severance, ling ma

It is too depressing, too soul-crushingly sad, to reminisce. The past is a black hole, cut into the present day like a wound, and if you come too close, you can get sucked in. You have to keep moving.

Ling Ma, Severance

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sheila heti pure colour \\ ray bradbury zen in the art of writing \\ sheila heti pure colour \\ marie howe interviewed by victoria redel for bomb magazine \\ ling ma severance 

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Severance by Ling Ma, 2018 / Severance by Dan Erickson, 2022

Just because you’re adequately good at something doesn’t mean that’s what you should do.

— Ling Ma, Severance

It doesn't take much to come into your own; all it takes is someones gaze. It's not totally accurate to say that I felt seen. It was more that: Beheld by her, I learned how to become myself. Her interest actualized me.

Ling Ma, “G” from Bliss Montage

severance, ling ma

It was the anonymity. He wanted to be unknown, unpossessed by others' knowledge of him. That was freedom.

Ling Ma, Severance

ling ma bliss montage: “peking duck”

kofi

Severance, flip phones, far from home: the impossibility of opting out 

I finished Severance by Ling Ma about a week ago. I loved it so much. I am not in school anymore and I am having a hard time trying to fulfill my desire for intellectual conversation. It’s not like I’m not learning anymore. I’m learning so much. These days, I am filling in the gaps of my learning in the sections of life that I chose to put off while prioritizing academia. I’m learning to take care of myself, complete tasks, hold myself accountable, and generally survive. It is hard and I miss the conversations I would have in school that felt like they truly challenged and deepened my worldview. Reading has been a great solace to me in that way but it often feels lonely to read something and not get to discuss it with others. I can never simply read or watch something without wanting to dig in and discuss the implications. I like to use fiction to interrogate real things. I have so many thoughts about Severance and what it had me thinking about in my own life as I read it. I decided to write it down to at least converse with myself as I did so. I'm posting it online to see if anyone would want to engage in conversation with me as well. It is not in MLA or whatever. I’m not in school. I can write how I want. 

I think that the title of Severance is very layered. On the surface, it references the phenomenon of severance checks (payments given to terminated employees that are fired due to layoffs or retirement). The payments are based on the amount of time that an employee has worked for the company. Effectively, it aims to take care of the people that have taken care of the company until they can find new work. Severance describes how companies have cut long-term employees and these checks in order to maximize profits at the cost of minimizing quality. This seems to echo a larger trend that the novel revolves around: a cutting off (or severance) from our interconnectivity under our current systems of hetero-patriarchal white supremacist colonial capitalism. What a mouthful. But basically… Society is severing us from the things that make living meaningful, and for many, possible. 

The characters of the book all seem to be struggling with the desire to opt out of this system (who wouldn't want that?) The narrator, Candace, immigrated to Salt Lake City from Fuzhou as a child. This severance from her ancestry, culture, and family was done in aims of giving her a better life in the United States. In many ways, it was an action done by her parents in order to attempt to opt out of the struggles of life in Fuzhou, made increasingly difficult under global capitalism. Even so, the choice was really just opting into a new set of struggles. The book describes the complex effects of this immigration on Candace and her family. In addition, it describes the guilt of leaving and the burden of feeling as if you are in a country that despises you while you must constantly prove yourself to it.

Candace’s ex-boyfriend felt dehumanized by the working in corporate America and therefore lives on the fringes of the system, skimping by. He believes himself to be opting out of the system. In this quote, Candace interrogates his lifestyle.

“I know you too well. You live your life idealistically. You think it’s possible to opt out of the system. No regular income, no health insurance. You quit jobs on a dime. You think this is freedom but I still see the bare, painstakingly cheap way you live, the scrimping and saving, and that is not freedom either. You move in circumscribed circles. You move peripherally, on the margins of everything, pirating movies and eating dollar slices. I used to admire this about you, how fervently you clung to your beliefs—I called it integrity—but five years of watching you live this way has changed me. In this world, money is freedom. Opting out is not a real choice” (205).

The illusion of opting out is a privilege. Jonathan, unlike Candance, is American. This gives him the ability to exist in America without questioning or proving his belonging. He does not carry the weight of supporting his family or really anyone but himself. Even so, he barely manages that. Candace, not afforded many of Jonathan's privileges, works for in a corporate office. Jonathan, idealistic and blind to his own advantages, is consistently criticizing this choice.

I have always had dreams of opting out. I've spent much of my life dreaming of this. I think that part of why I went to college was to opt out of joining the workforce for four more years. I studied art because it seemed like that would be opting out of the monotony of having a Real Job. I bought a flip phone to opt out of smartphone addiction. I moved across the country to opt out of my family. 

Severance depicts a world-ending incurable pandemic. The illness is called Shen Fever and it is somewhat akin to a zombie apocalypse without the eating of humans. The sickness comes for everyone, even if it does demolish the areas with the least privileges first. In the end, everyone is susceptible. You cannot opt out. You cannot buy your way out of an incurable disease. 

You cannot buy your way out of climate change, even if you can avoid its consequences for longer. Sure, you may be privileged enough to be given the illusion of opting out but this planet is deeply, densely interconnected. You are not opting out. You are delaying the inevitable. 

Over the summer, I went to an anarchist bookstore in Philadelphia and bought a book called Meaningful Flesh: Reflections on Religion and Nature for a Queer Planet. I would read the essays on my breaks from work, trying to see if I could be someone that reads academic theory in my free time. It ended up being very dense and difficult to get through but it was incredibly interesting to me. I was reminded of the second essay of the text when reading Severance. It is called, “Irreverent Theology: On the Queer Ecology of Creation” by Jacob J. Erikson. The essay aims to queer our ideas of nature and matter with a theological lens. That is a massive oversimplification of the text but I don’t want to stray too much from my original point here. I just wanted to include a quote from the essay to gesture to how these concepts in Severance have resonances in so many areas of life.

 “For this particular nature-cultural moment, we must be irreverent of old stories and ideas in our constructive creativity. Ideas of pristine nature, untouched wilderness, essential selves, essential genders, and uncomplicated assumptions of desire and sexuality, deaden and violate the messy and embodied realities of creativity, embodied ecology, and enfleshed divinity” (74).

Collectively, we have attempted to sever ourselves from the environment that we are interwoven with, dependent on, and constantly in conversation with. The consequences are far-reaching and the effort is inevitably futile. You cannot sever yourself from the environment that sustains you. You are the environment.

On Saturday, I took an Uber home from my friend’s house and chatted with the driver. We talked about daylight savings and how stupid it is. Why make the sun go down sooner? I wish I could opt out of it, but then I’d be an hour early to every event from now until spring. I told him that I thought that the government was supposed to get rid of this system but apparently they were too busy committing genocides. We talked about Palestine and how clear it is that what is happening is devastating but how some people still blindly support Israel. We agreed that people have lost a fundamental part of their humanity: a severance from the part of themselves that sees innocent people dying and is devastated and outraged. In America, we have the choice to participate in these colonial ideologies,  push against them, or to not have an opinion (to “opt out"). It is an American privilege, the illusion of opting out of mass murder. None of us are separate from this conflict. Our tax dollars are being spent on the weapons that do the killing.

I am a white American. I have a large array of privileges that give me the illusions of choice. But at the end of the day, none of my choices have truly opted me out. At the end of the day, these severances have only handicapped me in other ways. I have gotten lost and missed appointments that I could have simply typed into Google Maps on a smartphone. I walked to urgent care by myself when I could have called my mom to pick me up if I didn’t move so far away. I carry the debt of my art degree and I will be making monthly payments from now until forever. I don’t have enough money to get out of an unhealthy living situation.  How free am I? How much have I opted out? You can opt out and be crushed by the weight of what it means to be alone, still dependent and existent within the system you’ve supposedly broken out of. But if you opt in, do you get sucked in? What choice is there?

“To live in a city is to take part in and to propagate its impossible systems. To wake up. To go to work in the morning. It is also to take pleasure in those systems because, otherwise, who could repeat the same routines, year in, year out?” (290).

In Severance, the fevered mindlessly repeat patterns. Their condition is an identifiable sickness. Yet, at the same time, Ma also gestures to the fact that it is not too different from the condition that we all share. Our daily repetition, often mindless, trying to find pleasure. The condition one must adopt to survive in this world. The sickness is not individual, it is collective. The cure is not individual, it is collective.

My coworker is moving home across the country after moving away from his family many years ago. He told me about how stressful the process has been for him. I could relate a lot to what he had said. The unsustainability of not having family closeby. The feeling of - what am I proving? The unsustainable nature of being alone and the sometimes equally unsustainable nature of family. Every choice seems to be a choice to sever yourself from one thing or sever yourself from another. Either way, the choice is rarely to come together. The deeper we just get into becoming a mess of severed pieces. 

I got a flip phone back in 2021 when I took a year off from college. At the time, I had fallen headfirst into a lot of the crushing realities that I had never really wanted to face. I was back home living with my family. I was coming to terms with my health, my sexuality, my lack of funds, my place in the world. I was cut off from my illusions of Making it Big and was faced with what Making it Small would entail. I was trying to shoulder the weight of the world that seemed to slowly be collapsing. I got a flip phone as an experiment, to see if I could do it, to see what it would feel like.  I wanted to know what it would be like to have to figure things out on my own, to be in silence, to be present in the moment that I was in. I wanted to stop opting out of being alive. 

About a month ago, I switched back to my smartphone on a whim. To see if I could, to see what it would feel like. It hasn’t solved anything. It hasn’t cured me. It has made my life easier in a lot of ways but harder in others. I miss the way I could walk around with a built-in excuse as to why I had not seen your email. I liked not having the pressure of every piece of knowledge at my constant disposal. I miss the way I felt I could walk around the world without trying to sever myself from it. I would walk in silence instead of trying to impose some soundtrack onto my reality, the soundtrack of the life I’d rather live.

A second chance doesn't mean you're in the clear. In many ways, it is the more difficult thing. Because a second chance means that you have to try harder. You must rise to the challenge without the blind optimism of ignorance.

— Ling Ma, Severance

“Do you think,” she asked one night, “that if they combined the two of us, we would make the perfect woman?” “Am I lacking in some way?” I asked. “Are you?” She wouldn’t stop, I thought, until she had totally consumed me. I’d end up in her digestive tract, as she metabolized my best qualities and discarded the rest.

"G" - Bliss Montage by Ling Ma

I keep my heart vacant

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