Coolie Pathology

Shen Fever enters the public consciousness slowly and unassumingly. It had been "in the news through the summer," Candace recalls at an office-wide meeting on the subject, "like a West Nile thing."1 Except it's not really like the West Nile virus at all, as Spectra's CEO points out. Shen Fever is not viral but fungal; it travels not from mosquito to person, or person to person, but through spores in the air. Still, the infection takes on a racialized, anthropomorphic quality. The fungus Shenidioides — whose very name prompts us to think ethnically — originates in Shenzhen, a city best known for its rapid growth as China's first Special Economic Zone (SEZ). And as the pandemic worsens, Congress passes a travel ban that prohibits citizens of Asian countries from entering the United States.

This should sound uncannily familiar. Though Candace takes the West Nile virus as referent, the Fever falls closer to another set of illnesses. It riffs on the 2003 SARS coronavirus, which emerged in the Guandong province of China, and seems to foretell, as many have noted, the COVID-19 crisis. All three represent a kind of sensational, medicalized, twenty-first-century Yellow Peril. Gwen D'Arcangelis, writing on technoscience and US empire, has observed that diseases from China are customarily "measured in their vectoral to move and spread on a global scale."2 In other words, it's no longer Asian subjects per se who invoke fear and revulsion, but the possibility that some element of their Asianness might spread to the rest of the world. Insofar as these illnesses are racist, it's not just that they invite vitriol towards Asian bodies, but that they produce and intensify a matrix of precarity that is itself bound up with race. Behind every mass of carriers is an assemblage composed of the places they move and inhabit and the forces that govern their movement.

Shen Fever elicits an almost compulsive anxiety around both the Asian body (e.g. the travel ban) and the body in general (e.g. Candace instinctively washing her face after her friend Ashley, who is fevered, sneezes on her). Everywhere, race as a material force — as a thing that moves violently through bodies and objects — threatens to burst through Severance's surface narrative. We see how something that's not really bodily at all maps so easily onto human subjects — for it's much more manageable to locate danger in corporeal form than it is to locate it, speaking metaphorically, in the air. Moreover, Ma's pandemic draws attention to the social body.3 The Fever — which traffics in illness, suffering, and risk — creates, in some ways, a perfect scenario for the biopolitical state.4 The power of governments to "make live" and "let die" necessarily swells when we can't help but rely on them for our basic means of survival.5

Severance's most trenchant critique, however, comes from linking the racialized fear of infection with transnational circuits of labor. Shen Fever develops within the "factory conditions of manufacturing areas . . . where spores fed off the highly specific mixture of chemicals." 6 It's a disease, as Amy Wong writes, of global capital. Here, US demand for cheap manufacturing seems to activate the prospect of a distinctly Asian doomsday.

***

This misplaced panic over Asian labor is not a new one. In America's Asia, Colleen Lye traces what she calls the "Asiatic racial form" back to late nineteenth-century reactions to Asian economic modernity abroad and Asian migrant labor at home. For Lye, naturalist writers like Jack London offer evidence of the inextricable relationship between race and economy: "economic utopia," for them, "is predicated, centrally or tangentially, upon defeat of the 'yellow peril.'"7 Anti-capitalist resistance is thus displaced onto anti-Asian racism, at the core of which sits the figure of the economically-efficient coolie.

In "Meat vs. Rice," a 1908 pamphlet commissioned by the American Federation of Labor (AFL), Samuel Gompers and Herman Gutstadt corroborate this vision of coolie takeover. "There are three races who can work, but there is only one that can swarm," they write, quoting Rudyard Kipling. "These people work and spread...they will overwhelm the world."8 Chinese labor is portrayed as uniquely threatening to the West in its ability to propagate. The authors warn that the coolie form can spread, like a germ, to non-Asians as well, so that "the white laborer who would compete with [Asiatics] must not only pursue the same kind of life, but must, like them abdicate his individuality." It's not just the presence of ethnically-Chinese subjects that terrorizes — the Asiatic mode of working and living lingers even in the absence of Asiatics themselves.

Though others have attended to the entanglement between Asian racialization and capitalism in Severance, their arguments tend to take a liberal humanist bent. In Aanchal Saraf's view, the novel ultimately rescues Asian Americans from the material constraints of the coolie, bestowing them with what they, as humans, deserve — the potential for full subjecthood.9 I'm a little more skeptical. There's a difference, I think, between labor form and laborers. Both Dora Zhang and Jane Hu have cautioned against a reading of Severance that prioritizes its "ethnic coordinates" above its depiction of a "global capitalist system that implicates us all," and I agree. It does us little good to interpret the novel as flatly and essentially Asian, but we also can't afford to read it as post-racial. Any question of political economy is also a question of race. Disaggregating racial form from racial identity allows us, in turn, to interrogate how coolie-ness is constructed instead of dwelling on who is and isn't a coolie. It's the Fever, and not Candace, that best constitutes coolie labor in the novel, and the fear of succumbing to Asia, rather than that of being surpassed by Asia, that most keenly animates America's racial antipathies. Shen Fever is not just an inevitable byproduct of global racial capitalism, but the productive, itinerant, and indeed infectious germ of racialized capital.10

As a speculative metaphor, the infection in Severance usefully builds upon a tradition of materially-rooted racial pathology. Shen Fever's symptoms mirror those of the imagined Asian migrant laborer. "For the most part, from what we had seen," Candace remarks, "the fevered were creatures of habit, mimicking old routines and gestures they must have inhabited for years, decades." These routines, importantly, are made up of various acts of everyday labor: operating a computer mouse, running an empty dishwater, folding clothes in a deserted store.11 The fevered live in endless loops, keeping house, or keeping shop, until they tire themselves out. They take Marx's theory of alienation to its logical endpoint: all sense of agency appears to have been evacuated from the working body, now perfectly docile and utterly disconnected from the objects it produces.

In this formulation, race comes in obliquely. Although the fevered practice coolie labor, they are not necessarily culturally or phenotypically Asian. Ma cleverly draws our attention to Lye's Asiatic form by decentering its external casing and foregrounding its internal machinery. There's one crucial difference, however: though the fevered exhibit an extraordinary endurance, they are entirely unproductive. Ma's coolies short-circuit the capitalist system in which they live, resulting in wholesale economic collapse.

***

At one point, a member of the survivor camp that Candace joins comments on how absurdly formulaic their predicament seems. "It's like we're in this horror movie," he says, "Like a zombie or vampire flick." Bob, the group's leader, pitches into a lecture on horror tropes; Candace angrily interjects. "What are you saying? Because number one, the fevered aren't zombies. They don't attack us or try to eat us. They don't do anything to us. If anything, we do more harm to them."12 This is one of Severance's many self-referential moments. While a not-so-subtle dig at genre convention, it also opens the novel up to comparison. The analogy, from here onwards, fixes in our interpretive registers. It's hard not to think about zombies when we think about the fevered.

The zombie is a particularly potent figure when it comes to alienated and racialized labor. In Haiti, History, and the Gods, Joan Dayan (elsewhere known as Colin Dayan) locates the origins of zombie mythology in Haiti's slave plantations. Named after the notorious Jean Zombi, who developed a reputation for his brutal attacks against the French during Dessalines's massacre, the "zombi" emerged in vodou tradition as undead flesh that emblematized the total dispossession — both physical and psychical — wrought by chattel slavery. Forever subject to the command of another, the zombi labors endlessly, anonymous and depersonalized. "In contemporary Haiti," Dayan writes, "no fate is more feared." And yet, citing Maya Deren, she notes that "the terror incited by the zombi [lies] not in its malevolent appearance but in the threat of conversion projected by this overwhelming figure of brute matter."13 Again, we see a strangely infectious element of racial fiction — in this case, a condition of social death that pushes beyond the bounds of the atomized, individual body.

At the same time, however, the zombi offers an opening; it literally recalls, after all, a figure of militant, anti-colonial resistance. Reinfused with its historical context, zombie apocalypse doubles as slave revolt. Assuming that de-zombification, or re-humanization, is not an option, what might we imagine as the alternative futurity of the zombi?

If the zombie doubles down on the violence of enslavement, the fevered press on the violence of coolie labor. Though the two are by no means equivalent, they share a certain formal solidarity with one another. The coolie trade took off in the British West Indies post-abolition, as Chinese and Indian workers were shipped to sugar plantations, usually under debt contract, to replace enslaved African laborers. American planters soon began making the switch as well. As Moon-Ho Jung argues in his book Coolies and Cane, "racial imaginings of Asian workers were instrumental in the reconstruction of the United States as a 'free,' 'white,' and 'modern' nation in the age of emancipation."14 The initial disagreement over coolie classification — whether white or Black, free or unfree — eventually gave way to a federal re-designation of Asians migrants as voluntary immigrants. But this shift belies the continuing ambiguity of the role. With Shen Fever, Ma returns us to the laboring foundations of the coolie. What persists is not so much identifiable subjects as it is an identifiable form. Like zombies, the fevered situate race within a scaffolding of global capital.

Shortly after Candace joins Bob's group, they decide to conduct a "stalk" of a nondescript suburban home. Although stalks masquerade as supply-gathering expeditions, we might also think of them as a means of managing the remaining fevered. The survivors move through these houses in vigilante fashion, toting guns and taking loot. (Who, we might ask, are the villains here?) On this particular outing, they find the Gower family at their dining table — balding father, bleached-blonde mother, and son simulating a mundane ritual of bourgeois capitalism. Because they are still alive, the stalk will end in an execution.

There's something incredibly odd about the situation; it's not often that we see an exquisitely normative white family as a target of extermination. When the time comes, Bob shoots them "all in a row," and "like slumbering bears in a fairy tale, one by one they slumped over their dinner plates."15 Though the Gowers pose no literal threat to the survivors, they do raise a kind of existential one. They've become thoroughly coolified, but not though racial identity — the family remains conspicuously white. It's the stark contrast between their appearance, which indicates decency, and their affliction, which signals degradation, that makes them so unnerving a sight. Like Candace, we're met with a sense of narrative vertigo; the scene eludes the obvious instinct to read race as representation. It demands that we look elsewhere.

***

"The point I'm making is about the fevered," Bob explains, after offering up a series of aphorisms on death and humanity. "They aren't really alive. And one way we have of knowing this is that they don't take a long time to die."16 This becomes the official line of the group: survivors are alive and human, while the fevered are not-alive and non-human. The latter must be eliminated to establish the sanctity of the former — which is why Candace is forced to shoot Paige Gower, why Ashley is promptly cut off from the group once she falls ill. It's reminiscent of Foucault's account of racism in a biopolitical regime.17 "Race," he asserts, works "to fragment, to create caesuras within the biological continuum," allowing states to identify killable Others that threaten the "health" and "purity" of the dominant race. Candace's inclusion in the fold of survival, then, is predicated upon the exclusion of the fevered. When she begins to affiliate with the fevered, Bob's mode of management toward her begins to change as well.

It's possible — easy, even — to make your way through Severance without registering how deeply disturbing the survivors' treatment of the fevered is. I thought it was odd the first time I read the novel, but didn't linger on the point. It made some twisted kind of sense. But recall Candace's retort to the zombie analogy: They don't do anything to us. If anything, we do more harm to them. And then there's Janelle, the novel's only identifiably Black character, shot by her own comrades for defending the fevered Ashley. These details pass us by because they reflect the casually humanist, white supremacist logics that surround us like air, thick and ubiquitous.

Shen Fever both naturalizes and magnifies racial difference. Of course survivors would treasure their healthy, individuated subjecthood, and of course they would fear becoming fevered — likely to the point of paranoia. That doesn't make it any less brutal. In fact, Bob's ideology reeks of Herrenvolk republicanism, a phrase that historian Robert Lee borrows to describe white working-class reactions to the groundswell of imported labor in mid-nineteenth century America. "Free Labor," he writes, "maintained a craft consciousness based on a nostalgic reconstruction of the pre-capitalist workplace and home" and sought "a means to escape permanent proletarian status."18 For these white workers, coolies became a useful foil, enabling "common labor" to be racialized as Asian, and the problem of work as a whole to be recast as a problem of race. The survivors, with their messianic creeds and vaguely-communalist ethos, modernize Herrenvolk virtue. Their thinking harks back to a purer time in history, yet is also completely, even comically, anti-historical.

The survivors' weeks-long trek toward Bob's mysterious "Facility" ends, deflatingly, at an old shopping mall in suburban Illinois. The scenario calls to mind George Romero's Dawn of the Dead, except there's no imminent risk of invasion by zombies. Instead, the group manages to orchestrate its own slow demise. "In the end," Candace muses, "we have come to the Facility to work."19 It's a haunting reenactment of neoliberalism's muted violence. Bob views the survivors as "subjects," she adds — a small but crucial elision that accentuates the disciplining rhetorics of liberal democracy. This, then, marks the inevitable dead end of identity politics' re-humanizing impulses. For individuals to be recognized and afforded rights as human, they must be registered as subjects; to be humanized is to also be subjected.20

***

Candace, like Ashley and Janelle before her, poses a problem for Bob's liberatory project. At the Facility, she is placed under solitary confinement. We can guess at the reasons — her missteps at the Gowers's and at Ashley's, her unborn child — but when pressed for an explanation, Bob staggers. "The point is," he concludes, "I can't trust you."21 This vague and unnamable state of suspicion serves, it seems, as a sign of racialization, of difference. Yet not once does Ma mention Candace's racial identity in the context of the group; we only encounter her Asianness, in the traditional sense of the word, through memories and flashbacks. Post-outbreak, she contracts a different sort of closeness to the coolie: first just an amorphous feeling, then a series of actions-in-solidarity, then a total collapse of the easy boundary between fevered and not. Am I sick? Do I have a fever? Candace asks, again and again.22 There's no way for us to know for sure, and perhaps it doesn't matter. Candace is racialized through her implicit alignment with the fevered, and it is this affiliative Asianness — not the filial one she inherits from her parents — that ultimately alienates her from the survivors.

If Candace is indeed infected, to some degree, with the coolie labor form, her experiences with the survivors suggest that redoubling on the primacy of the human is an insufficient, if not outright destructive, response. Severance takes us far afield from the conventional logic of apocalyptic fiction, in which survivors are by default protagonists. We cannot restore the fevered by making them good subjects, or by disciplining them under the guise of good will, just as we cannot reign in racial violence by simply restructuring racial identity. Ma instead pushes us to reassess these categories — raced/unraced; fevered/not; human/inhuman; good/bad — altogether. For if Severance is a story about the demise of human civilization, it's also a lesson in the complete, systems-level breakdown of capitalism — not from any consolidated resistance, but from the unexpected incursion of Shen Fever, itself endemic to the system. These infectious particles arise, quite literally, from the factory floor before traveling widely and rapidly along global trade networks. Even as human traffic is brought to a halt, the flow of capital, it appears, must go on. And as the survivors show us, what's scary is not just that people will die, but that we do not know how to live otherwise.

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Eileen Ying is completing their MSt in World Literatures in English at the University of Oxford.

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