might think here of the soot that becomes a problem only when it makes its way from Guangdong’s factories to LA, or of the pneumoconiosis suffered by the gemstone workers, which was appropriately contained there, unlike the spores of “the fungus Shenidioides” (210) that inappropriately spread here. The reinforced association of toxicity with China—and with it, the moral assignation of culpability, as well as fears of contagion or contamination—is just one example of the ways modernization and capital accumulation displace harms onto racial others, often precisely those most likely to bear the burdens of industrial modernity. This displacement, as in the case of the pneumoconiosis, in turn makes “the atmospheric risks of global modernity—the infrastructures and labor regimes that make Asian immigrants disproportionately vulnerable to airborne pathogens and toxins—a key feature in the olfactory racialization of Asians.”47
The COVID-19 pandemic itself, in its activation and intensification of longstanding anti-Chinese sentiments, can also be understood in terms of atmo-orientalism, but here the fictional unfolding of the pandemic departs in important ways from real life. As Zee observes, the COVID-19 pandemic has been understood by many Asians in the Anglophone Americas as giving rise to a coterminous pandemic of “Asian hate,” where racism and the coronavirus are “twinned vectors of damage, a ‘syndemic.’”48 Zee opens his essay arrestingly with an anecdote about the first time someone called him “Coronavirus,” in a drugstore parking lot in Northern California, “a month before the first wave of stay-at-home orders on the US West Coast.” “I learned for the first time that coughing with a face like mine, with eyes like mine, with family dispersed in a transcontinental splatter pattern like mine, was a kind of self-indictment.”49 The slur hurled at Zee, and many others racialized as Asian, conflates having a disease, causing a disease, and being a disease.
In Severance, by contrast, Candace seems to bear no special association with Shen Fever. The rest of the group of survivors are—implicitly or explicitly—white, but no one appears to assign her any blame as a cause of harm; she encounters no scenes of viral-racial address, nor are there any mentions of the broader consequences of discursively binding together pathogens and people. Although Shen Fever’s point of origin is significant for the reasons discussed above, in the novel’s world the name appears neutral in its valences, unlike the perniciousness of “China virus” in our world. Reading Severance now in light of the “syndemic,” the contrast is striking. How should we understand it? As an underestimation on Ma’s part of how completely the racialization of toxicity and disease might saturate the atmosphere, exacerbating longstanding anxieties and aggressions as well as newer fears produced by China’s economic rise at the end of the twentieth century? For those who experienced the COVID-19 pandemic as an intensification of a “climate of hate,” this aspect of the novel may read as a fantasy—not a reparative vision, since Shen Fever brings about the end of society, but a vision where the global effects of an apocalypse, as a boomeranging form of involuntary environmental justice, does not lead to the entrenchment of ethnonationalism and the toxic convergence of racialization with epidemiology.50
Reading Severance in terms of its simultaneous proximity to and distance from real-life events means recognizing the “molecular intimacies of empire,” situating the fictional disease in terms of the real—that is, really imagined—“threats posed to both individual and national bodies by the transpacific circulation of volatile airborne chemicals and microorganisms.”51 And yet the novel spares its protagonist from being conflated with a disease, allowing her to be Chinese but not a virus.52 It would be possible to dismiss this aspect of Severance as a naive kind of wishful thinking, or a misunderstanding of the insidious ways in which racialization works, but we could also read this counterfactual reality as an imaginative loosening of a “lethal viral-racial knot.”53 Among the many things Candace has to do in order to stay alive, dealing with an intensified climate of anti-Asianism at least is not on her list of worries. The way the pandemic’s infection by racialization fails to be total means that the environment Candace has to survive in is, in this one regard, a little less toxic.
Breathing in Common
Ultimately, the fact that Shen Fever is transmitted through the air means that it is contracted through one of the most basic actions keeping us alive. For who, among us, is not a breather? Timothy Choy asks this question in his work on the politics of air in Hong Kong, borrowing the term “breather” from environmental economics, where it refers to “those who accrue the unaccounted-for costs that attend the production and consumption of goods and services, such as the injuries, medical expenses, and changes in climate and ecosystems.”54 Breathers pay for the externalities that are not accounted for in calculating, for instance, the production costs of goods whose manufacturing pollutes the environment. As a variable for an abstract social cost, Choy suggests that breather functions like Marx’s worker, “a vocative meant to figure a role in a particular kind of relation, one occupied in common by multiple forms of human and nonhuman life.”55 In this way, terms like air, atmosphere, and breather orient us toward a common condition without denying stratifications and differentiations, thus obviating some of the usual traps of universality and particularity. “The commons of breathing, in other words, is not one of equivalence but of partial connection, uneven distribution, and potential resonance.”56Severance makes clear how hard it is to account for these costs and, at the same time, that we are all breathers—not all by any means bearing the same burdens, but none of us immune to capitalism’s depredations of the atmosphere.
Notes
First quote in Jennifer Day, “Ling Ma, Author of Zombie Pandemic Novel Severance, Wins Whiting Award,” Chicago Tribune, 25 March 2020, https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-books-ling-ma-whiting-award-0325-20200325-iklv6daldvdinout5rmkdis4dq-story.html. Second quote in Madeline Day, “Apocalyptic Office Novel: An Interview with Ling Ma,” Paris Review, 22 August 2018, https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/08/22/apocalyptic-office-novel-an-interview-with-ling-ma/.
Ling Ma, Severance (New York, 2018), 85. Hereafter cited parenthetically in text.
Peter Sloterdijk, Terror From the Air, trans. Amy Patton and Steven Corcoran (Los Angeles, 2009).
Timothy Choy and Jerry Zee, “Condition—Suspension,” Cultural Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2015): 211. In addition to sources cited in this essay, see Tobias Menely, “Anthropocene Air,” minnesota review 83 (2014): 93–101. For work focused on affect, another prominent approach in scholarship on atmosphere, see Ben Anderson, “Affective Atmospheres,” Emotion, Space and Society 2, no. 2 (2009): 77–81; and Kathleen Stewart, “Atmospheric Attunements,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 29 (2011): 445–53.
For more on the way atmospheres are unpredictably co-constituted, see Dora Zhang, “Notes on Atmosphere,” Qui Parle 27, no. 1 (2018): 121–55.
Neel Ahuja, “Intimate Atmospheres: Queer Theory in a Time of Extinctions,” GLQ 21, nos. 2–3 (2015): 367.
I have relied here principally on Robert G. Wallace, Dead Epidemiologists: On the Origins of COVID-19 (New York, 2020), especially “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” co-written with “human geographer Alex Liebman, disease ecologist Luis Fernando Chaves, and mathematical epidemiologist Rodrick Wallace,” 42–57. See also John Vidal, “Destruction of Habitat and Loss of Biodiversity Are Creating the Perfect Conditions for Diseases like COVID-19 to Emerge,” Ensia, 17 March 2020, https://ensia.com/features/COVID-19-coronavirus-biodiversity-planetary-health-zoonoses/; and Laura Spinney, “It Takes a Whole World to Create a New Virus, Not Just China,” Guardian, 25 March 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/25/new-virus-china-covid-19-food-markets.
This is anthropologist Kim Fortun’s term to describe a period of “deteriorating industrial infrastructure, landscapes dotted with toxic waste ponds, climate instability, [and] incredible imbrication of commercial interest in knowledge production, in legal decisions, in governance at all scales”; “From Latour to Late Industrialism,” HAU: Journal of Ethnography 4, no. 1 (2014): 310. Fortun symbolically dates the period where industrial disasters are normal and common to the Bhopal disaster in 1984, when hundreds of thousands were exposed to a highly toxic gas used in making pesticides at a Union Carbide factory. The industrial order “privilege[s] production, products, property, and boundaries—in a way that systematically discounts transboundary migration (of toxic chemicals across the fencelines of factories or out of products like carpets, plastic bottles, or electronics) and trespass (into human and other bodies, usually…also considered bounded and quite immune to environmental insult)” (313).
Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC, 2011), 101.
Ibid., 54.
See Rebecca N. Liu, “The Asian American Contract: On Useful Labor and Social Reproduction in Severance and Minari,” American Literature 96, no. 3 (2024): 473–99; and Aanchal Saraf, “Global Racial Capitalism and the Asian American Zombie in Ling Ma’s Severance,” Studies in the Fantastic 7 (2019): 12–23. Saraf briefly discusses the travel ban on citizens of Asian countries in the novel in terms of a broader legacy of racialized exclusion vis-à-vis Asian labor (15–16). More broadly on the centrality of economic conditions to Asian racialization, see Colleen Lye, America’s Asia: Racial Form and American Literature, 1893–1945 (Princeton, 2004); and Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham, NC, 2016).
This has been documented in many studies. See, for instance, Sean Darling-Hammond et al., “After ‘The China Virus’ Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health Education Behavior 47, no. 6 (December 2020): 870–79. “China virus” and “Chinese virus” were both commonly used during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I will use them interchangeably in this essay.
For a reading of the zombie in Severance in relation to naturalism, see Hsuan L. Hsu and Bryan Yazell, “Naturalist Compulsion, Racial Divides, and the Time-Loop Zombie,” CR: The New Centennial Review 20, no. 3 (2020): 23–46.
Quoted in Michael Schaub, “‘Office Politics Is, to Some Degree, Horrifying’—Ling Ma On Her Horror-Satire ‘Severance,’” Los Angeles Times, 24 August 2018, https://www.latimes.com/books/la-ca-jc-ling-ma-20180824-story.html.
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock,” in Prufrock and Other Observations (London, 1917), 10; Charles Dickens, Bleak House (London, 1853), 1. See also George Yeats, “‘Dirty Air’: Little Dorrit’s Atmosphere,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 66, no. 3 (2011): 328–54, for a discussion of Dickens in the context of not only industrial pollution but also nineteenth-century cholera epidemics and Victorian theories of miasma.
This reading is inspired by the kind of atmospheric connections within and across texts made by Jesse Oak Taylor in The Sky of Our Manufacture: London Fog from Dickens to Woolf (Charlottesville, 2016).
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 100. Berlant theorizes slow death with the so-called obesity epidemic as a case study, a phenomenon that differs in many ways from the pandemic depicted in Severance. Nevertheless, I find many aspects of Berlant’s discussion of the forms of crisis subjectivity shaped by slow death useful in understanding the novel’s crisis environment.
In an interview, Ma describes many of her friends living without healthcare and “working to live” in their 20s and, in their 30s, still trying to pay down student loans, noting that many of these frustrations coalesce in Candace. Quoted in Michael Schaub, “‘Office Politics.’”
Jean-Thomas Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics (Durham, NC, 2022), 9–10. Insofar as these conditions of increased precarity include worsening air, Severance can be placed in what Tremblay calls a “crisis in breathing” that began in the 1970s, with increased pollution and the weaponization and monetization of air and breath.
Bob, the group’s self-appointed leader, ends up keeping Candace imprisoned at the Facility after he learns she is pregnant, seeing her unborn child as evidence that the group’s survival has been divinely ordained. She decides at the end to escape, after a visitation from the ghost of her mother, in order to protect her unborn child. Her decisive action at the end represents a break from the modes of “coasting, cruising, or drifting” through which she inhabits the world for most of the novel; Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 63. These modes are characterized by what Berlant calls “lateral” or “interruptive” agency, an alternative to the more familiar conceptualization of sovereignty as intentional acts of decision-making (100, 18).
As Jane Hu writes, “at the end of the world, Candace continues to work not because it is socially productive or financially necessary, but because it is personally, indeed psychically grounding. The office has the potential for salvation, however temporary”; “The Office at the End of the World,” New Republic, 12 October 2018, https://newrepublic.com/article/151682/office-end-world. For an alternative reading of Candace’s obligation to remain at work, see Liu, “The Asian American Contract.”
Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 100.
Ibid., 100–101.
Ibid., 54.
In China, the hukou system of household registration means that residency status determines access to education, housing, healthcare, and social services. Those with an urban hukou have great advantages relative to those with rural ones, but an urban hukou is often difficult to obtain for those from the countryside, even if they have lived and worked in a city for many years. For accounts of the lives of migrant workers that could be read complementarily with Severance, see Yuan Yang, Private Revolutions: Four Women Face China’s New Social Order (New York, 2024); and Leslie T. Chang, Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China (New York, 2009). Although Candace catches only a glimpse of the worker dormitories in her tour of the Shenzhen printing factory and quickly moves on, evincing little curiosity, these books fill in the details of the lives in those quarters.
Victoria Nguyen, “Breathless in Beijing: Aerial Attunements and China’s New Respiratory Publics,” Engaging Science, Technology, and Society 6 (2020): 442. Nguyen is referring to the twin sources of industrial manufacturing and rising emissions from automobiles with the emergence of a consumer middle class. See also Lijian Han et al., “Multicontaminant Air Pollution in Chinese Cities,” Bulletin of the World Health Organization 96, no. 4 (2018): 233–42.
Tremblay writes, “As long as we breathe, and as long as we’re porous, we cannot fully shield ourselves from airborne toxins and toxicants as well as other ambient threats”; Breathing Aesthetics, 1.
Nguyen, “Breathless in Beijing,” 443.
Tim Choy, Ecologies of Comparison: An Ethnography of Endangerment in Hong Kong (Durham, NC, 2011), 165. Choy observes that Hong Kong relocated its industrial zones across the strait to Guangdong, in mainland China, in an effort to improve its air quality. “But then the pollution comes back in those notorious winter winds” (159).
Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Thousand Oaks, CA, 1992), 23.
Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham, NC, 2012), 167. Chen is writing about the 2007 panic over lead in Chinese-made toys, which I discuss further below. See also Tremblay’s critique of an equalizing model of environmental hazards in Breathing Aesthetics, 7.
Jerry Zee, “Surface and Retreat: The China Virus in Three Lunar Years,” English Language Notes 61, no. 1 (2023): 37.
Andrew Liu, “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market,” n+1, 20 March 2020, https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/chinese-virus-world-market/.
Ibid.
Wallace, “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” 48.
Ibid., 49. See also Liu, “‘Chinese Virus,’ World Market,” for a discussion of the way pangolin consumption was painted in the early days of the pandemic as either part of traditional Chinese medicine and thus a primitive custom or part of the “exotic and peculiar tastes” of local cuisine.
Wallace, “COVID-19 and Circuits of Capital,” 49.
Eamon Whalen, “The Unemployed Epidemiologist Who Predicted the Pandemic,” The Nation, 6/13 September 2021, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/rob-wallace-profile/. Robert G. Wallace co-edited a technical book with Rodrick Wallace called Neoliberal Ebola: Modeling Disease Emergence from Finance to Forest and Farm (Cham, 2016).
After the World Health Organization’s warning about nomenclature on 11 February 2020, on 6 March 2020, Mike Pompeo, then Secretary of State, used the term “Chinese virus” in several television interviews. On 8 March, there was a 650 percent increase (compared to highest-reported prior daily average) in Twitter retweets with terms “Chinese virus,” “Wuhan virus,” “Chinese coronavirus,” and “Wuhan coronavirus.” And on 9 March there was an 800 percent increase (compared to prior day) in the number of online news articles using stigmatizing terminology. Then-president Donald Trump also repeatedly used these terms in public statements starting in March 2020. See Hammond et al., “After ‘The China Virus’ Went Viral,” 871.
Hsuan L. Hsu, The Smell of Risk: Environmental Disparities and Olfactory Aesthetics (New York, 2020), 115.
Ibid., 116. Hsu cites San Francisco’s “pure air laws,” which mandated at least five hundred cubic feet of air for each person dwelling in a room or apartment and were enforced exclusively against Chinese tenants. See also Nayan Shah, Contagious Divides: Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s Chinatown (Berkeley, 2001).
Michael Ziser and Julie Sze, “Climate Change, Environmental Aesthetics, and Global Environmental Justice Cultural Studies,” Discourse 29, nos. 2/3 (2007): 394. They cite the US media’s fascination with air quality and smog during the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing as one prominent example.
Joseph Kahn and Jim Yardley, “As China Roars, Pollution Reaches Deadly Extremes,” New York Times, 26 August 2007.
Chen, Animacies, 164. Saraf also connects Shen Fever to the 2007 lead panic. See “Global Racial Capitalism,” 16.
Chen, Animacies, 165.
Ibid.
Hsu, The Smell of Risk, 118.
Zee, “Surface and Retreat,” 31.
Ibid., 30.
Racism has been figured in atmospheric terms by a number of thinkers. Christina Sharpe has influentially theorized antiblackness as “the weather” in In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC, 2016). Kristen Simmons uses “settler atmospherics” to describe “the imbrications of U.S. militarism, industrialism, and capitalism” as they’re “felt on indigenous lands and through indigenous bodies.” “Settler Atmospherics,” Fieldsights, 20 November 2017, https://culanth.org/fieldsights/settler-atmospherics. 2020 was of course also the year of widespread protests after the murder of George Floyd, with “I can’t breathe” as a rallying cry. See Tremblay, Breathing Aesthetics, for an overview of breath and respiration “as both a record of injury and a political vernacular” in Black studies (5–7).
Hsu, The Smell of Risk, 118, emphasis removed.
I am referring to the signs reading “I am not a virus” carried by many Asian demonstrators since 2020. As Zee writes, the phrase “underscores the wish for the kind of sovereignty that one would need to have to be able to set the terms by which one is addressed”; “Surface and Retreat,” 37. At the same time, he rightly cautions against the kind of “love” promulgated by racial liberalism as an antidote to “Asian hate.”
Zee, “Surface and Retreat,” 32.
Choy, Ecologies of Comparison, 145–46.
Tim Choy, “Externality, Breathers, Conspiracy: Forms for Atmospheric Reckoning,” in Reactivating Elements: Chemistry, Ecology, Practice, ed. Dimitris Papadopoulos, María Puig de la Bellacasa, and Natasha Myers (Durham, NC, 2021), 241.
Ibid.
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