New America and Old China in Dystopian Novels

Chang-rae Lee’s fifth novel, On Such a Full Sea, begins in the voice of a “we” that evokes the past and discounts its significance in a single sentence. “Everyone is from someplace,” the faceless collective muses, “but that someplace, it turns out, is gone.” In Lee’s dystopia a century and a half into the future, what is irrevocably gone is the United States of America.

And yet Lee had not intended to write a book about America. When he traveled to China in preparation for this novel, his original intention was to research the lives of Shenzhen factory workers. The more Lee thought about his journey, however, the more the Korean-American author of powerful immigrant protagonists such as Henry Park and Doc Hata, of Native Speaker (1995) and A Gesture Life (1999) respectively, realized that “a component of [his] interest in China was an anxiety about the decline of American power and status.”

The protagonist of the novel, Fan, is also a descendant of immigrants to America, but On Such a Full Sea is hardly a traditional immigrant story. In the speculative, dystopian future Lee has created, Fan’s ancestors have fled to the US from a China desiccated by pollution into a toxic wasteland. In the landmass that is America, citizens don’t fare much better.

Communities, in the conventional sense, have splintered into three distinct, hierarchical strata. Atop the social order sit Charter villages, that rarefied and heavily fortified realm of society’s elite where resources remain “essentially inexhaustible” and residents live in perpetual anxiety of losing their throne. One echelon down are “grow facilities,” or labor colonies as removed from the privilege of the Charters as they are from “the life cycle of the nearest star.”

Composed mainly of emigrants from New China, grow facilities resemble internment communes where citizens are to each other no more than “a kind of cousin”; in exchange for growing fresh meat and produce for Charter villages, inhabitants are guaranteed the staid safety of gated, collective living (in other words, it is a hyper-capitalist state that has morphed into Marxist socialism). Still, if Charter villages represent the lofty heavens, and grow facilities, zestless but systematic Earth, then the open counties, the vast tracts of balkanized badlands where anarchy rules, are hell.

Before embarking on her improbable journey in search of a lost lover—and the father of her child—Fan was a member of the grow facility named B-Mor (once known as Baltimore). Because silent submission to the directorate is implicit, and most of oral history serves as a propagandistic form of self-pacification, Fan’s disappearance is peculiar.

Like any good quest narrative, Fan’s makes a full tour. Upon leaving the “kind confines” of B-Mor, she is promptly hit by a car and carted off to a rogue Counties compound where she is nursed back to health by an exiled Charter dweller named Quig. In a former life, Quig, a veterinarian, had a family and the respect of his peers—that is, until a mysterious animal virus compelled the banning of all pets and virtually bankrupted Quig overnight. Quig’s hapless fall from grace is a telling aperçu of America, post-Occupy. But the world of cataclysmic inequalities, even among the 1 percent, is a murderous and mercenary one. Quig and his partner rescue Fan in hopes of selling her off to a wealthy pedophile but not before the group falls prey to a family of cannibalistic circus performers (what a world the twenty-second century shall bring). Lee is a master of painting vivid, compelling details (an outhouse issues “an odor so vigorous it seems alive” while a human bone is “pitted and bleached white from the sun, scarred and gouged down its length by chew marks”) and that is, in part, what saves the plot from the farcical turn it assumes in summary.

Still, the depravity Lee puts on acute...