Review:
In the present, Candace Chen is traveling with a group of other former white collar workers to the Facility, a destination chosen by the group's leader, Bob. Shen Fever has overtaken the world, and most of the fevered are either dead by now or in the process of dying, stuck in meaningless routines until their bodies can no longer manage.
In the past, Candace's parents were Chinese immigrants who were eventually able to bring her over to the US with them as well. After her parents died, Candace lost touch with the rest of her family and lived a rootless life in New York City. She enjoyed photography and, for a while, kept a photo blog called NY Ghost that became her way of documenting Shen Fever's effect on the city. Before that, though, she worked in Bible production, a job she was good at but didn't particularly enjoy.
I'm not sure what to say beyond that. The book explores Candace's memories and past - her relationship with her family, how she got her job, how things began and ended between her and her boyfriend, how things went at work when Shen Fever started taking over, and how things turned out between her and Bob's group.
I picked this up because I thought it would go well with my current interest in workplace fiction. I was also interested to see how the Shen Fever aspect was handled, especially since this was written and came out before the COVID-19 pandemic.
I feel like this book tried to tackle too many themes at once and ended up not following completely through with any of them. There was Candace's relationship with her parents and her Chinese roots, as well as her mother's lifelong desire to go back to Fuzhou and the happiness she was sure she'd find there. There was her relationship with work - its ethical and human rights aspects ("nice products made cheaply" = someone suffering, for example a factory worker in China), its place in her life when Shen Fever became more prominent. Then there was Shen Fever itself, which was presented as a fungal infection but which was actually a vehicle for some kind of statement about people and their memories and routines.
I was most interested in seeing how things were going to end up with Bob's group, and how Candace became past of their group in the first place. However, most of the book was more concerned with Candace's memories of the past, particularly her mother. The Shen Fever aspects didn't really become more prominent until the last third of the book, and by that point I was bothered by the realization that it was more of a literary device than a disease. It was 100% fatal and apparently nothing could stop it, except maybe colder temperatures. Antifungal spraying and N95 masks were useless, at least according to Candace. You either got it or you didn't, but even seemingly immune people could start presenting Shen Fever symptoms in an instant, particularly in environments to which they had some sort of nostalgic connection.
The portion of the book describing Candace's time at work during the early months of Shen Fever were eerily familiar - office workers trying to get permission to work from home, physical locations kept open by a skeleton crew, people like Candace continuing to try to do their jobs and go on as usual despite everything. In Ma's version of the pandemic, people like Candace were offered enormous bonuses for agreeing to be part of their workplace's in-person skeleton crew. Ma could envision the effect that Shen Fever would have on something like book production supply chains, but lots of other things, like water, medication, toilet paper, garbage collection, etc. were hazier or not mentioned at all.
In the end, the car Candace was in ran out of gas, and so too did the story, which basically just stopped. My unanswered questions remained unanswered, and the book's most interesting aspects would have worked just as well in a much less time-consuming to read short story. There were seeds of something good here, and it would probably make for a great book club read, but, as presented, it all felt pointless.
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