Severance Study Guide

Ling Ma was born in Sanming, China, but moved to the United States when she was six years old. Ma spent her youth in Utah and her teen years in Kansas before eventually moving to Chicago, where she attended college at the University of Chicago. Ma originally intended to study archaeology and anthropology, but her coursework ended up guiding her to English and creative writing. After graduating, Ma worked at Playboy Magazine in Chicago as a fact checker for three years from 2009 to 2012. Ma began writing Severance as a short story during her last few months at the magazine. She wrote the bulk of its first draft while on severance pay after being laid off, thus the title. The novel took her four years to write, during which time she attended the MFA program at Cornell University. Ma published Severance in 2018 to critical acclaim. She has since published a collection of short stories entitled Bliss Montage (2022).

Readers of Severance will likely be struck by its similarities to the COVID-19 pandemic, which began in 2020. Like Shen Fever, COVID-19 was first identified in low-income urban environments in mainland China and quickly spread throughout the rest of the world.  Ma’s virus, presumably imagined in 2012, eight years before COVID-19, also leads to the proliferation of N-95 masks, mass hysteria, and the explosion anti-Asian sentiment and rhetoric. Besides being predictive of the real pandemic, the book also references notable events from 2011 and 2012. The novel’s “Hurricane Mathilde,” for instance, has similarities with Hurricane Sandy, which ravaged the U.S.’s East Coast, in late 2012. The hurricane (technically a tropical storm) did considerable damage to New York City, Long Island, and the surrounding area, flooding the subway system and shutting down the New York Stock Exchange for two days. Many homes were destroyed, and large areas of the city were without power for days. Ma’s novel also references the Obama presidency (2008-2016), as well as “Occupy Wall Street,” a left-wing and populist movement that occurred in 2011 in response to the U.S. government’s 2008 bank bailouts and general public distrust in the private sector in the aftermath of the Great Recession (2007-2009).

Severance joins a lineage of other “zombie novels” that speculate about the world through the lens of a viral apocalypse. Mark Brooks’s World War Z (2006) is perhaps the most famous in the genre, with a blockbuster movie adaptation starring Brad Pitt that came out in 2013. World War Z is a more “standard” zombie novel, with themes focused largely on fear, survivalism, and the military-industrial complex. Zone One (2011) is prolific writer and contemporary literary figure Colson Whitehead’s take on the zombie novel, returning to his childhood fascination with science fiction and horror writers like Stephen King and Isaac Asimov. The novel is similar to Severance in its exploration of race in a post-apocalyptic setting. Also like Severance, Zone One largely takes place in New York City as well. Severance enjoyed an explosion in popularity following the real life COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, especially with its similarity in certain details to the Shen Virus in Ma’s work. Likewise, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), which centers around a fictional swine-flu pandemic that wipes out humanity, enjoyed a similar boost and was optioned in the TV miniseries in 2021. Severance also joins a growing movement of novels by Asian and Asian American authors that focus on themes of disease, post-apocalypse, and post-humanism to examine their experience as Asian people. Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) notably includes the mysterious “dreaming disease” that inflicts the population of a region that was formerly Canada, and Chang Rae-Lee’s On Such a Full Sea (2014) similarly explores a dystopian post-apocalypse.