Before the semester got away from me, I became fascinated by science fiction books written by people of color. Chang-Rae Lee's On Such a Full Sea (2014) and Colson Whitehead's Zone One (2011). Because I am teaching Larissa Lai's Salt Fish Girl (2002) in my ethnic American writers class, and because rumors of Junot Diaz's science fiction novel, Monstro, aroused the interest of my students as we read his first collection of short stories, Drown, I thought about how interesting an entire class on science fiction by people of color (ethnic science fiction, for simplicity's sake) would be.
For, you see, the authors that I am teaching my students in the ethnic American writers class, Diaz and Lee in particular, have had interesting and dynamic writing careers that can be traced from reading their first, more traditionally ethnic-lit books (Drown and Native Speaker, respectively) to reading their recent ones, which are often exercises in genre fiction. Because of time constraints, however, we started with their first books even as I have read, by myself, their more current texts.
On Such a Full Sea follows the life of a young girl living in what seems to be a former city (Baltimore) turned worker town. One day, the main character--Fan--realizes that her boyfriend, Reggie, has not returned from being summoned by local government officials. After his disappearance, Fan continues to work in the fish tanks, and to attend ceremonies, but one day she simply leaves the confines of her stable and clean town. There is no large-scale and violent upheaval that leads her to escape (think of The Hunger Games), instead, she simply walks out of the city gates and never returns. Her face, and her love story, however, become the narrative of the resistance and as soon as she leaves, the hierarchy and restrictions in B-Mor start to change.
What strikes me about Fan is that she is always described as looking considerably younger than she is. While she is, in actuality, 18 or 19, people mistake her for being as young as 12-years-old. Although she is slight of build, she is incredibly self-possessed and, when faced with dangerous situations, is able to act logically in order to maintain self-preservation. She moves from her worker facility in B-Mor, to a compound in the country (a lawless and apparently contaminated area) to the Charters. The Charters are a type of Elysium space--nearly everyone who lives there (except for the help) is incredibly intelligent, talented, and wealthy. Like the community of Saints in Puritan New England, however, you are not automatically selected to remain in the Charters because of lineage. Instead, you must pass an official government exam. These exams are incredibly high pressure and high stakes and those outside of the Charters can only be accepted it they score within the very highest percentiles--and they must do so without the formal training, the neurological enhancers, or the same amount of schooling as children in Characters. If a child from outside of the Charters passes the exam, they must renounce connections to their family and be adopted by a Charter family. Exams of this sort drive the intense pressure of life in the Charters and it doesn't end when a child passes, life in these gated and privileged spaces are preoccupied with status, material objects, and competition. They are, a contaminated space, but the contaminate is not environmental in origin.
Death, it comes as no surprise, primarily occupies the thoughts and drives the motivations of people in the Charters. Remaining "C-free" is not possible--eventually, everyone gets a version of C that proves fatal. And while a number of technologies stave off the effects of C disease, they cannot cure C or prolong life indefinitely. This is where Fan enters into the plot's main intrigue. Because Reggie is presumed to be C-free, the government and scientists speculate that they might harvest or otherwise utilize Reggie's body to create a type of immunization or antidote to C disease. They expect that people of mixed origins (not necessarily of Asian descent) have some type of immunity to the disease. While this does not prove to be true, Fan is carrying Reggie's baby, and the baby might be the key to creating some type of antidote or cure.
So while Fan journeys through spaces outside of B-More--some spaces that are much poorer and some that are much wealthier--is searches for Reggie or for people who might help her to find him (such as her older brother, who was adopted into a Charter when he was a child). Along the way, she is entrapped in a Charter house and forced to play "doll" for a wealthy white woman (Miss Cathy) who cannot sleep in her own bed unless it was previously occupied by the body of a young girl, she is nearly raped by this wealthy woman's pedophile husband, and she is rescued... well... she rescues herself, but she is helped by a successful Indian Doctor who hates the sterility of her life in a Charter. Fan, then, reflects the unseemly urges and desires of the people she meets in her journey, even as she also carries a potential savior for the human race.
Obviously, the science behind this new "American" dystopia, fascinates me. But so too does the way in which collective memory and lore operate. While Fan sets out on her journey early in the text, a seemingly disembodied narrative voice recalls not only her adventures (through recounting rumors, video feeds, and other "evidence) but also the ways in which B-Mor has changed she her defiance and departure. Mass and chaotic group gatherings occur, in which people suddenly and viciously destroy public property and kill decorative fish. Elders are removed from everyday interactions and, often, evidence of abuse and neglect is visible on their bodies. Former gatherings for Lunar New Year, mourning rituals, and other "New China" traditions are no longer honored. Political dissent becomes happenstance. Fan--or the idealized image of her and her love story--fuel the discontent and frenzy that ensue as the workers of B-Mor rebel against their station.
There are, of course, a lot of interesting intersections between labor in the future and labor now--illegal and undocumented workers who catch our fish, grow and harvest our vegetables and fruit, remain silent in the face of legal policies that further restrict their movements and their work--but there are also similar panics related to "foreign" food sources. In the Charters, there is a rejection of B-Mor produce, most notably their fish, because of a fear that it causes C disease. For a time, everything is restricted in B-Mor--medical care, education opportunities, retirement trips, etc. As resources constrict, rebellion occurs more often. Then, just as the sudden embargo on B-Mor products throws the facility into a panic, the demand rebounds and doubles and the workers are working full shifts and overtime. Work, then, keeps people from questioning the role of the government in their lives: in place of rebellion, there is the steady flow of money and resources into B-Mor, money, then, silences dissent most effectively.
In America, similar panics have sent markets around the world reeling: think of the various Chinese food scares or tainted Japanese soil and water. These are just a few examples of how international markets are deeply entwined at the site of exchange but not at the production level. While Americans are able to enjoy the relative cheapness of these products (which are cheap because a number of violations, environmental and human), there is angry outrage when these products prove to be made with dangerous or substandard ingredients; it's a sad and familiar story when the immigrants who harvest the fish in B-Mor are blamed for spreading C disease.
The ways in which writers such as Lee (or Whitehead, or Lai, for that matter) write about racial and ethnic identity is far more nuanced than texts with primarily focus on race and ethnicity--think autobiography here or other first person narratives with a person of color as the main character. Unlike Native Speaker--Lee's first novel--Fan does not seem terribly concerned with being Asian, or of Asian descent. She has a relationship with Reggie, who is mixed and presumably of African-American descent. She doesn't feel terribly close to her large family and doesn't seem to struggle with acting or being autonomous. In short, the typical depictions of an Asian-American (if America is still a thing in this future) female protagonist are not in operation in this this text: there is no extensive explication from a first person point of view about what one experiences when one speaks English as a second language, or struggles with non-Western historical atrocity. Yet her "otherness" is important to the movement of the plot and the interaction between characters in that it enables her to move about spaces she might otherwise be barred from (she is, after all, presumed to be a pre-teen when she is actually a woman because a number of white people "misread" her physical attributes); it also gets her into trouble (because she is still fetishized for her "exotic" qualities), as the strange encounter with Miss Cathy and her husband, demonstrates. Ethnicity, then, in books such as On Such a Full Sea are characterized in far less heavy-handed ways than ethnic literature that was published even as recently as 14 years ago.
Recent science fiction by people of color also seems incredibly preoccupied with questions of biological, medical, and neurological import. From On Such a Full Sea's focus on C disease to Lai's depiction of a genetically modified and cloned work force, science is becoming the new language through which writers can explore the ramifications of scientific augmentation on labor force and commerce patterns. It is an exciting time to be reading this particular genre.
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