How zombie dystopian lit (and a pandemic) helped me finally get over New York
2020 in books I finally got around to reading (Part I)
I began keeping a list of what I read in 2011, when, thanks to the plenitude of the New York Public Library and the quotidian rite of uninterrupted time in the form of long subway commutes, I resumed the habit of reading as I had as a child - constantly and feverishly and unabashedly. Relieved of the chore of assigned reading for the first time in ten years, I cherished the daily hours of anonymity and delighted in this return to fiction and the ability to choose what I wanted to read and when. Cell service on the subway was still years away, as was the need to carry a laptop to and from work, meaning I never left home without a book in my bag. I was young, and often tipsy, and therefore not annoyed by a 20 minute wait for the F train at 10:15 at night, as long as there was a column to lean against as I opened my book to the page I had dog-eared thirteen hours earlier upon my arrival to the 48th floor of the Grace Building, the elevator’s ding marking the end of the time that was my own. Returning to my book on my evening commute was a way of retreating into myself and the comfort of home when my apartment was still a borough and a river-crossing and a hurried late-night walk away.
It’s now obvious to me that reading - and keeping track of what I read - was not just a way of passing the time, but an overachiever’s attempt to extract from a hobby a quantitative measure of accomplishment, now that it seemed I left no mark on the world beyond printing and arranging documents in binders in chronological order. I had wanted to be a young professional in New York since I was approximately five years old. I was still thrilled by the trappings of adulthood that were finally available to me. Clomping through Bryant Park in heels to buy a $13 salad! The Equinox locker room! A New Yorker subscription! An unlimited MetroCard! And yet. Despite the tremendous relief of being freed from academic obligation, I felt unmoored, as evidenced by the first book I recorded on my post-college reading list—The Unbearable Lightness of Being. On lonely Sundays I would wander Brooklyn, feeling more like an observer of adulthood than a participant. Aside from moments of alcohol-infused revelry and the endorphin rush of a Zumba class, reading became the one activity that could quell my nascent ennui—my fear that my “life” would now forever be forced to exist on the margins of time spent working and commuting and exercising. As long as I had a book to read, I could forgive myself for not having enough weekend plans and could escape the lurking loneliness I was ashamed to admit to anyone. While I waited for my life to begin—and for lots of G trains to arrive—reading became my primary coping mechanism for filling that now-familiar sense of adult-in-a-capitalist-grind-induced emptiness.
It’s in this moment, after another long lonely year of walking and reading and working, that I find myself staring at The List. Though my own 2020 was, in many ways, monumental, I can’t shake the fear that a year—the stuff that gives it substance and not just shape—was lost. But I did read. With bookstores and the library closed, I read books on my bookshelf that had been sitting there for months and years (but no, not Infinite Jest). What I couldn’t have known when I started keeping The List ten years ago was that The List would itself come to tell a story. Visible only in hindsight, The List now tells the story of how what I read simultaneously shaped and reflected me in the intervening decade. I turn back to The List in this moment where I’m grappling with a sort of formless grief triggered by the “loss” of this last year spent at home (and the accompanying guilt for feeling any kind of grief at all in a year when I gained so much more than I lost). Perhaps I’m trying to elicit some sort of story arc from the year that I did have. Perhaps I’m indulging in self-congratulation for having finally fallen fully in love with Virginia Woolf. Perhaps it feels like I have nothing else to write about after a year at home. The metaphor is cringey, but with its formal documentation of what I chose to read in the last year, The List takes on the role of a stamp-filled passport. (In reflecting on reading in last year, it’s hard to escape the cheery cliches of elementary school library decor - “Get Lost In A Book!” “Reading Gives Us Some Place To Go When We Have To Stay Where We Are!”) In these early editions of Turtleneck Season, I’m revisiting the List in an effort to remind (convince?) myself that reading books was more than just a way of passing the time in 2020—it shaped my year as much as it filled it. Making peace with how I spent my 32nd year is obviously some form of healing, but I hope it also provides an (albeit self-justifying) argument for reading books, even when—or especially when—we feel our attention spans are zapped or overloaded by content.
It is still bewildering to me that the first book I read in 2020 was a dystopian satire, in which a fictional virus of Chinese origin, “Shen Fever,” sparks a pandemic that leads to the collapse of society. In Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, a recognizable New York City slowly grinds to a halt, as midtown empties, New Yorkers flee, and our narrator finds herself surviving off of Postmates deliveries and, ultimately, snacks from her office’s pantry, before she too flees the city in a yellow taxi cab.
“The End begins before you are even aware of it,” writes Ma in the first sentence of the first chapter, a sentence that slipped past me then, but which strikes me now as ominously synchronistic. Indeed, I was myself blissfully unaware that The End of life as we knew it had already begun halfway around the world when, alone for the first time in over 24 hours after ringing in the New Year the night before, I read that sentence on the couch of my apartment in Los Angeles, while waiting for Indian food to arrive. As tempting as it is to attribute my decision to finally pick up Severance the day after the WHO first learned of a series of mysterious pneumonia cases in Wuhan to some form of prescience or predestiny, such an attribution surely ascribes too much meaning to what was merely just an inevitable convergence of a pandemic and pandemic lit.
In other words, it seems uncritical to chalk Severance’s appearance in my path on January 1, 2020 up to some kind of kismet when our society has long harbored a taste for this kind of zombie disaster porn. A dark-humored satire filtered through refreshingly unpretentious prose that also somehow manages to imbue a zombie plotline with emotional depth? Of course this book was a critically-reviewed best seller! Even when the notion of a twelve-month quarantine was still unfathomable to me, screenwriters and novelists were already as attuned as public health experts to the inexorable probability of a pandemic that could doom our cities and disrupt our supply chains, that we were hurtling towards it. And despite their having little to no effect on our level of preparation for such catastrophe, our culture is addicted to these narratives, and drawn to playing out what happens when we are left with only the skeletons of infrastructure and our instincts for survival.
That being said, personally I’m not drawn to these narratives. I was traumatized by an in-flight screening of Outbreak, the 1995 medical disaster film, on a flight from Dallas to Newark when I was eight years old. I have been a dystopiaphobe and hypochondriac ever since. I don’t generally enjoy, or even read dystopian fiction, and so my decision to finally pick up Severance on New Year’s Day was so out-of-character that I can only attribute it to something far more mundane - its book jacket. Printed in what is best described as “millennial pink,” (a shade closer to bubble gum than Elif Batuman’s 2017 novel The Idiot), FS&G’s decision had its intended eye-grabbing effect, and I registered the presence of Severance in bookstores around town for more than a year before I finally got around to reading it. Somehow, the pink jacket softened the threat of looming dystopia, and with its promise of a female author and narrator and its description as “satire”, I unconsciously came to associate it with other late-capitalist novels featuring malcontent millennial protagonesses - Ottessa Moshfehg’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and Catherine Lacey’s The Answers. And so, when I saw the book in a Little Free Library on a neighborhood walk in 2019, my tsundoku1 tendencies got the better of me and I took Severance home with me.
It’s reductive to call Severance zombie dystopian lit. Severance is a satire that, filled with familiar brand names, prods at late-stage capitalism, but humor aside, explores themes as wide-ranging as Asian-American identity, the immigrant experience, the romance of New York, and manifest destiny. Indeed, before it resonated with me as a pandemic novel after-the-fact, Severance struck me first as both a paean to the mythology of being young in New York, and a familiar indictment of its lonely capitalist trap:
“Me, nothing really weighed on me, nothing unique. Me, I held down an office job and fiddled around with photography when the moon hit Gowanus right. Or something like that, the usual ways of justifying your life, of passing time. With the money I made, I bought Shiseido facial exfoliants, Blue Bottle coffee, Uniqlo cashmere,” reflects the narrator Candace, when considering whether to leave New York with her then-boyfriend, even before the pandemic hits.
Candace spends her first unemployed summer in New York as I did, “walking around aimlessly, without anywhere to go, anything to do,” looking into windows and imagining being a part of others’ lives. Candace carries a camera on her walks and starts a photo blog under the handle NY Ghost.
“Instead of wasting time with others, I began to waste time alone. I walked. I had a routine.”
So did I. On warm summer nights when I didn’t have plans and couldn’t face my stifling apartment and the Craigslist roommates, I would walk home from midtown along the entire length of Central Park to 112th street, listening to Vampire Weekend’s new album on repeat. It was the soundtrack of the life in New York I was still hoping to find. But that’s New York, isnt it? Wandering around trying to find it—and stumbling into bars and sublets and relationships along the way—is kind of what New York, and its unique density of random opportunity, is all about. At least until a pandemic hits.
Severance jumps back and forth between the present and the past, but Ma makes Candace’s exodus from New York the fault line of her narrative, rather than the pandemic. With the city miles behind her, Candace’s flashbacks to her life in New York straddle the Before Times and the aftermath of Shen Fever; the great rupture for Candace is not the disruption of the pandemic, but leaving New York.
While it was the pre-pandemic descriptions of New York that first resonated (they feel realist more than satirical), it was the post-pandemic depictions of New York that haunted me. My initial impressions preserved in a text to Ben, who had dropped me off at home a few hours earlier. “I’m 75 pages into Severance and it’s gripping and terrifying and resonant and depressing.” I had no idea how close we were to experiencing our own version of Shen Fever, and asking ourselves the question posed by the book jacket: “Is it the end of the world, or just another day at the office?”
Even on the eve of vaccination, that question still rings in my ears, as I imagine it does for so many other workers who, one day last March, brought home their computers and keyboards and maybe some desk supplies, and just kept working. We were the lucky ones, the ones who transitioned into doing our work from home, and who retained our salaries, without having to face any danger on the front lines. I was one of the especially lucky ones, who narrowly avoided having children at home by a margin of a few years. And yet, there was something surreal about the utter elision of the transition, how we just slid into working from home for the rest of the year without little to no acknowledgement in the workplace of what felt like, more days than not, the meltdown of society around us.2
Candace does keep working, even after the subways stop running and midtown is patrolled by security guards, accepting an offer from her corporation to keep going into the office. Her company provides her with more than what most of us got from our employers - two sets of N95 masks and a set of latex gloves, emblazoned with the company’s logo.
It’s impossible to say whether I would have reacted differently to the early days of the pandemic if I had not read Severance, and maybe also if I hadn’t lived in a city like New York, which primed me to be keenly aware of the vulnerability of urban life to infectious disease. The sudden appearance of Covid-19 on the world stage would have launched me into an anxiety spiral regardless. But as February and March unfurled, I was keenly aware that Severance informed how I perceived each piece of breaking news. Before we understood that Covid could rip through communities, urban and rural alike, I worried not just for myself and for my loved ones, but for my cities. On February 29, Ben and I were in Mexico City, collapsed on the grass of the Bosque de Chapultepec after a full day of traversing the city on foot. Ben fell asleep and as I leaned against him, I scrolled through New York Times updates on my phone, learning of the situation unfolding in Northern Italy. Taking in the scene around me—an empty stage in between sets of a music festival, groups of students lounging on the grass, toddlers on tricycles—I got teary-eyed, fearing, if not sensing, that the moment represented the end of some sort of stage of innocence and that we might never know urban life again.
And yet life still went on at full speed, somehow, for another two weeks. Ben thought I was overreacting. I flew back to LA and Ben flew back to San Francisco, and the next weekend we rendezvoused in New York as planned, where Ben was set to attend a conference that was miraculously given the go-ahead despite attracting attendees from all over the world. Looking back, it is difficult to reconcile my decision to fly to New York on March 6th with the need to do a grocery store run before leaving, in case the stores were empty upon my return. At 7 am on the morning of my flight to New York, I bought a few packs of lavender-scented hand wipes and, at my mother’s urging, shelf-stable pantry items at the 3rd & Fairfax Whole Foods. I carried three cans of chickpeas, peanut butter, nuts, and a couple of boxes of hippie soups back to my apartment. While getting on a plane to the city whose fictional demise I had just witnessed in Ma’s novel, I was wondering how long I could eek out the high-calorie foods in my pantry. But, twenty-four hours later, I squeezed into a banquet at a teeming Cafe Dante to eat dinner across from a friend without a second thought. We had hand sanitizer.
A severance is an end of a relationship, a separation. I’ve long joked that New York is the one who got away. Since I weepily packed up my Brooklyn apartment almost seven years ago, New York has quickly tried to re-establish itself as the center of my universe and its fountain of possibility within hours of arrival on each subsequent visit. Every time, leaving New York requires resisting the siren song of what might have been or would could be, regardless of whether it is by plane or the Henry Hudson Parkway or the New Haven Line. Last March was no different. Something was coming, and in that moment of panic, a primal urge to stay within driving distance of my parents, in the place where my brother and uncles and friends from every stage of my life exist in the span of a few miles almost ensnared me. That proximity will never exist for me in any other place in the world. It certainly did not exist for me in LA last spring, where I feared I would be returning to ride out this dystopia on my own. If I hadn’t read Severance, could I have grasped the futility of that proximity to my tribe—the possibility that I wouldn’t be able to see any of them if I stayed? Would I have understood that a New York in which New York’s eight and a half million residents became a threat to one another, a New York in which one was confined to a shoebox in the sky, would not be New York? A pandemic upends your sense of what you can call home. After twice refusing invitations to leave New York, Candace one day makes a split second decision to shove a fevered taxi driver out of his cab, take the wheel, and flee the city. A similarly selfish will to survive pushed me onto my flight back to LA, leaving Ben to fly back to San Francisco a few days later, after catching Covid somewhere between Han Dynasty and Veselka.
The following weekend, San Francisco announced its “stay-at-home” order would go into effect on March 17. I threw pasta and chickpeas and peanut butter into the back of my car, along with my yoga mat, toilet paper, and a three-month supply of birth control and contact lenses. I wasn’t alone in California anymore, even as I felt like a lone survivor driving up the dusty, eerily empty I-5. Nothing could have stopped me from driving up to San Francisco in that moment, not even the knowledge that Ben had coronavirus and that I would catch it too. It was too impossible to unlearn the belief that we were safer together.
I have always been reluctant to subscribe to the adage that it takes falling in love with someone new to get over an ex. I have always wanted to be able to break away on my own terms. It seems to allow for a more permanent rupture. I acknowledge that in the last year, I have finally gotten over New York, but if I’m being truthful, it’s hard to say whether it was seeing New York descend into a dystopia that made it impossible to imagine ever living there again, or whether it was the romantic lure of building a sunny home with my native Californian love—and a sudden willingness to exchange my aimless wandering (and its vague promise of possibility) for long neighborhood walks with another person. In the early weeks of quarantine, I would grow accustomed to that particular form of Californian guilt as I spoke to friends who hadn’t left their apartments in New York in weeks. I had wide, empty, citrus-lined streets to walk, a car, and sunny rooms to work in. The night I arrived in San Francisco we walked to Ocean Beach, as we would night after night for months to come. I watched the sun set on the western horizon as I put my toes in the icy Pacific Ocean, after following a different gravitational pull. We went home and cooked dinner.
A wonderful Japanese word referring to the habit of acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them.
