Response 1: “Many pasts to access”: Recent Dystopian Fiction by Asian North American Women Writers

In her conversation with critic Sherryl Vint and scholars Rocío Carrasco and Irene López Rodríguez, Chinese Canadian author Larissa Lai points out that “the future can only come out of the past, but we have many pasts to access.” I take my cue from this perspicacious comment on what I believe is one of the outstanding features of utopian/dystopian fiction of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries, the substantial contribution of authors from the Global South and from diasporan communities in the Global North to a growing corpus of dreams for a better future, or else of nightmarish accounts of our present. In line with Caroline Edwards (2023), I see these narratives as so many stepping stones in a progressive decolonization of utopian/dystopian discourses. I would argue that it is indeed the kernel of “difference” at the center of these fictions that will affect life-changing revelations, including the exposure of the extreme imbalances derived from the various colonial pasts that remain constitutive of late-capitalist societies. However, one can also identify yet another kind of difference being addressed in recent dystopian fiction, not just colonialism but also gender. For Susan Watkins, male-authored post-apocalyptic fiction all too often is colored by a nostalgic tinge, a wish to return to the status-quo as soon as possible after trauma. In contrast, Watkins argues, contemporary women writers’ works analyze “the ways in which patriarchy and neo-colonialism are intrinsically implicated in the disasters they envision. Rather than nostalgia and restoration after such a disaster, they successfully transform and rewrite the apocalyptic genre to imagine different possible futures for humanity post-apocalypse (Watkins 2020, 12).I turn to Asian North American women writers’ texts in order to pursue some of these threads laid out by both Watkins and Edwards, yet also depart from them in several ways, particularly in my selected corpus. In this short response to the many productive thoughts inspired by the conversation between Lai and Vint, I focus on four recent dystopian novels published by Asian North American women writers that imagine postapocalyptic worlds after a global disaster, be it a plague, a pandemic, or a deep socioeconomic crisis. Their interrogations of Asianness (and/or gender) in the West have been drawn from both sides of the forty-ninth parallel, two US-located and two Canadian. Chronologically, too, these texts are differently placed on the boundaries of those real traumatic events that unfolded globally during the COVID-19 pandemic. Ling Ma’s Severance and Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu were both released in 2018, whereas Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World dates from 2020 and Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts from 2022.All of them, I contend, attest and respond to the rise of anti-Asian hatred connected more generally to the economic rivalry between China and the West, and more specifically in the wake of the recent COVID-19 pandemic. As Perng and Dhaliwal have rightly pointed out, the rise of anti-Asian racism in North America in 2020 and 2021 “can be conceptualized as a second public health crisis” (Perng and Dhaliwal 2022, 379); in fact, thousands of anti-Asian racist incidents were documented in the United States alone in the early months of the pandemic (Le et al. 2020, 1371). In addition, prominent US politicians played a part in demonizing Asian-descended citizens by referring to COVID-19 as the Wuhan or Chinese virus, “part of a larger and familiar political strategy of demonizing foreigners as threatening and dangerous” (Reny and Barreto 2022, 209). These strategies built on a long history of anti-Asian sentiments and discrimination that included, for example, the internment of Japanese North Americans in camps during World War II, to name but one of the most infamous historical episodes that evidence the racist treatment of Asians as “the Yellow Peril.”Ling Ma’s first novel, Severance, has been described in a review for World Literature Today as “a zombie apocalypse tale, a workplace comedy, and a classic coming-of-age story all in one” (McManus 2022, 7).1 While these elements might appear to be rather disparate, they actually come together seamlessly as a critique of late-stage global capitalism from the perspective of a young migrant woman, Candace Chen. As a child Candace is left behind with her grandmother and extended family in China, a time she remembers with great nostalgia, while her parents gain a footing in the United States’ competitive job market. Once her parents send for her, she loses contact with her Chinese relatives; now that they have passed away, Candace feels unmoored. She holds an uninspiring job in which she oversees the routine minutiae of production for a Manhattan publishing house that trades in Bibles, and whose manufacturing center is in China. Meanwhile, New York City is succumbing to the Shen Fever, a disease that turns sufferers into nonviolent zombies that keep repeating the same tasks until death. This is an apt metaphor for racial capitalism’s biopolitical demands, imposed by an economic system designed to churn out an endless chain of consumer goods. Candace remains mostly unaware and later simply indifferent to the disease’s emptying of the city. Having absorbed uncritically her parents’ “immigrant code,” she accepts being a cog in the machine; in a sense, she is, while disease-free, already a zombie. The novel is thus an ironical coming-of-age story, but Candace’s awakening is also the readers’, as we grow more fully aware of the ongoing extraction of labor from the racialized bodies undergirding Western civilization.Like other feminist dystopias Severance does leave some room for hope in Candace’s pregnancy as a new beginning of both her kin and of humanity—and in this respect Ma’s novel parallels some of Larissa Lai’s creative concerns. In Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002), protagonist Miranda Ching evades the oppression of a corporate-run dystopian world by joining the Sonias, a community of female clones who have mastered female fertility without male insemination. Miranda’s relationship to the Sonia “Evie” as well as her eventual pregnancy set up what Lai presents as another way of being and living in our world. The Tiger Flu (2018) as well examines the making of a community. Indeed while Ling Ma’s Severance is about being unconnected, Lai’s fiction is characteristically about connectedness as a way (or indeed, the only way) to resist oppression. The Tiger Flu contrasts two communities in the midst of a severe crisis: Salt Water City is ravaged by a human-engineered virus, and Grist Village, an all-female clandestine society, is threatened both by the spread of the pandemic and by the extinction of the so-called Gristies’ parthenogenic capacities. As Calvo-Pascual (2023) points out, Lai’s novel juxtaposes two ways of dealing with the crisis: Salt Water City’s response, grounded in a Cartesian notion of the mind/body split, encourages its citizens avoid the infection of the flesh by choosing a “virtual” life by uploading their bodyless minds into a storage facility run by large, male-controlled corporations.In contrast, the Grist Village protagonist, Kirilow Groundsel, perceives that their intentional separation from others has threatened their biological viability. She therefore guides her community toward acceptance of a more liberal relationality and an appreciation of embodied difference. Unlike Lai’s previous novel, Salt Fish Girl, and Ling Ma’s Severance, The Tiger Flu does not posit reproductive futurity as a solution to the crisis, resisting the pull of a reprocentric narrative (Klimenko 2020, 174–75); there is no pregnant young woman standing for the future of humanity. Instead, the fifteen-year-old Kora, a Salt Water City citizen who is a genetic descendant of the Grist clones, is transformed into a tree capable of keeping the women’s memories and of growing the organs the Gristies need for survival. In other words, the solution to the conundrum of survival is not “less body,” but a different embodiment; not less materiality, but a closer relation to other kinds of matter, including the other-than-human. Lai’s eco-queer imaginary in The Tiger Flu affirms her proposal for “a relationship to planetary alterity as one [that] does not place human beings at the center of knowledge or at the center of the reproduction of life, but only as one set of participants among many within it” (Lai 2018b, 101). The plant-centered narrative experiment at the novel’s conclusion aligns with other fictional human/animal associations in Lai’s writing, particularly the fish/human alignments in Salt Fish Girl and the fox/human associations in her earlier When Fox is a Thousand. Together, these novels represent a sustained endeavor to remind us, as in the interview above, of “other ways of being on the land, other ways of inhabiting the space, other ways of theorizing what it means to be human through inter-relationality with non-human species.”2 Each creative text exemplifies her notion of “insurgent utopias” as “the combined action of idealistic thought, critical thought, and narrative experiment” (Lai 2018b, 97), which allow her to resist essentialist notions of Asianness and to envision other and more sustainable forms of life.Of these Asian North American women’s dystopias, Saleema Nawaz’s Songs for the End of the World (2020) focuses most closely on the evolution of a viral pandemic (the so-called ARAMIS, or “Acute Respiratory and Muscular Inflammatory Syndrome” virus), including the pandemic’s impacts on people’s physical and psychological reactions and coping strategies. An interview appended to the novel reveals that Nawaz’s initial inspiration for Songs dates as far back as 2012; she spent the better part of seven years researching viral epidemiology and reviewing the emergency plans of cities across North America. The manuscript was completed in 2019, and in response to the emerging COVID-19 pandemic around the globe the publishers pushed forward an electronic launch in early 2020.Songs for the End of the World follows for about six months (July to December 2020) the lives of several loosely related persons of different racializations, social backgrounds, and sexual orientations. Its non-linear narrative points of view shift from character to character, and the plot takes detours to recount incidents occurring much earlier (between 1999 and 2016) in order to make the characters’ life choices and personalities more easily understandable. These two characteristics—the novel’s choral presentation of diversity and its non-linearity—recall similar strategies (Roy 2022) in Emily St. John Mandel’s masterful Station Eleven (2014). While Mandel’s work is interested in how to restart the world, Nawaz’s novel focuses on how we got to this point: what warning signs we missed; how we dealt with the catastrophe. It does not look forward to its aftermath. For anyone who like myself read this story in 2020, Nawaz’s account is horrifyingly realistic and prescient in its description of the wide range of our responses to the crisis, ranging from altruism to misanthropy and reclusiveness.The heart of the narrative lies with the mystery of the so-called ARAMIS Girl, an Asian woman who is alleged to be the source of the plague. This allegation unleashes paranoid anti-Asian discourses and aggressions. But Songs for the End of the World stresses interdependencies and relationalities in troubled times, the networks of siblings, colleagues, lovers, and acquaintances who are connected to the girl. In stressing these relationships, Nawaz, like Lai, challenges restrictive concepts of kin or family, and emphasizes community-driven priorities that may ensure future human survival.Celeste Ng’s Our Missing Hearts (2022) returns us to the isolated hero/ine and nuclear family (reminiscent of Ling Ma’s fiction) of twelve-year-old Bird Gardner, who decides to find out why his mother had left. Bird’s life is strained, living in a dreary apartment with a silent father who used to be a professor, and now shelves books in the Harvard library system. Bird’s mother, Margaret Gardner, had been a Chinese-American poet who authored an obscure book of poetry whose title, surprisingly, had become a popular slogan for protesters against a nationalist and racist regime. This government emerges following a worldwide economic breakdown allegedly caused by Chinese market manipulation, and promotes anti-Asian hatred and the removal of Asian children from the care of supposedly “unsuitable” parents. Recognizing the risk for her mixed-race family, Margaret becomes a fugitive, cutting off all ties and communications; at the same time, she embarks on her own quest to interview all parents whose lives are broken by the removal of their children, those “missing hearts” of the title. Bird’s resilient friend Sadie, another separated child determined to find her family, guides the young boy through the anti-Asian hatred raging in the streets as he follows clues left behind by his mother. The remarkable role assigned by Ng to libraries and librarians, who form an underground record-keeping network preserving public memories from erasure by the regime, places Our Missing Hearts alongside such masterpieces as Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), in which each character memorizes one book, word by word, to preserve it for future generations. Like Lai, Ng underlines the power of diverse stories to access multiple pasts and build sustainable futures, in line with Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous warning against the dangers of a single story (Adichie 2009).Critic Sherryl Vint’s rationale regarding how we currently look at our post-pandemic world bears repeating: “Not only has the [COVID-19] pandemic shown us that humanity is entwined with other species—the microbial virus, the bats from which this zoonotic disease migrated—but its uneven effects on communities stratified by race and class make starkly visible the effects of economic discrimination” (Vint 2021, 199). The four novels discussed in this essay clearly convey these two messages. And these novelists also, as Vint and Lai argue in their interview, extend the unfinished projects of earlier utopian/dystopian feminist writing generally, by infusing and enlivening their work with an appreciation and embrace of the diversity of human and other than human life, and by projecting equally heterogeneous futurities.