Ling Ma: “New York Ghost”

By Sigrid Löffler

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“New York Ghost” by the Chinese-American author Ling Ma is not unjustifiably marketed by the publisher as the “novel of the hour”, says Sigrid Löffler. (Deutschlandradio / CulturBooks)

An epidemic turns the USA into a world of the dead. A young woman lurches through her precarious life and ends up roaming New York as the last survivor. Long before Corona, “New York Ghost”, the cleverly told debut novel by Ling Ma, was published.

In 2018, long before the pandemic, a dystopian novel was published in the USA in which an epidemic, Shen fever, introduced from China not only depopulates New York, but spreads worldwide. “New York Ghost”, the first novel by the Chinese-American author Ling Ma, born in 1983, has now also been published in German.

Since he anticipates our pandemic present with uncanny clairvoyance and imagines its consequences, the publisher is not wrongly marketing him as the “novel of the hour”.

The last survivors plunder and vegetate

It describes how the Shen fever is transforming America into a post-apocalyptic world of the dead, in which the last survivors either vegetate as feverish zombies or marauding hordes that have not yet been infected and plunder abandoned shopping malls and private houses.

The author Ling Ma, who, like her heroine Candace Chen, was born in China and came to the USA as a 6-year-old, interweaves this end-time pandemic story with an autobiographically inspired second narrative thread.

It tells the heroine’s prehistory before the outbreak of the epidemic – and it’s a mix of migration history, work-world satire, globalization and consumer criticism as well as a generational portrait of urban millennials. Like all young people in the novel who grew up at the beginning of the millennium, Candace lurches through her precarious life as a disoriented and rootless sleepwalker – the embodiment of the isolation of bondless individuals in late capitalism.

Narrative spheres cleverly linked

As different as these two narrative spheres appear, the author interlinks and mirrors them in a sophisticated way – through narrative tricks such as parallelizing themes and entangling or reversing motifs. It is only when you look at the novel as a whole that you realize the well-thought-out craftsmanship of the novel’s structure.

The heroine Candace, daughter of Chinese immigrants in Salt Lake City / Utah, drifts to New York and ends up in a monotonous office job: In a publishing house, she coordinates the production of Bibles, made to measure according to the customers’ weirdest special requests.

The double irony of this grim satire on the world of work under globalization conditions: Since practically everyone already has a Bible, the only thing that matters is to sell the consumer the same product in a different packaging. The production of the Holy Book of Christendom is being outsourced to low-wage printing companies in southern China for reasons of cost.

Scary zombie road novel

After people left New York in a panic because of the Shen fever, Candace posts pictures of her forays through the ghostly empty city on her photo blog called “New York Ghost”. As the last survivor, she becomes a ghost herself, a New York ghost, before she too flees into the surrounding area.

From then on, the novel takes the form of a gruesome zombie road novel. Candace is picked up by a kind of sect and moves with her at the behest of her messianic leader Bob in the direction of Chicago, where he promises his followers to survive in a safe “facility”.

On the way they break into private houses, where they often come across feverish or dead people. The Shen fever turns its victims into zombies, senselessly trapped in the eternal repetition of empty everyday routines until death or until the coup de grace by Bob’s gang.

Surprising punchline at the end

The “facility” turns out to be an empty shopping center. There, Bob establishes a paranoid regime of violence. Escape attempts are cruelly punished.

The author Ling Ma manages a surprising final punch at the end. It makes “New York Ghost” one of the most remarkable debut novels of the last few years.

Ling Ma: “New York Ghost”
Translated from the American by Zoë Beck
CulturBooks Verlag, Hamburg 2021
360 pages, 23 euros

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