The Tree at the End of the World

There's a moment in Severance, before the beginning of the end, when Candace Chen finds herself crying on the fire escape of her East Village apartment. It's an in-between moment, in between school and employment, in between romantic partners, and in the middle of the 80s nostalgia party Candace is hosting with her roommate — a gathering that, as Summer Kim Lee shows, captures how New York has been the site of intersecting, transitory ways of living for recent generations of young people. Contemplating the listlessness of her life, so different from the purposeful existence her parents wanted for her, Candace observes the flora on the ground below:

The fire escape looked out on the backs of other apartment buildings and a communal garden that all the ground-level tenants shared, its disorganized, uncultivated plots overrun with ghetto palms and riffraff vegetation; a dash of wildflowers here, a fledgling fruit tree there.1

I know what it feels like to cry on a Manhattan fire escape; I did it several times while in college in the 90s. I also know what it's like to drift in and out of relationships under those conditions, some casual, some lasting years, their varied duration a function of urban proximity more than anything else, bodies getting in each other's space and occasionally intertwining. As it happens, I also know what it's like to stumble into a corporate publishing job in midtown Manhattan, and to seek refuge in its polished, glass-doored, air-conditioned routines: at the end of my sophomore year at Columbia, a family connection secured me an interview in the copy editing department of Avon cosmetics, where I worked all summer on the bulky biweekly catalog for what seemed like an extravagant $16/hour, living in an East Village apartment, saving money for a year abroad, and where I continued to work after returning to New York for my senior year, saving money for grad school.

The metaphor of "riffraff vegetation" made visceral sense to me; I too have been a twenty-something Chinese American weed, proving hardy enough in the inhospitable landscape of New York under neoliberalism, meandering around without much self-awareness or dignity but also without ever questioning the mandate to keep living the life in motion.

The "ghetto palms" catch Candace's attention with more force later, when she is the only person left in Spectra's midtown office, yet she keeps showing up to work. "For the first time," she says, "I noticed that Times Square was completely deserted":

It wasn't just the emptiness. In the absence of maintenance crews, vegetation was already taking over; the most prodigious were the fernlike ghetto palms, so-called because they exploded in prolific waves across urban areas, seemingly growing from concrete, on rooftops, parking lots, any and all sidewalk cracks. I'd Googled ghetto palms after seeing them everywhere. Known by their scientific name, Ailanthus altissima, which translates to "tree of heaven," but informally called "tree of hell." They are deciduous suckering plants that originated in China, were cultivated in European gardens during the chinoiserie trend before gardeners became wise to their foul-smelling doors, and were introduced to America in the late 1700s. They have lived on this land almost since the formation of this country.2

Alix Beeston offers a beautiful reading of how this observation leads to a reverie on "the unmaking of empire" resonant with Candace's experiments in "ruins photography." As someone who specializes in eighteenth-century chinoiserie, I was struck by another aspect of the "past in the present" here. Like Candace, I Googled "ghetto palms": I needed to know more about these feral descendants of Enlightenment-era landscaping. The Tree of Heaven, the internet reminded me, has a literary genealogy in these parts, being the eponymous Tree [that] Grows in Brooklyn in Betty Smith's 1943 novel about a girl living in early twentieth-century Williamsburg.

Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly, but only in the tenements districts.3

Smith portrays the tree as a harbinger of social overturn, resulting from its attraction to financial ruin. You might see one springing up in a "nice neighborhood," her narrator says,

and you knew that soon that section of Brooklyn would get to be a tenement district. The tree knew. It came there first. Afterwards, poor foreigners seeped in and the quiet old brown-stone houses were hacked up into flats, feather beds were pushed out on the window sills to air and the Tree of Heaven flourished. That was the kind of tree it was. It liked poor people.4

Eleven-year-old Francie Nolan spends her summer sitting on the fire escape, where the Tree of Heaven's umbrella-like leaves "curled over, around and under her," as nurturing to this grandchild of European immigrants as any Romantic bower.

Until the internet returned me to this detail, the main thing I remembered about A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was how I stopped reading it as a child after encountering the ostensibly loving description of the Chinese laundryman in Francie's neighborhood, with his pigtail and shuffling and lichee nuts and abacus and two words of distorted English — "the mystery of the Orient in Brooklyn."5

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Native to northeast and central China and Taiwan, Ailanthus altissima was reportedly introduced into England in 1751, when a Jesuit missionary stationed in Peking sent some seeds to members of the Royal Academy in London. In the second half of the eighteenth century, it was one of the most widely planted trees in European cities, prized for its hardiness, elegant foliage, and fashionable association with China. It made its way to the United States in 1784, when William Hamilton added Ailanthus among other Chinese tree species to his property in Philadelphia, and it remained popular on both sides of the Atlantic throughout the nineteenth century.6

The common Chinese name for Ailanthus, 臭椿 (chòuchūn), means "stink tree," referring to the strong odor released by male trees during flowering. But the irreverent name belies the tree's deep cultural roots and complex symbolism. The ancient poets called it 神树 (shénshù), "God tree," and the Daoist philosopher Zhuangzi celebrated its stalwart "uselessness," which he associated with a region of "Nothingness," free from social convention and ideological pressure, where tree and philosopher alike could flourish without being conscripted into service.7 Under Confucianist world-views, the tree's legendary uselessness appeared less of a virtue; "good-for-nothing ailanthus stump sprout" was a figure of speech for a wayward youth, aimless in life and heedless of obligations, with little prospect of developing "into a useful mature person."8

As Amy Wong shows, Candace is shaped by precisely these questions of usefulness and uselessness, as they contort under the competing pressures of her parents' immigrant work ethic and the cataclysmic collapse of the global economy to which that ethic belongs. It's not that Candace aspires to avoid being professionalized and productive — in fact, she resents her boyfriend Jonathan's encouragements in this direction, accurately reading them as part of an ethos of anticapitalist detachment to which only a certain class of white men have ready access. It's that she can't imagine how the routine movements of work, to which she has committed, lead to one's becoming a successful, contributing member of society. Jane Hu points out that this is not an immigrant problem but an American one, as the myth of the Protestant work ethic, long fraying under the pressure to support capitalism's exploitations, finally unravels completely in the last gasp of global industry.9

But as Eileen Ying writes, "Race . . . runs through Ma's novel like electrical wiring," and it pulses insistently through the problem of how Candace fits into the increasingly mystified landscape of labor relations. "What are you doing here?" asks Manny, the doorman of Spectra's office building, when Candace shows up for work after the city has shut down in preparation for a storm.10 What are we doing here? It can't but be a racialized question, a version of the perennial "Where are you from? No, where are you really from?" that has long been a hallmark of the Chinese American experience. The two senses of the question — what is your value here, and how did you come to be here? — converge when it is put to a creature of diaspora, person or plant.

Chinese people, like Chinese trees, are present in North America because at some point in the ongoing European colonization of these lands, someone thought we would be useful here. Over time, the logic of our usefulness, our appropriateness to the colonial situation, has become uncertain: we have outlasted our purpose, or failed to live up to it, or exceeded it. In truth, it has never been possible for Chinese migrants to become part of the Anglo-American landscape "proper": Chinese people's historical status as a supplementary labor force is reproduced as racial difference regardless of the kind of work we are doing, what language we speak, what our nationality or terms of residence. This racialization in turn renders Chinese "usefulness," or the labor of Chinese people, uncanny in relation to the liberal individualism that organizes hard work into a progressive narrative of American personal success. As Ying shows in their reading of the specter of coolie labor present in Shen Fever, anti-Asian racism provides a conceptual frame for the terrifying prospect of capitalism's generally dehumanizing effects. Similarly, Danielle Wong's reading of the ghostly transmissions of collective and intergenerational experience through online media shows how the "self-enclosed individual" of American political mythology has never been the subject actually generated by the habitus of "information capitalism." Rather than name the contradictions inherent to liberalism, Anglo-American culture has long preferred to displace them onto sinicized evil-twin versions of Enlightenment modernity. After so many generations of serving, as J.S. Mill put it in On Liberty (1859), as "a warning example" for Europeans of what human accomplishment looks like without enough of the human in it, Chinese people in North America might be forgiven for being a little standoffish, as Candace strikes (white) people.11

As both a condition of labor and an aesthetic quality, Chineseness has always been defined in Anglo-American culture by how quickly it turns from useful to destructive, from pleasing to monstrous. The Tree of Heaven has always also been the Tree of Hell. In his 1841 Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening, landscape designer Andrew Jackson Downing declared Ailanthus "a picturesque tree, well adapted to produce a good effect on the lawn singly or grouped; as its fine long foliage catches the light well, and contrasts strikingly with that of the round-leaved trees."12 The tree's scent was well-known, but apparently negligible to Downing and other fans of the tree's resilience and graceful shape; its suckering habit, Downing insisted, could be managed and even used to advantage in nursery cultivation.13 Yet just over a decade later, in 1852, Downing described Ailanthus as

an usurper in rather bad odor at home, which has come over to this land of liberty, under the garb of utility to make foul the air, with its pestilent breath, and devour the soil, with its intermeddling roots — a tree that has the fair outside and the treacherous heart of the Asiatics, and that has played us so many tricks, that we find we have caught a Tartar which it requires something more than a Chinese wall to confine within limits!14

As Behula Shah points out, Downing's dramatic change of heart is consistent with American public opinion in relation to fluctuating international relations with China in the wake of the Opium Wars. Yet the vocabulary on which he draws, both to praise Ailanthus as an ornament useful for diversifying a landscape, and later to condemn it as a devious, oriental menace, can be traced back well past the nineteenth-century trade wars, to eighteenth-century discourses on taste and reason that grappled (none too gracefully) with the problem of how to use Chinese difference to enhance Western particularity without finding liberal selfhood frighteningly beholden to — perhaps even responsible to — foreign presence.

One of the ironies of the Yellow Peril myth, the version in which the "tricky" Chinese villain suddenly reveals the "treacherous heart" behind its "fair outside," is that this, too, is a pretty good account of how anti-Asian racism operates in the form of microaggressions, only twisted to make us the aggressors instead of the targets. I keenly remember the feeling — like being punched in the throat — when I stumbled upon a gratuitous dig at "Asian girlfriends" in a novel I was reading "for fun" because everyone else I knew who had read it seemed to have a lot of fun doing so. It was hardly something to get mad about; the "Asian girlfriends" were not the point, but a detail meant to illuminate how tedious a certain kind of white man was, the kind that only dates "younger" "Asian" "girls."15 (I know from endless personal experience that for many white women, "young" and "Asian" are actually synonymous with regard to other women.) But the jolt of being interpellated as the dehumanized accoutrement to white masculinity that makes life so compellingly complicated for white women did its work on me. I found it hard to have fun reading after that; I tensed up every time the book mentioned Chinese food. For those of us who know what it feels like to move among white women, aspiring awkwardly to model ourselves after their confidence, their social ease, Severance's scenes of Candace among the "art girls" are a gift: like being able to sit in on that experience but, for once, with company. When Candace visits Lane's apartment for the first time, she learns that Lane has a cat named "Suki." "Suki's shy," Lane says, "So I call her sulky."16 I felt in solidarity with the cat, too.

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Severance remains ambivalent to the end about whether it tells a story of survival or not. What is clear is that the intrepid individual of Western liberal hegemony is not going to survive the collapse of capitalism. What is unclear is whether Candace is such a subject, as she wanders into the ruins of Chicago, with the same ghostly momentum — which is not the same as determination — with which she drifted through the city as the "NYC Ghost."

How do you tell a story about diasporic life that doesn't rely on the forms of liberal selfhood that inevitably rebound violently on racialized people? I think a lot about the cab driver, Eddie, who says to Candace, "now that all the white people have left New York, you think I'm leaving?" And about how Candace's response — "I smiled" — is so much more relaxed than her response to just about anything else in the novel.17 A 2001 article in Landscape Architecture on "Invasive Trees" opens:

From Europe, Africa, and Asia, they came to America, seeking a new world in which to grow and have a better life for their children. What was true for immigrants can also be said for certain plants that have arrived on this continent from their homelands. These nonnative plants are known as exotics or alien plants. Many alien species are economically important in horticulture and agriculture; however, some have escaped cultivation and have become invasive.18

Given how easily the idioms of settler colonial liberalism slip between stories about people and stories about plants, it is not surprising that Severance's Shen Fever arrives in the form of a fungus. As Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing has recently shown, telling the story of a mushroom compels different forms and rhythms from those provided by either natural history or Bildungsroman. Such progress stories, she writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, cannot account for the mycological dynamics of life in the ruins of capitalism: "To know the world without [progress narratives], this book sketches open-ended assemblages of entangled ways of life, as these coalesce in coordination across many kinds of temporal rhythms . . . My hope is that readers will experience some of this 'mushroom fever' with me in the chapters to come."19 The mushroom can help us imagine life after capitalism, but it requires us to redefine survival itself:

In popular American fantasies, survival is all about saving oneself by fighting off others. The "survival" featured in U.S. television shows or alien-planet stories is a synonym for conquest and expansion. I will not use the term that way. Please open yourself to another usage. This book argues that staying alive — for every species — requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die.20

Tsing's paradigm of collaboration refutes the colonizing logic of "invasion" that turns every contamination narrative into a horror story. Has the fungus that causes Shen Fever enacted any particular violence on other living beings? It causes them to slip into rote and habitual movements, repeating them until the body gives out — but so, famously, does capitalism. Perhaps the fungus is just remarkably good at assimilating, settling into the most pronounced rhythms of the life it joins with, compelling its hosts to commit to the truest form of the life they are already living. "Shen" refers to Shenzhen, the geographic origin of the outbreak, but the history of Ailanthus reveals that in another inflection, it means "god" or "spirit." We might read Shen Fever as a kind of spiritual possession in a mode of collaboration, distilling people down to the core motions of their existing animacy. It's not a particularly "livable collaboration," but only because life under capitalism is not livable to begin with. The COVID-19 virus, too, has been shown to conspire with existing forms of racial, economic, and gendered inequity to reveal, and enhance, pre-existing structural disparities in people's chances of survival. What might be possible if the agency of other beings were to mix with ours under different conditions of living altogether?

"If New York is breaking down and no one documents it, is it actually happening?" Candace asks after noticing Times Square empty of people and overrun with Ailanthus altissima.21 If all the white people leave, were there ever any "immigrants"? If a cat is no one's pet, can it ever be seen to sulk? If a tree grows in Brooklyn while people become mushrooms, has New York survived? In a colonized world, in an interspecies world, who is the "we" by which survival is measured? The genre of the novel, Severance shows us, is better equipped to ask such questions than to answer them. But Tsing's hope that we might learn to recognize the "world-building work of fungi"22 and rebuild ourselves accordingly promises new ways of reading Candace's story, too — as a parable in which the breakdown of the world as we know it is documented in a profusion of trees with no one left to read them as hellish or heavenly, as barometers of liberal humanist failure or success.

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Eugenia Zuroski is Associate Professor of English and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. She is author of A Taste for China: English Subjectivity and the Prehistory of Orientalism (Oxford University Press, 2013) and Editor of the journal Eighteenth-Century Fiction (ECF).

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