“Each generation built with the intention of passing a long what was meaningful, but the cycles always repeated. If not pillaging, then greed or neglect, willful or ordained patterns of amnesia, mere clumsiness or environmental disaster. The ones who came next were left to sort through whatever crumbs happened to remain.”
— Susanna Kwan in Awake in the Floating City
Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City opens in Bo’s studio apartment in a mega S.F. high rise. She is one of the residents left behind in a city that has experienced seven years of steady rainfall, flooding the world-class city and challenging its ability to survive. This is a Biblical-scale disaster, and the continual rain (unexplained) limits what can be done to recover. SF is a rainforest with vines “from roof to ground” and a green skyline.
The remaining residents have created a “floating city” that exists on roof tops of buildings, where vendors sell their container-grown fruits and vegetables and try to get by. The rooftops have been connected with suspension bridges. Kwan writes of a spiritedness among the survivals, the skeleton population left behind:
“It didn’t take long for everything else to follow them up. The school district cordoned off areas for recess and after-school programs. The parks department put on movie nights. Talks, concerts, and community meetings took place under the shelter of portable bandshells. But even then, there was a sense that it wouldn’t last. Activity had diminished steadily, as expected, especially in the last two years, and only a third of the vendors remained now. Still, everyone left moved along the roofs, by necessity and for pleasure, for groceries and exercise and socializing, and to get from one place to another.”
Bo is a middle-aged carer. Her former client, Ricardo, has passed. He has left her some small moneys from which she can survive in between clients. Her needs are few even in one of the most (formerly) expensive cities in the world. She is the child of a single mother, who had disappeared in the floodwaters and is presumed lost. She has an uncle and cousin who live in Vancouver, B.C., in Canada. Jenson, her cousin, and Winston, her uncle, use their connections to try to wangle her way off the water-logged high-rise to a new life. There is perhaps some comfort that while one part of the world is in disaster mode, other parts are still functioning.
The boat comes and goes, without Bo. She does not yet want to leave the city. Perhaps she is afraid to start anew. Perhaps she is waiting for her mother to show. Her own reasons are not clear to her. She has some self-knowledge, but some other insights are withheld from her. She has a dream to be an artist and some early tentative moves in that direction. In art, she seems to be a neophyte, perhaps a bit of a dabbler. It seems that she wants to make art for others, to perhaps have a voice in the world, but she has not created in a long time.
Still, she dares to aspire:
“Even touching her toe to the placid surface of a pond had once set off an internal crisis. Ridges had formed on the water, a motion so tiny it was like detecting the sound of a needle released by a towering pine. She’d watched as the rings pushed out into mesmerizing patterns, moving in so many directions, as the waves lapped against the retaining wall and flowed over it, and her whole body flooded with the beauty of what she’d set in motion. But after a minute, she could no longer track the movements. The ripples had stopped. There was no sign that any of it had happened. A private misery took over then—that she should believe her skin touching the water important enough to be in some way registered, that it would have any effect at all. The unbearable problem of something she would later call transience, or impermanence.”
She wants to stop time. She wants to capture what is precious. She wants to share what she observes.
Hers is a quiet and thinking life. While her friends have achieved financial stability and married and raised families, she has gone a different path. She has not pursued much higher education per se. She is comfortable in her own skin. She has an occasional boyfriend. In one scene, she makes a meal by picking mushrooms off her mycelium wall in her kitchen.
Her placement agency reaches out. A woman who is over 100 years old needs some help. Mia is a fellow Cantonese-speaker. She has family in Europe, and they are clearly too far away to be of help. Bo observes Mia:
“The woman’s perm resembled a bleached broccoli top. Her cardigan was the same color as her skin and looked like a mass of inexpertly woven cobwebs. Her arms, soft lumps, pushed against the sloppy lace, and her bosom melted into the rolls and dips and pockets of the larger landscape of her body. A pale jade pendant of the goddess Kwan Yin rested on her belly. Her blue-tinted feet bulged from a ratty pair of house slippers.”
The two form a symbiotic relationship. Bo needs to be needed, and Mia needs physical care a few times a week, for food preparation and perhaps some encouragement.
Mia shares some of her observations about history, including of the Chinese experience in the 20th century: “Famine made cheap goods of girls.”
In remembering the Japanese invasion of China, Mia shares:
“In desperate times, value fluctuated—of women, rice, gold. When you were destitute, the price was always negotiable. A piece of jade could be a fair trade for a fistful of rice; then the tide shifted and sacks of the same grain were sold for pennies; later, the jade might be exchanged for college tuition. Heirlooms sewn into secret pockets could rescue you from an early death. Only the very fortunate, the ones who had not faced starvation, could pass jewels to the next generation.”
Mia Yee de-mythifies the power of marriage, even though she was married 60 years. In her super-centenarian stage, she is not shy about sharing secrets of her own affairs. The two characters—Bo and Mia—form a unique chemistry. Mia’s sharing is answering a question that Bo did not know she had…about time, about art, and about herself.
The two, through conversation and cooking and socializing, celebrate important holidays and mark the passing of time. Bo realizes that the world around her has changed fundamentally:
“As a painter who had rendered landscapes, she should have realized sooner: colors went extinct with species. The palette of a place, like its ecology, kept changing. Could it be recovered in paint?”
Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City describes a disappearing and disappeared world. The various dependencies—for utilities, for healthcare, for governance, for law enforcement, for education, for transportation—are reliant on fundamentally broken structures.
Kwan’s debut novel is richly imagined, humanistic, and hopeful. Kwan writes with an artful poetry and the steeliness of historical prose. Awake… celebrates community and human relationships, even given human limits. It focuses on the salutary and saving value of art for a community under siege and the greater publics beyond.
The rain reads as a symbol of accelerated time and accelerated loss. Meanwhile, humanity strives to create lives above the waterline.
Susanna Kwan talks about her novel on Friday, June 6, 2025 at Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle.
Shalin Hai-Jew has worked in higher education for many years. She has edited dozens of nonfiction educational books and authored a dozen with a number of publishers.
