Religion on the Move: Migration, Globalization and Post-Apocalypse in Ling Ma’s Severance

Ling Ma’s 2018 debut novel, Severance, weaves intimately three types of fiction: the storyline of a post-apocalyptic survival narrative, interlaced with the coming of age tale of the narrator/protagonist (Candace Chen) struggling to find meaning and make a living in a globalized economy that was posing increasing ecological threats to its inhabitants, and through the flashbacks of her memory, a traumatizing story of her immigrant parents and her own childhood facing unfathomable heart-breaking tragedy.  Religion permeates each of those three strands. Published in the year before Covid-19, Ling Ma’s Severance offers an uncanny and unsettling depiction of the spread of a global pandemic and humanity’s chaotic response to it. While seamlessly rooted in the trajectory of a Chinese-American immigrant family, Severance can be placed in the long line of what Father Marc Rastoin (2018) termed “post-apocalyptic genre” in recent decades in which religion constitutes an important dimension.