‘Awake in the Floating City’: Holding on in a San Francisco high-rise

Bertolt Brict wrote that in dark times, there will also be singing. In Susanna Kwan’s first novel, she asks whether these songs have sang if there are no choirs for singing. Circles require society, and the role of society during environmental disasters is one of the subjects that pass through this studied narration of art, creation and ways that we care about each other.

Bo Woman 40ish who lives in San Francisco is tall in the middle of the twenty -first century. The city is underwater after it was flooded by the rising Pacific Ocean and continuous rain. But the city is still present. Those who did not escape the upper floors of the Skil clouds. The sons of Amuum Bo lined up job opportunities in Canada, but when the novel begins, she insists on staying. What keeps her is sadness. Two years ago, her mother disappeared during a storm. Bo hangs in the hope that it will be reunited one day.

Like Bo before rain, KWAN is an artist and she transmits what is lost in her personality life after the environmental disaster: in permanent rain there are no longer seasons. Without seasons, there are no holidays or festivals to distinguish changes per year. Bo represents time with her visit twice a week to the surface markets, as merchants sell or brought it to the boat. But it is also the place where she wipes the bulletin panels filled with missing and missing pictures in search of her mother.

KWAN revolves around the methods of isolation and boredom SAP vital parts of ourselves. The book picks up the modern history of America: 2020 and isolated in our apartments and homes while abroad, the dead accumulated in the freezer trucks and collective graves. The ways caused by anxiety and loneliness caused the transmission of many inward, to make what was happening personally, as if no one else was affected. The loss of society and sympathy for others in the waves of fear, uncertainty, a lot, anger. Bo herself is struggling with her individual feelings of frustration and sadness, but then reminds herself that she was not distinguished for bad luck.

“What made it distinctive in the long human history of crisis and displacement?” Wonders Bo. “I have followed reports on the heat waves that have never subsided, the widespread anthrax, smallpox, and malaria, the drying of the continents to deserts, the genocide systems, and the military government on the borders that prevented its passage to hundreds of thousands of people who have any place, and drowning children in the sea.

Before her mother disappeared, Bo worked constantly as a painter and a painter, a source of the joy he preserved. But after the death of her mother – it is clear that her mother was probably washed into the sea – she is paralyzed. “Art, I felt, did not serve any purpose at this time. It belongs to another world, I left it behind.” Sadness led to gray her love to create colored.

One day, one of the neighbors slides a note below her door. He asked to help Bo from MIA with household chores. Mia lives alone, at the age of 129, struggles.

Bo supported herself in the narrow economy as a career. Many of those in high rations are the elderly, in some cases that have been abandoned by their fleeing children, but sometimes they cannot be transferred sometimes. By 2050, people live after 100 and live to 130 not rare. But 130 -year -old elders have elderly children and even the grandchildren of the elderly. The weakest bonds with the descendants of the third and fourth generation left a lot to care for themselves.

Bo is the daughter of the Chinese immigrants. Mia came from China with her parents. Mia’s daughter lives more thousands of miles away. Mia’s care reminds Bo Book of the time she spent with her mother when they made repeated trips to check the elders of the family, a way to pay respect, her mother told her when Bo was a child.

In Mia’s apartment, the two women begin in the bond in the kitchen. Bo is food while Mia tells stories about her life in San Francisco. It was born in the twenties of the twentieth century, and it was not long after the earthquake and the devastating fire that chased the city in 1906. Mia’s life is parallel to San Francisco and its memories on how the city changed over the decades in the twentieth century. He lost a lot, first in the wave of explosive population growth and wealth, but when the rains came, whole parts of the city disappeared, and its history swallowed through the height that is unabated in the Pacific Ocean.

The memories of Bo have already been filled with permanent gray. But hanging with Mia wears something inside Bo, and notes that her senses can serve as “time machines” and allow her to reach her past. There are clear reminders – a picture – but songs are particularly exciting even before you get to know the melody. “I presented a pass from the current station to a place and a time, distinct and tangible. The journey was fast, and it was skiing on tearing the LEGE path, and the body senses its arrival before the mind was able to record the trip.”

Poe lover sometimes is a man who visits San Francisco as part of his job job in natural resources. He spends a lot of time counting and indexing the species that remain, or what is about to be lost. When he arrives in the city after she started working in MIA, Bo finds her growing sense of goal, and her desire to return to art made, paid similarly.

She wants to index the experiences of Mia, and its memories of the city that no longer exists. In their long conversations, MIA calls the pictures and the history of places that BO never knew. Inspired by MIA, Bo goes to the city’s archive and examines photographs, press articles, plans, maps and other roads documented by the city that now misses its existence.

In order to approach Mia’s 130th birthday, which Bo Senses will be the last employer, she decided that she would use her skills as an artist to return the old city to life again – a gift to her employer, but also a way through which BO can respond to the wild energy that is creation.

They are preparing to be preparing for a wardrobe and imaginative future supplies, supplies and storage of weapons “to protect themselves from the needy. But as Kwan explains, such visions in the future are nihilistic breaks and the American belief that individual survival and success only refer to individual effort. But this was not. What preserves human life – even life in horrific circumstances – is care and cooperation. A society based on caring for each other is the only way we will flourish. The networks that we build to support others eventually become the social safety network that we will need ourselves.

In dark times, the songs that will be comfortable for us will not be the individual original flavor that cries its grief. Darkness will be raised through the consensus of those who know each other.

Perry is a writer and critic who lives in Oregon.