A graffito, seen on the wall of a house in Berlin: “Corona is the virus, capitalism is the pandemic.” Unquestionably abbreviated, agitated on top of that, but this diagnosis has at least been memorized as worth examining. As it turns out, an entire novel can be built on it – which, surprisingly, has neither self-righteous nor didactic features.
“New York Ghost” is the debut of the writer Ling Ma, who was born in the Chinese province of Fujian in 1983 and grew up in the USA. Your novel was originally published in 2018, two years before the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
This is followed by the question: How do you read a fiction that has apparently been overtaken by world events? Candace Chen, Ling Ma’s first-person narrator, is responsible for the production of kitschy Bible editions with fake gemstones for a New York book publisher. The Word of God is manufactured in Shenzhen, east China, which, thanks to its special access to the world market, has expanded from a fishing village to a metropolis of twelve million within decades, offers cheap labor and is well connected to global trade via Hong Kong.
In spring 2011 the “Shen fever” broke out in Shenzen as a result of the poor working conditions (from today’s perspective a rather Trumpian naming), which soon reached the USA. When reading, there is inevitably a knowing pleasure when details have apparently been verified by the coronavirus.
The trips of migrant workers for the Chinese New Year are becoming a driver of infection. Employers grumble about working from home. There are mask opponents. “We were in anger, the slower of us lagged behind in denial.”
From China to the USA
But literature is not a weather forecast and the positivist reading is the most boring. It is more worthwhile to look at Ling Ma’s multi-layered imagery, which, in addition to the clear criticism of capitalism, also outlines a painfully honest search for a Chinese-American identity. The novel alternates chapter by chapter between the time before and after the outbreak of the epidemic, the “END”.
Before: Candace’s everyday life in New York in her twenties, office politics, relationships, an unplanned pregnancy. After: the struggle for survival in an America that, in its human poverty, is reminiscent of Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel “The Road”. Are there any other survivors out there? Can you trust them?
[Ling Ma: New York Ghost Roman. Aus dem Englischen von Zoë Beck. CulturBooks Verlag, Hamburg 2021. 360 Seiten, 23 €.]
As in Susan Sontag’s classic short story “How We Live Now” about the HIV epidemic of the 1980s, those who are not sick always speak in “New York Ghost”. They are judged, worried, their demise is decided, but they themselves remain silent: “Words often disappeared first when one was feverish.”
Candace once had something similar happened despite her health. Before moving to the United States at the age of six, like Ling Ma, she grew up in Fujian. Her incomplete, in their own way speechless childhood memories are among the strongest passages in the novel: “I noticed that I didn’t know the full names of any of my relatives. I always addressed them by their family name. The first uncle, the second aunt, my grandmother. “
On the way through Chernobyl Manhattan
The text has been convincingly translated into German by Culture Books publisher and crime writer Zoë Beck, who recently published a pandemic novel with “Paradise City” herself. Especially the descriptions of the ghostly New York trigger a visual pleasure: You want to see it, this Chernobyl Manhattan, in which horses, which were just driving tourists through Central Park, explore the urban wilderness. When public transport stops, Candace unceremoniously moves into her office in Times Square. Your superiors have long been elsewhere, the partners in China have other worries.
First the world gets out of hand and then the employment contract expires. The fear only grabs Candace when the latter happens. She joins a group whose leader Bob declares that one is the “divine selection” and that the “feverish” must be “redeemed”. The infected become skinny and tend to mindless repetition. When a house is ransacked, Candace observes how a woman sets the table, simulates dinner, covers the table again – and starts all over again. “In the moments before we shot, they looked at us with crocodile eyes, noticed how different we were.”
Is that correct? The rituals, which have degenerated into an end in themselves, are ultimately an echo of Candace’s work between elevator, copier, desk and the production of eternal Gospels with changing covers. The novel scares you precisely because the lost world is not particularly attractive. The longing for her is to live a better bad life. In this respect, the “END” is not a complete break.
What remains are the rituals of capitalism
The strict utility that it needs to survive, especially in the rental juggernaut New York, was there long ago. Bob’s group eventually moves into “the facility”, an abandoned mall in Illinois. Their apartments are the skeletonized rooms of Apple Store, Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch and L’Occitane. And her first act after moving in is tellingly to pull sweets from a vending machine – just like in McCarthy’s “Street” a Coca-Cola can in the remains of a burned down supermarket becomes a souvenir of a pre-apocalyptic home.
Dystopian literature is used for identification. The horror too, sure. But horror would be a bed sheet ghost if we didn’t recognize ourselves in it. “New York Ghost” can be felt with and without Corona. This also indicates that the more robust framework of our “now” is probably not the pandemic, but an unleashed work and trade culture.
What is left in Ling Ma’s horror vision? The rituals of capitalism. US evangelicalism. The television series “Friends”. And finally, unexpectedly, like in Cormac McCarthy’s father-son relationship the love of a lonely parent for his child, here an unborn one – the nuclear unity in Candace’s ruinous, unsocial life.
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