'Awake in the Floating City': hang in a height of San Francisco

Bertolt Brecht wrote that, in dark times, there will also be song. In Susanna Kwan's first novel, she asks if these songs can be sung if there are no choirs to sing them. Choirs require a community, and the role of the community during the environmental disaster is one of the themes that crosses this novel reflected on art, creation and ways that we care about each other.

BO is a 40 -year -old woman living in a height of San Francisco in the middle of the 21st century. The city is underwater after being overwhelmed by the upright peaceful ocean and the incessant rain. But the city continues to exist. Those who have not fled live in the upper floors of skyscrapers. Bo's cousins ​​have aligned work opportunities for her in Canada, but when the novel begins, she insists on staying. What keeps it there is sorrow; Two years earlier, his mother disappeared during a storm. Bo clings to hope that one day she will end up with her.

Like Bo before the rains, Kwan is an artist and she conveys what is missing in the life of her character after an environmental disaster: in the perpetual rain, there are no more seasons. And without seasons, there is no vacation or festivals to mark the changes of the year. BO marks time with his visit twice a week on the roof markets, where traders sell food they have grown up or brought by boat. But it is also there that she scanned the babbles filled with photos of the missing and lost in search of her mother.

Kwan's novel takes care of the way in which isolation and boredom of the vital parts of ourselves. The book captures the recent history of America: 2020 and isolates in our apartments and houses outside, the dead have stacked in freezer vans and massive pits. The ways in which anxiety and loneliness have greatly pushed to turn inward, to make what was going on personal, as if no one else was affected. The loss of the community and empathy for others drowned in the waves of fear, of uncertainty and for many, of anger. Bo herself struggles with her individual feelings of frustration and sorrow, but then remembers that she was not distinguished for bad fortune.

“What made her special in the long human history of the crisis and the displacement?” BO wonders. “She had followed reports of heat waves that have never calmed down, epidemics of anthrax and variola and malaria, dried continents in deserts, genocidal regimes, military blocks at borders that prevented the passage to hundreds of thousands of people without nowhere, children were drowned at sea. And yet, she inscribed her own delirium.

Before his mother disappeared, BO worked constantly as an illustrator and painter, a source of joy that supported him. But after the death of her mother – and it is clear that her mother was probably washed at sea – she is paralyzed. “Art, it came to feel, was useless in a time like this. He belonged to another world, the one she had left. ” Mourning has granted its love for colorful creation.

One day, a neighbor slips a note under his door. This is a request that Bo comes to help Mia with household chores. Mia lives alone and at 129, has trouble.

BO supported the economy contracted as a caregiver. Many of those who are in the skyscrapers are the elderly, in some cases abandoned by their children on the run, but sometimes too fragile to be moved. By 2050, people live beyond 100 and live at 130 is not uncommon. But the 130-year-old alumni have elderly children and even elderly grandchildren. Lower links with third and fourth generation descendants have left a lot to take care of themselves.

BO is the daughter of Chinese immigrants; Mia came from China with her parents. The daughter of Mia and other descendants live thousands of kilometers away. Taking care of Mia reminds BO for the time she spent with her mother when they hiked frequent to register on the family elders, a way of paying tribute, her mother told her when Bo was a child.

In Mia's apartment, the two women are starting to bond in the kitchen. Bo is preparing food while Mia tells stories of her life in San Francisco. She was born in the 1920s, not so long after the earthquake and the devastating fire that leveled the city in 1906. Mia’s life was parallel to the growth of San Francisco and its memories of the way the city changed during the decades of the 20th century intrigues. So many things have been lost, first in the explosive growth and wealth wave of the population, but when the rains came, entire parts of the city have disappeared, their stories swallowed by the implacable development of the Pacific.

Bo's memories have already been blurred by a perpetual toe. But hanging out with Mia loosen something inside Bo, and she notices that her senses can serve as “time to go back in time” and give her access to her own past. There are obvious reminders – a photograph – but the songs are particularly evocative before it even recognizes the melody. “A song provided the passage from the current station to a place and a time, distinct and palpable. The trip was fast, a sled tearing a toboggan track, the body feeling its arrival before the mind could record the trip.”

BO's occasional lover is a man who visits San Francisco as part of his work work in natural resources. It spends most of the time to count and catalog what the species remain, or what is about to be lost. When he arrives in town after starting to work for Mia, BO finds that his growing meaning, his desire to return to art, is motivated by a similar impulse.

She wants to catalog the experiences of Mia, her memories of the city which no longer exists. In their long conversations, Mia invokes images and stories of places that Bo did not know. Inspired by Mia, Bo goes to the city's archives and seeks photographs, newspaper articles, plans, maps and other ways whose now missing city has documented its existence.

For the approach of the 130th anniversary of Mia, which BO feels will be the last of her employer, she decides that she will use her skills as an artist to bring the old town back to life once again – a gift for her employer, but also a means by which BO can resume wild energy which is creation.

Survivors preparing for a catastrophic future imaginary food and supplies and get their supplies on firearms to “protect” those who need it. But as Kwan shows, these visions of the future are the refractions of nihilism and American belief that individual survival and success are due only to individual effort. But that has never been the case. What preserves human life – even a life in horrible circumstances – are relationships of benevolence and cooperation. The community dedicated to taking care of each other is the only way to thrive. The networks we build to support others finally become the social security net that we will need.

In Dark Times, the songs that comfort us will not be the cacophony of individual voice that mourn their sorrow. The darkness will be raised by the harmonies of those who recognize the humanity of the other.

Berry is a writer and critic living in Oregon.