On Being a Person of Use

Shortly after the US began its waves of lockdowns, academics took to Twitter to scold one another about working. "Productivity in a crisis," in Summer Kim Lee's characterization of leftist discourse on social media, "is suspicious, it's disturbing evidence of one's cold complicity with the capitalist mandate to work in the face of endless bad news." Weaker protestations offered self-deprecating confessions about binge watching television, compulsive snacking, tweeting, not having dressed professionally (or washed our hair) for Zoom lectures. Small pleasures were taken in imagining these speech acts as resistances to our capitalist interpellation (even as we checked these pleasures with our always-already understanding).

Just before Governor Newsom issued his statewide shelter-in-place order, and just before my Bay Area university moved to online classes, I had just finished teaching the first half of a course on dystopian fiction. We were reading and discussing Ling Ma's Severance as the reports of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan rolled in. And we had just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go before I sent my students off to spring break, ruminating over why we "just do our jobs" in face of certain death. Both novels feature protagonist women whom my students protested, with almost visceral disbelief: Why does Candace keep sending her work emails from the office of her book production firm after all of New York — and much of the world — has fallen to Shen Fever? Why doesn't Kathy H. resist being a caregiver after she knows the full truth of what her life is for? Are these forms of habitation and habituation, as Dora Zhang keenly speculates, part of a survivalist management of loss? I remember challenging my students to think about what they would do if people around us were dying en masse because a global pandemic had crudely laid bare the seams of capital's merciless biopolitical sorting of those who get to live and those who don't. Would they resist? And how would they resist? Might we all just keep on sending our emails, signing them, "Best," as Candace does?

When our class had our final meeting over Zoom, we circled back to this question: one student confessed that he had taken four showers that day, another was writing poetry but not completing classwork, yet another was reading Jenny O'Dell's How to Do Nothing. Together, we experienced the catharsis of a group confessional, one that signaled that we belonged to a tribe that could afford to feel ambivalent about our labor. And yet, knowing all of this, I could not help but to feel some anxiety about whether I was too productive in the wrong ways, whether my students (in this final class session, all white) might, on some level, think that I was an Asian American bot — who, like Candace, was monstrously concerned with keeping up with a capitalist order that none of us believed in anymore. While sheltering-in-place, I was caring for a toddler, yet I was teaching, and I was happily collaborating with dear friends on a special issue arguing that Victorian studies needs more critical race theory. I wanted to work.

1. Working

Severance, as Jane Hu has pointed out, is a novel that does not shy away from the pleasures of work under capitalism — in particular, work that potentially remains connected to a pre-capitalist desire for ritual and routine. The labor conditions under the former IT engineer Bob's mall-cult are equal parts hunter-gatherer and capitalist accumulation. The novel is fluent in the discourse of critiquing capitalism (the pandemic in Severance is a disease of global capital, arriving to the US through the distribution networks of mass production and zombifying people into performing repetitive, factory-like actions — and, as Eileen Ying importantly reminds us, the "zombi" was originally a Haitian vodou emblem of chattel slavery). But the novel is also keyed in to how there is no outside, and probably no resisting from the inside, either. Our critical affects won't save us.

On a tour of the factory in Shenzhen that manufactures commercial Bibles for Candace's firm, she imagines the Chinese operations director's subtext:

We manufacture the emblematic text to propagate your country's Christian Euro-American ideologies, and for this, for this important task, you and your clients negotiate aggressively over pennies per unit cost, demand that we deliver early with every printing, and undercut the value of our labor year after year.1

The disease's origins are from the East, but it is equally a disease of the twinned imperatives of Western capitalism and imperialism. Candace knows, but she works and works to the bitter end.

Working until the end does not make Candace satisfied or victorious. To the contrary: as my students often remarked, Candace bothers us because of her inscrutability — and this, of course, gets very complicated given that she is Asian American and a woman. Why, they asked, does Candace work to the bitter end — and beyond, if she knows the history of racial capital? Why isn't she angrier, more guilty, less affectless, more . . . human?2

Bracketing for a moment the Asianness that inevitably marks Candace's inscrutability, I'll wager that Candace finds herself stuck, at least in part, in a bind that might be familiar to any academic who is trying to be a leftist in a neoliberal world. The irony with which she focalizes the Art book department captures this bind:

Things were different in Art. The clients weren't so fixated on the bottom line. They wanted the product to be beautiful. They cared about the printing, color reproduction, the durability of a good sewn binding, and they were willing to pay more for it, alter their publication schedule for it. They donated to nonprofits that advocated against low-wage factories in South Asian countries, even as they made use of them, a move that showed a sophisticated grasp of global economics.3

Many of us, like Candace, fancy ourselves ironizing with more sophistication than those mainstream liberals who think they have a sophisticated grasp of global economics, we even ironize ourselves, but what's the use of irony in a global pandemic? What work is our reading and writing and thinking doing, is it anti-capitalist (enough), and if not, do we feel guilty (enough) about it?

2. Persons of Use

One ritual I've developed during the pandemic is to listen, every day, to a podcast called "Learning Chinese Through Stories" when I lie down next to my toddler, waiting for her to nap. Like many other Chinese Americans with immigrant parents, my Mandarin is shaky through no fault of my own but I nonetheless carry shame about it. The podcast contains a mix of Chinese folk tales, sometimes motivated as rather obvious forms of cultural propaganda. One of the stories I recently listened to praised the usefulness of the peanut: it is ugly, but it is useful, the podcast intones. In life, it is good to try to be a person of use. A person of use lessens the sufferings of others.

I translate what I heard, 有用的人, with the phrase "a person of use" rather than "to be useful," because in Chinese "to be useful" is to possess usefulness, to "have use" (有用). I was thinking about this distinction — between being useful and being a person of use — and how the latter comes up in Candace's remembered conversations with her mother and her father. Before she dies, Candace's mother repeats a wish previously expressed by her father (who died prior in a tragic accident): "No matter what, we just want you to be of use."4 "To be of use" is a familiar phrase I can hear my own Shanghainese mother saying to me, in my father's Cantonese — and the distinction between being useful and possessing utility sounds to my ear like a divestment, in the latter, from Western selfhood. What takes moral precedence is one's instrumentality — and not one's identity. When I hear my mother say it, it resonates a critique of American individualism and enterprise. Being useful defines personhood as (capitalist) utility but 有用的人 keeps personhood and utility apart.

The adage about the peanut predates the sins of Western capital and its mass-scale conversion of persons into use: human resources, human capital. And so to imagine this other instrumentality — somehow outside enslavement, outside coolie labor, outside Indigenous displacement and land extraction, outside all the myriad ways in which the West has treated black, brown, and yellow persons as use — seems impossible. We would also have to un-imagine and divest from the frameworks of Bentham and Mill, whose nineteenth-century utilitarianism is inextricable from the beginnings of capitalist, liberal modernity (i.e., to be useful is to be our freely enterprising selves, that we may pursue happiness and material wealth).

As Danielle Wong argues, "capitalism structures both the family's and pandemic's circuits across the globe" as well as "diasporic intergenerational memory." When I think about my mother's exhortations to me to be "of use," it was rarely followed by the "lessening of suffering" part, but with the imperative to work hard toward achievement and excellence. This imperative, often simplified as the immigrant work ethic and Asian culture is as much — if not more — the seduction of Western capital's greatest ideological hoax, the American Dream. Model minorities, as Cathy Park Hong has recently explored, uniquely register their attendant disappointments through a complex and relentless deluge of "minor feelings." Candace's mother, at any rate, also inculcates in her an ethic inevitably transformed by capital: "to be of use" within the systems of modernity that none of us stand outside of is to live something like what this strangely euphoric, yet matter-of-fact passage from the novel describes:

To live in the city is to live the life that it was built for, to adapt to its schedule and rhythms, to move within the transit layout made for you during the morning and evening rush, winding through the crowds of fellow commuters. To live in a city is to consume its offerings. To eat at its restaurants. To drink at its bars. To shop at its stores. To pay its sales taxes. To give a dollar to its homeless.5

Capital sets the terms to "propagate its impossible systems." In class, my students and I stopped to consider this passage's arresting final turn: to give a dollar to its homeless. We wondered at the violence of Candace eliding the distinction between this act of giving and other acts of consumption. And yet she is right, of course, because to give a dollar to its (the city's) homeless is to consume, too — the homeless are commodities that belong to the city's carnival, and you consume them so that you might feel liberal, kind, human. Such use lessens none of the suffering of others.

I think about how tipping the anonymous carrier who has delivered our packages to our door is the pandemic's version of giving a dollar to the homeless. I feel useless, ashamed, guilty, and disgusted with how I assuage that guilt by typing that slightly higher-than-usual number into the credit card order box. Before the pandemic, I was reading a section from Laurence Scott's Picnic, Comma, Lightning in which he muses about overwhelming ethical quandaries presented by "the internet of things," how the conditions enabled by digital technology and capitalism mean we are constantly aware of the intimate ways in which our convenience might be linked to the death of another person. Scott's answer is like the answer that we get in Severance — there isn't anything an individual can do to be clean. One can easily lose herself in the magic, equalizing objecthood that we all seem to share in relation to these things that increasingly constitute our survival and ourselves. Neither Scott's essays nor Ma's novel offers ethical absolution (though, as Dora Zhang notes, there's a "gentleness" to how the novel treats habituation to life under global capitalism). We're all — even if in slightly different degrees — just in it, as in a trance.

It is depressing to understand that most of the ways in which we can be persons of use toward lessening human suffering are laughably inadequate. I cannot think what it would mean to have use, in the sense that the folk tale means, before capital. I know it is not to die in someone else's place, even as we are asking "essential workers" to do so.

3. Remainders

"Only in America do you have the luxury of being depressed."6 This is another line that Candace remembers her mother saying, and something my mother has said to me, as well. If I push her to explain further, she acts as if the sentiment is self-evident — and American born, Western educated, as I am, and having been afforded the luxuries of capitalist modernity — I am practiced in dismissing her sentiment as an immigrant's stigma against discussing mental health. But in revisiting this sentiment now, in the novel and in my own memory, I stop to think about how the China of my mother's childhood — from Maoist revolution and the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution — was in fact quite cordoned off from Western capital, unlike the China of today. This makes me wonder whether this sentiment is also keyed in to usefulness differently: Is there some remainder, here, of what pre-capitalist instrumentality feels like? Is there, in our Chinese mothers' imperatives to be of use, to work hard, to eschew depression, an echo that yet connects to a less American instrumentality, possibly, less ineffective in the face of suffering? And can I, as a Chinese American daughter, comprehend what it is that remains, exactly, of this instrumentality? I hear traces of something different — even when (and perhaps because) my mother always says "depressed" in English.

Candace's inscrutability, both to herself and to her white colleagues, often functions through a form of excess that feels structurally homologous to remainders: "At work, they knew me to be capable but fragile. Quiet, clouded up with daydreams. Usually diligent, though sometimes inconsistent, moody. But also something else, something implacable: I was unsavvy in some fundamental, uncomfortable way. The sound of my loud, nervous laugh, like gargling gravel, was a social liability. I skipped too many office parties."7 On the one hand, she is the "quiet" and "diligent" Asian worker, fitting comfortably within a world order that opposes the robotic, manufacturing East against the enterprising, innovating West. On the other hand, she is a social radical, an unpredictable liability in the "gargling gravel" of her laugh, a dark and irreverent sound that seems beyond the pale of capital, and perhaps even of humanity itself.

Candace's orphanhood — thematized throughout the novel as severances from childhood, Fuzhou, her family, her white Brooklyn boyfriend, her colleagues, her job, and Bob's cult — makes her a remainder herself, unassimilable to any usual structure of kinship. The singular tether that remains at the end of the novel is umbilical: pregnant, Candace walks the deserted streets of Chicago. This, my students and I agreed, was not the hopeful reproductive futurity that ends The Children of Men. Rather, it seems important that her baby remains unborn, because reproductive labor — particularly in the form that it takes when the baby is still in the womb — is the only work in the novel that feels outside of capital. In the novel, Candace's unborn baby — or should we say fetus? — is the singular, material site where an alternative form of labor occurs.

Reflecting on pregnancy's queerness, Maggie Nelson in The Argonauts describes the strangeness of a mother's automatic labor: "You are making the baby, but not directly. You are responsible for his welfare, but unable to control the core elements."8 When I was pregnant, I marveled that my body knew what to do, that it was, in effect, stitching together all the little pieces that would eventually become my daughter. My partner and I joke that I did a good job. Like Candace, my relationship to having a baby sat somewhere between wanting and not wanting, and the process of her growing felt separate from me. Not against my will, but also without any need of it, my body built my daughter. This labor of one body unfolding the programming of another seems as automated and zombified as factory work or the proverbial office job, and yet it can be recalcitrant before the capitalist ends that define reproductive labor — especially after the apocalypse (Nelson writes: "you can't reverse an unfolding or chromosomal difference by ingesting the right organic tea").9 As Alix Beeston suggests in her essay, Candace seems to prefer queer or ghostly relations, ones that are enabled through detachment and an individual's inviolable singularity.

And what about this strange, in-utero, making? Is Candace "a person of use" to her baby? In the automated ways that the pregnant body grows another, it arguably lessens the suffering of that other — or, at least, with each placental transfer, it offers further insurance against fetal destruction. Candace, as she grows her daughter, does this other form of work, too, and may finally be a "person of use" simply because of this detached relation between one body and another against the backdrop of a post-apocalyptic landscape.

In returning to the question of what work our reading and writing is doing, whether it is anti-capitalist (enough), and if not, if we feel guilty (enough) about it, I think we might just let one another off the hook when it comes to how we are working these days. Not ethically, but maybe from the feelings that lead us nowhere but into the loops of harsh and paralyzing adjudications of one another's labor. Even as I write this, I am aware that engaging with an essay cluster about a novel is probably absurd as a way to respond to 200,000 dead in the US, is it not? But it lessens no one's suffering if I feel depressed about the totality of my capitalist interpellation, or the slimness of its remainders. That's a depression that I think might very well be American in the sense that our Chinese mother's mean it. Acknowledgment, then, of our complicities but with less this kind of feeling, this kind of depression. Just writing, with you reading — maybe this is of use. Ma, in the end, wrote Severance, and we in this cluster read it. Could this be a lesson the novel offers us — as thinkers, as leftists in a neoliberal world, as Chinese American daughters?

Meanwhile, Severance's final line compels me toward a zombie-version of myself that also feels utterly correct right now — and perhaps even resistant: "I get out and start walking."

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Amy R. Wong is Assistant Professor of English at Dominican University of California, where she teaches courses in literature, film, media theory, and critical race studies.

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