Memory and Movement from Fuzhou to NYC

 “Because I misremember everything, because I watch a lot of China travel shows when I am alone at night in New York, because TV mixes with my dreams mixes with my memories…” (Ma 97). 

Through the novel Severance by Ling Ma, readers witness protagonist Candace reminiscing on summers spent in Fuzhou, as in the quote above. Such instances reveal the interplay of perception, media, memory, and dreams in our experience of place and how we map meaning onto physical space. Passages will start with a present-tense description grounded in perception of the physical surroundings. However, Ma goes on to indicate the transition of present perception into memory, i.e., “Because I misremember everything…” (97). At this point, memory, dreams, and media distort the original perception. The China travel shows she watched become stored as memories of physically lived experience, and as dreams which inevitably become memories again. 

Candace goes on to describe a contradictory recollection of being in Fuzhou, walking “along the concourse that runs alongside the river even though there is no river” and “down boulevards punctuated by palm-tree clusters even though those belong in Singapore” (98). These distinct places (Fuzhou, Singapore, New York) thus meld into a singular place in her memory space. I attribute this phenomenon to the process of the present becoming memory, which happens swiftly and at every moment. The present is constantly becoming the past, allowing all of this information to become easily entangled within the memory space. Television fragments become indistinguishable from dream fragments become indistinguishable from prior memory fragments. It all becomes memory, and once it enters this memory space, the distinctions between lived and watched and dreamed become less so. Of course memories can be recalled in the present, but even this act of recalling inevitably falls to the past and becomes memory once again.

I am reminded in this moment of David Wojnarowicz’s assertion that “there is really no difference between memory and sight, fantasy and actual vision” (Close to the Knives, 27). Taking into consideration the similarity of sensory intake across these processes and the swiftness of transition from present to past/memory, one can imagine how the space of consciousness becomes homogeneous to the point that memory, dreams, past, present, and place are blurred and potentially indistinguishable.

With great literary dexterity, Ma portrays this phenomenon through space. First, she presents an unreliable (in the sense of actual spatial elements) map of the city – what do we do with this map? How do we navigate it? It is clearly not meant to be taken as a literal map, but rather a map of phenomenological experience. In this moment, physical space has become place, providing us a rich phenomenological look into the character’s life in the city. Ma’s artful commentary on the intricacies of memory in conjunction with her critique of capitalism and corporate culture raises urgent questions about ways of living. Although our various experiences inevitably enter the memory space, the present is still worth showing up for. Perhaps Ma suggests that with intentional focus and awareness, with purposeful embodiment of our actions and daily routines, we may resist the complete dissolution of meaning as experience into memory with time. There may be hope yet in the face of the fictional Shen fever, the “disease of remembering.”