By Justine Trinh
Chang-Rae Lee’s speculative fiction novel, On Such a Full Sea, imagines a post-apocalyptic dystopian world that is ravaged by an environmental disaster and the terminal disease “C” that everyone has. This world is stratified by class, where those who have resources live comfortable lives, and those who do not labor to ensure the wealthy citizens’ comfortability. Fan, a fish tank diver, lives in the Charter village of B-Mor (formerly Baltimore) with her boyfriend, Reg. However, after Reg’s disappears, she sets off to find him, leaving the safety of B-Mor for the crime-filled, anarchist open counties where she meets a wide range of characters from Quig, a Charter exile and leader of the Smokes, to the Nickelmans, a family that performs as a troupe.
Life and its sustenance are precarious when everyone is sick with “C,” so those who are given life (including those who have C) are put in this debt of repaying it. When giving the audience context and background to Loreen, the matriarch of the Smokes, the narrator states, “[Loreen] had come to give birth to [Sewey] and was lucky she had because he needed to be cut out of her to be born and Quig was the only person in the Smokes to do it, and least without killing the mother most of the time. Loreen had then stayed on, first to work off the debt she owes Quig, eventually becoming his main assistant and scheduler.” Life is therefore framed as something that needs to be worked off, something that can be owed. Loreen owes Quig for both Sewey’s life (the delivery of it, “he needed to be cut out of her to be born”) and her own life (performing the c-section “without killing the mother”) and thus she needs to pay back Quig for the bestowment of life, exchanging manual labor and care for life. Quig eventually depends on her for sustaining his own life, and it becomes this cycle where Loreen works for Quig to pay off her life, but Quig owes Loreen for sustaining his lifestyle as a doctor. Regardless, life and debt are intertwined with one another that places both these people into this debt. Additionally, Sewey depends on both Quig and Loreen for his own survival—Loreen is his mother who takes care of him, and Quig is the doctor who treats him with medication.
Additionally, the idea of life debt reoccurs throughout the novel with people saving fish tank diver Fan’s life and later “selling her” for something they need. Quig saves Fan who is then traded off to Mr. Leo and is treated as property. Quig treats Fan as such because she owes him her life and is later traded off as an indentured servant to Mr. Leo and Ms. Cathy, wealthy residents of the Charter village of Seneca, in exchange for Sewey’s medication. This ignores the fact that Fan rescued Quig from the Nickelmans who attempted to gut him. It is as if his life debt to her is less than hers to him. Rather Quig owes Loreen more for sustaining his life over the years in comparison to Fan who physically saved his life once from the murderous Nickelmans. As a result, he feels more compelled to get the medication for Loreen’s son without really addressing the fact that Fan saved his life.
This trend continues again when Ms. Cathy “saves” Fan from future harm by Mr. Leo. As a result, Ms. Cathy keeps Fan with her other Asian girls that are treated interchangeably, where they are forced to work as servants. All of Ms. Cathy’s servants are Asian females and denied a true name, rather they are referred to as numbers (one to seven). Fan is added to this collection of Asian women and treated as property where she is passed around by these characters. Later on, we see this with Vik, a doctor who treats Ms. Cathy’s girl and takes Fan away from Ms. Cathy only to be a housewarming gift to his friends, Betty and Oliver. The gift scene, where Vik gives the aquarium to Betty and Oliver is symbolic of Fan, as she used to be a fish tank diver, before he physically leaves her at their place. Additionally, Oliver tries to sell Fan to a pharmaceutical company, despite all his talk about family. He talks about family like they owe it to each other to take care of one another, but once they find out Fan is pregnant, she is more valuable to them as capital. This life debt is constantly put on her body and wants to see her as a commodity that can be sold and exchanged for other necessities to sustain someone else’s life and lifestyle. As such, it denies Fan any real agency.
On Such a Full Sea tackles a range of themes and issues, but Lee’s use of life and debt illuminates the juxtaposition of dependency and lack of agency. With Quig and Loreen, this dependency to live determines the choices they make, and they are unable to escape this arrangement. In Fan’s case, this life debt is constantly placed on her body where she is a commodity that can be sold and exchanged for other necessities to sustain someone else’s life/lifestyle. Because she is powerless within this framework but needs to live, her agency is stripped in order to ensure her survival and she is dependent on other characters’ choices, and she is unable to escape.
On Such a Full Sea is available from Bookshop, Elliott Bay Book Company, Green Bean Books, Kinokuniya, Skylight Books, and Waucoma Bookstore.
Justine Trinh is an English literature Ph.D. student at Washington State University. She graduated from the University of California, Irvine with B.A.s in Asian American studies and classical civilizations and a B.S. in mathematics. She then went on to earn her M.A. in Asian American studies, making her the first student to graduate from UCI Asian American Studies’ 4+1 B.A./M.A. program. Her research interests include Asian American literature, critical refugee studies, family and trauma, and forced departure and disownment.