Too Much to Miss

"After the End came the Beginning."1 So starts Ling Ma's Severance. But before the End came a party in New York City.

In the summer of 2006, before the viral fungal infection called Shen Fever spread from the global economic center of Shenzhen, China to the rest of the world, the novel's narrator, Candace Chen, moved to New York. She had just graduated from college, recently lost her mother, and did not have a job. That summer, Candace received a box sent by her mother's hospice. The box held an odd mix of her mother's belongings, including a plastic Ziploc bag filled with dried shark fins. They looked like "chunks of amber-colored tree resin . . . They were triangular slices, with linear grain and a golden fibrous gleam"; "they smelled stale, a tinge of oceanic rust, salt crust."2 The fins were for making shark fin soup, a Chinese dish for special occasions that wasn't served anymore because, as her roommate Jane put it, "you know, animal rights"3: when sharks' fins were cut off, dead or alive, the rest of their bodies were then discarded. But now that they had the shark fins, Jane suggested they make shark fin soup for an "an outdated dinner party" with an "eighties-decadence" theme.4

They didn't host the party until the end of that summer. Guests arrived in appropriately outdated dress to their railroad apartment. Giorgio Moroder played in the background while someone dressed as Ronald Reagan threw jellybeans at girls. For the main event, guests gathered around "a makeshift Trump-themed dining table" with a "metallic gold tablecloth," a "brass candelabra," and "bouquets of fake plastic flowers . . . spray-painted gold," all of which accompanied "ironic predinner canapés: salmon mousse quenelles with dill cream, spinach dip in a bread bowl, Ritz crackers, and a ball of pimiento cheese in the shape of Trump's hair."5

Following the canapés, the shark fin soup was displayed in a crystal punch bowl with a ladle. The soup wasn't that good — it had a "strange, gelatinous texture" and tasted "sour" and "musty" — but once the guests forced it down, the party continued, with tables tucked away to make more room.6 Everything, down to the gold, gelatinous shark fins, was made to shine with a tacky, nauseating decadence, made to reflect the unregulated baby boomer excess from which these millennials were excluded, unknowingly on the brink of the 2008 financial crisis. At that party, the eighties were the butt of a millennial joke. As a theme, the decade became the stuff of perverse abundance, when anything Trump-related did not yet feel so acutely threatening.

For Candace, the party "marked the end of that strange transitory summer," when she wasted time alone, spending days walking around lower Manhattan in her mother's Contempo Casuals dresses and taking photographs of the city with a digital camera.7 After that summer, she got a boyfriend and started an office job overseeing the cheap manufacture of bibles, mainly in China. From the excess of the eighties, she settled into the repetitious, dull environment of the office job, responding to emails, making phone calls, and occasionally taking trips to Shenzhen, where she met with manufacturers.

Like many, lately I've been returning to Ling Ma's Severance. Not just because of my work and my teaching, or because of the novel's uncanny relation to the coronavirus pandemic, xenophobically associated with China, but also because of how Ma's novel moves through the well-trodden trope of leaving New York by prolonging the act of leaving, through a narrator who, even during an encroaching apocalypse, stays in New York, and moreover, refuses to stop working.

I've been missing New York terribly, and what I find myself missing most are the house parties — those at times thrown together, last-minute, informal events, perhaps with a superfluous theme, like the eighties. People's homes, which no one owns or lives in for long before the rent gets too high, serve as improperly intimate venues where guests are surrounded by the personal belongings of the party's host or an unknown absent roommate: their laundry, hair and skincare products, framed pictures, bed, and disgruntled pets. As a guest, you see what food they eat, what books they read, what kind of sheets they like, how clean they keep their bathroom. You see how others tend to their private space.

I miss being inside other people's homes, especially in New York, where no one actually has a house. Instead, everyone has parties in overheated and overcrowded apartments, with overflowing recycling bags of beer cans and liquor bottles. People are always looking for more ice for lukewarm mixers. Some smoke on a fire escape or by an open window, which does little to prevent smoke from wafting throughout the entire apartment. Others sneak into the bedroom with the coats and jackets for some privacy, for drugs, sex, or a fight. Bathroom lines are slow, awkward, and passive aggressive, and a small group frequently huddles in a corner trying to adjust the lights and pick a playlist for a dance party. Later in the night, the truly hardcore will attempt to make the night last longer by convincing people to go to a bar or warehouse party. Every house party is actually the same. It's their familiarity that makes me miss them as much as I do.

***

Mirroring Severance's opening, the first line of Joan Didion's 1967 essay, "Goodbye to All That," reads, "It's easy to see the beginnings of things, and harder to see the ends."8 For Didion, it's the end of her eight years of living in New York, before leaving for Los Angeles. In Severance, Ma takes this end even further. For Candace, the end is not only the end of her time in New York — it is also the end of the world as she knows it, and a shift into the beginnings of a postapocalyptic one.

"Goodbye to All That," is often understood to be one of the first personal essays to introduce this particular trope of leaving New York. For Didion, to write about living in New York is to write about being young. "It is a city for only the very young,"9 she writes, for those in their early twenties seeking what they feel to be a truly unique experience of living that everyone else is having or has already had. Living in the city and barely getting by felt possible because it was always temporary, an "indefinitely extended leave" from reality, where one does not need to buy furniture or toasters, does not need to install new cabinets, and need not concern oneself with the pursuit of "some reasonable future."10 Home is where others let you stay, among their things.

Since Didion, the "leaving New York" essay has become a literary cliché. Other essays and books by writers like Megan Daum and Luc Sante have followed suit, with stories of living in the city as a hazy, heady phase, both a "financial and psychological ordeal" and a "cheap, happy time"11 one goes through before realizing that the city is "a ruin in the making."12 These narratives are marked by loss, by one's waning enchantment and growing irritation with how the city starts to feel the same, combined with the disappearance of favorite restaurants and dive bars, toxic exes, eccentric neighbors, and one's youth that has gone with them. This loss must be mourned, which is to say, it must be let go of properly. For Didion and the others, leaving is a necessary step, a developmental stage in one's life. One becomes so broke and in debt, so tired and depressed, one must move on and grow up elsewhere.

I moved to New York in 2007 for college, and ten years year, I left for a fellowship and teaching position in New Hampshire. By then, I was indeed broke, in debt, tired, and depressed, and even so, taking that step toward any next stage didn't feel right. Even though I moved a five-hour drive away, I went back frequently. I kept the keys to my old apartment, which my friends still live in. They were a comforting charm on my keychain. When I was in town, I looked forward to letting myself in, catching up until 3am, and sleeping on the couch. I visited so often that it sometimes felt like I hadn't moved away. But now I haven't visited since this past February, when reported cases of COVID-19 in the US started to rise. Only now am I experiencing what it's like to miss New York, and as an embarrassing confirmation of the cliché, it feels regressive and childish.

In May, a friend in New York got upset with me over text message for not being there during the worst of the pandemic. I wasn't there for the constant ambulance sirens and fireworks, the increasingly violent police presence in response to the protests in the Movement for Black Lives. When I mentioned to my friend that I was thinking of trying to get back to Los Angeles where I'm from, to be closer to family while teaching remotely, he angrily told me everyone in New York was also fleeing west. It was odd to face my friend's judgement and disdain. Unlike the others he grouped me with, I hadn't left New York because of a pandemic. In fact, I wanted to be there instead of scrolling through Twitter from the small Vermont town I lived in, where a neighbor's Trump 2020 flag waved at me from outside my window. I knew my friend was frustrated, afraid, and concerned for his and others' safety. Nevertheless, I felt more isolated, even further from New York and my friends and their quarantine pods I wanted to join.

I wanted to go back to New York at the same time that others were writing of getting out, in a new onslaught of essays written during the pandemic.13 This new iteration of the "leaving New York" essay has been criticized because of how the very option of leaving the city is a privilege not afforded to those without the means — without the money, without a job that can be remote, without a job at all, without anywhere else to go.14

While the city's wealthiest and whitest neighborhoods cleared out from March through May of this year for refuge, space, quiet, and safety, coronavirus cases and deaths surged in its low-income, immigrant, black, and Latinx neighborhoods.15 It's as if those absconding to upstate New York or the Hamptons are merely starting their summer vacations early. While most of us are missing parties, those who left are still having their own "posh pandemic parties"16 with access to private testing, jeopardizing their own health and that of the service workers around them. Those who have stayed in New York denounce those who leave, not just out of loyalty, but also because of the stark, ongoing inequalities of the city that their leaving perpetuates and lays bare.

There is a marked difference in who's writing these essays, or rather, the same people are writing them, but the moment at which they leave has changed. We're reading the accounts of those who stayed in New York past their twenties, who made a living and have more or less comfortably resided in the city for a decade or more. These writers self-consciously describe scenes of anxiously packing up cars with partners, kids, pets, and belongings to head out on the road and arrive at literal greener pastures. They leave homes they own, and they can because they own other ones, or they have the means to acquire one. Not only do they have the means to leave, they also have the means to take what they'll miss with them. They travel with the ability to preserve and consolidate their family, and certain notions of ownership, home, health, and safety, and the financial stability they all require.

But when you can't take them with you — when you have a life made up of what you don't and can't own, it can feel like there's too much to miss. What about the friends who stay? What about one's longing, once having left, and the knowledge that the city and your friends will go on without you? What about the parties? The fear of missing out is generally a source of shame, and during a pandemic it makes little sense since none of us are doing anything anyway, but nevertheless it has become an unexceptional feeling that pervades the everyday as one spends another day in isolation, reflecting on all the time they've lost.

I write all this knowing that it isn't the time to idealize an expensive, policed, rapidly gentrifying city. At the same time, it hardly seems appropriate, accurate, or interesting, to declare once again that the city is "over." It does, however, seem like the time for recognizing and marking loss, recent or belated: the losses faced by those long mistreated by those with power in the city, and those who are now becoming aware of them and feeling compelled to interrupt all the ways the city is trying to get back to business as usual.

The title of Ma's novel speaks to loss: the loss of people's jobs during the pandemic; what they're owed for their length of employment; and Candace's loss of her parents and past. These losses continuously resurface throughout the novel. Severance, then, offers no clean breaks. Instead it begets more and more unwieldy, indebted relations that last beyond one's leaving. From the very beginning of the novel, we know Candace eventually ends up leaving New York, but Candace does not let go. There's too much to miss that she can't take with her.

For Candace, there was too much to miss, but also too much to do. Not only does Candace stay in New York, she also doesn't stop working. She continues to commute from her apartment in Brooklyn to her office in midtown Manhattan. She keeps going even when the building's doorman, her co-workers, and her boss stop showing up; when overseas manufacturers have shut down; when there are no more work emails to answer. When the trains and buses stop working, she decides to live in her office, undeterred, eating whatever preserved food she can find in empty bodegas and deserted food carts.

***

To pass the time, Candace starts, after a long hiatus, taking photographs of the city again — this time abandoned and overgrown — and anonymously posts them to NY Ghost, a blog she had created during that first aimless summer. When people visiting the blog from different parts of the world begin making requests for photos of their favorite sites, the blog becomes another job with "assignments," which Candace organizes by neighborhood to create a schedule. "There was a pleasure in doing this," she admits, "a pleasure in knowing that every morning, upon waking up, I knew my agenda for the day."17

In an interview, Ling Ma says, "The question I kept trying to figure out was, Why does Candace Chen keep working at her job?18 For Ma, the model minority myth and immigrant work ethic are not adequate answers. For although narratives of self-sufficiency, assimilation, and upward mobility are a part of what drives Candace's unsettling need to work, as Jane Hu notes, it's also a compulsory part of everyday life under capitalism. Candace's ability to keep working is also the inability to stop. Much like the fevered around her, she finds herself in an endless loop of habits and routines.

By the end of that summer, after the party, Candace's life changed. All of her friends started getting jobs — they became people with responsibilities, obligations, and schedules. Candace soon becomes one of those people when she starts working at Spectra, and soon enough, she cannot stop working at all, even during a pandemic.

Like those who write about leaving the city in the pandemic, those who talk about how peacefully productive they've been in quarantine are admonished for disregarding those whose quarantine has been anything but, due to mental health issues, partners, children, or other relatives in one's care. Productivity in a crisis is suspicious, it's disturbing evidence of one's cold complicity with the capitalist mandate to work in the face of endless bad news.

To be productive in quarantine muddies even further distinctions between work and leisure, now that both must take place at home. People have responded to this predicament in different ways. While some have shared Instagrams of themselves reading Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy,19 others have pointed out, unhelpfully, that William Shakespeare wrote King Lear during a plague.20 The question of what to do with our time, of how to be of use, has become a problem.

But rather than think about King Lear, I want to think about Charli XCX's quarantine album, How I'm Feeling Now. In March, early on in the days of COVID-19, before Taylor Swift made her own quarantine album in the countryside, English singer-songwriter and producer, Charli XCX, a self-identified "workaholic"21 decided that in two months she would record and release an album while under quarantine in Los Angeles.22

My favorite songs on the album play back to back. In "party 4 u" Charli throws a dream party with pink balloons, champagne, drugs, a DJ playing your favorite tunes, and friends from out of town. She croons, "I only threw this party for you / I was hoping you would come through." It's a seduction, and maybe even an apologetic romantic gesture, yet it's also a hopeful, melancholic invitation to a party she really hopes you'll one day come to.

Then there's "anthem," a louder, chaotic song where Charli shouts lyrics describing uninspired online shopping and TV binging. She can barely contain all her frustrated energy as she belts in the chorus, "I want anthems / late nights, my friends, New York / I sleep, wanna wake up brand new / I sleep, wanna wake up with you." It's straightforward and many might roll their eyes when they hear it, but quarantine has made me corny and direct. The song enacts what it desires: you want to scream it with friends late at night in New York until you're so worn out, you're ready to sleep alone or with company through a night that spills into a different day. It's a song devoted to a promiscuous way of marking time. Charli might not be able to stop working, but it's the work of, as Ethan Philbrick might say, "party planning."23 Charli's not just singing about all the parties we used to go to, she's singing about the parties we're missing.

***

Throughout the novel run two narratives. One is about Candace not leaving New York because she cannot stop working on her "assignments." The other is about Candace leaving New York after staying for as long as she could, but never actually leaving anything behind. Candace's tedious, mind-numbing labor, as the disaffected, inscrutable narrator and efficient worker, becomes what Colleen Lye calls the "economism of Asiatic racial form," the "historical expression" of Asian racialization bound to economic interests.24

But what about Candace's photographs? What do they formally convey of Asian racialization? These photographs, like Charli's album, cannot solely be chalked up to a coercive project of neoliberal self-optimization. Alix Beeston writes that her blog in its anonymity "studiously avoid[s] self-disclosure." At the same time, the blog is "an attempt at communion even as it concretizes its loss." Candace's photographs inhabit a nonvisible, unknowable racialized, gendered subject position determined by what is asked of her, but also by what she decides to take on as an assignment. She stays and works; she's down to plan a themed house party, as much as she's game to take on a new assignment that lets her let another see what they've been missing. This doubled letting is not just one giving into another, but one doing something on behalf of another so that they both don't miss out.

Accompanying these photographs are moments throughout the text when Candace's narration drifts into melancholic reveries that move us from the novel's postapocalyptic present to a sensuous preapocalyptic past of summers in New York and Fuzhou, and living with her parents in Salt Lake City, where they first immigrated in the US. Rich nonlinear passages carry us through Candace's thickened, vivid memories that feel like humidity late at night, taste like cold Pepsi, and sound like the low rumble of R&B from a neighboring apartment.25

In these instances, Candace's interiority as narrator is anything but disaffected, inscrutable, or efficient, nor is her life, both remembered and imagined, confined to work, the office, and her own capacity as a worker. These moments are not mere dissociative escapes from work and a postapocalyptic present; they're disruptions to narratives of leaving, to the different kinds of severance the novel names. Like Candace's photographs, and unlike the "leaving New York" essay, these moments in the novel are about what is missed, where leaving might be inevitable but not possible.

Hu writes that these "memories are filtered through American goods" like Pepsi.26 This is why the posthumous gift of dried shark fins stand out. They're a different kind of product for a Chinese dish. They're an object Candace had not directly encountered before. They're excessive, outdated, and preserved from the past for a future special event, for something to celebrate in a banquet hall: they're an occasion for a party, something her mother would have wanted after all.

When Candace was a freshman in college, her mother was experiencing an early onset of Alzheimer's:

She was given to strange, sensuous pursuits like rinsing our silver coffeepot under a cold tap faucet for abnormally long periods of time, or ordering fifty entrees of mapo tofu, her favorite thing to eat, for some imaginary dinner party. There was never not a dinner party. My voicemail filled with invites to lavish nonexistent gatherings. Those parties, if they actually happened, would've been kind of amazing, like a cross between a classic Chinese banquet-hall dinner and eighties-era Studio 54. She'd describe the menu she was planning and the guests she'd invited: my dead father, some divorced aunts and uncles, then some other Chinese names of friends or relative I didn't recognize, just a tangle of gibberish. They'll be so happy to see you. Don't worry about airfare; I've already bought you a ticket, she'd say.27

I like thinking about these "strange, sensuous pursuits," like feeling cold running water on one's hands and on a clean, shiny object, or planning "imaginary dinner parties" for the living and those who have passed, who must fly from all over to attend. And while Candace calls these parties "lavish nonexistent gatherings," of course there's a gathering that does in fact take place in her apartment, one centered around crystal bowls of sour, musty shark fin soup her mother has left her.

***

It is only in walking and taking photographs for her blog that Candace comes to know New York outside of its mythic qualities so often described by those who leave it. Candace stays in New York, and her unwavering productivity is used to document what other people miss, to capture what others couldn't take with them, which is not the city preserved in a timeless image, but the work she puts into what she and others can't let go of. She carries out requests for a party or a photograph to mark the deteriorating end: the end of a summer in New York, but also an apocalyptic End.

Didion and a friend of hers start to experience a certain fatigue at New York parties. They no longer encounter "new faces."28 Instead, they encounter the faces of those they've slept with or owe money to, or if they do come across someone new, they don't care to know them at all. Didion writes, "it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand the lesson in that story, which was that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair."29 But new encounters are not the only thing worth staying for. House parties might all start to feel the same, and that can be boring, yet there too are the comfortable assurances of the old, the same, and the familiar. The messy drama of a too-small scene can be an inconvenience, but it can also afford the sense that one will always have a place to stay, and overstay.

Years ago, for Halloween, some friends and I went to a dance party at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple in Fort Greene. The premise of the party was a lockdown during a zombie apocalypse. As we danced inside, fake news segments played on a screen documenting the chaos outside. Toward the end of the night, the party ended with a twist: the zombies were defeated, the doors opened, and we were able to leave. The party and the apocalypse were over.

We were locked in, but Candace gets locked out. When Candace realizes she cannot get back into her office, she decides she must leave. When she does, she leaves in a cab, the way any New Yorker would — one that she finds abandoned, along with the rest of the city she leaves behind.

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Summer Kim Lee is Assistant Professor of English at UCLA.

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