In a Flooded Future San Francisco, Care Is All We Have

A woman packing up her life to escape the cataclysmic flooding and sinkholes that have rendered San Francisco “a city on a sheet of Swiss cheese” suddenly finds a note under her door. It bears three unignorable words: I need help.

This is the inciting spark of Susanna Kwan’s debut novel Awake in the Floating City. In it, Kwan imagines the city engulfed in flood water. Endlessly, suffocatingly wet. Most have fled or died. It is illogical, difficult, to remain, but the story revolves around two people who do: Bo, a struggling young artist; and Mia, her 130-year-old neighbor.

Awake in the Floating City is a terrifically polished debut and addition to the growing genre of climate fiction — contemporary creative works contending with the very real ways climate change has and will continue to alter the human landscape. Kwan, a third-generation San Franciscan, currently lives in the Richmond District. It was her hometown’s ancient and recent history of climate emergencies and natural disasters that provided welcome inspiration for her first novel.

“I was here for the recent wildfire seasons, the orange day, [and] even as a kid, there was a six or seven-year period of extreme drought. There was a big earthquake,” she recalls. “These big events affect everybody here and really shape the culture.”

This lived reality of calamity served as both fuel and research. “When I started the book, it seemed implausible that there would be years and years of rain,” says Kwan. “In the last few years, we’ve had these weird winter seasons [where] it seemed like it rained every single day for months on end.”

Until, that is, she saw a drawing of Sacramento from the 1860s. “It was of the city underwater,” she remembers. “I learned there had been these precedents for these huge devastating storms where atmospheric rivers came for months and months and devastated a lot of places in California and beyond.”

This knowledge and experience, coupled with living through the 2010 Tennessee floods as a graduate student in Nashville, helped her imagine a future San Francisco that was plausibly deluged under unprecedented volumes of water.

In her book, the wetness impacts everything. The third floor of Bo and Mia’s building becomes the bottom floor. On the 100th floor there’s a community garden, and a rooftop economy starts up between buildings. Everyone has a city government-issued mycelium wall installed in their homes that they pluck and eat from for basic sustenance. Aquamation emerges as an alternative to cremation.

Kwan paints an extraordinarily detailed and realistic picture of the way water purges the city of most of its inhabitants, its color and its identity. Days bleed into each other. In the absence of sunlight, the fresh yellow color of greenhouse-grown lemons becomes a rare spectacle. The devastation mutes ambient noise like “alarms, miscellaneous beeps, the calls of other species” that typically function as a city’s proof of life.

But Kwan also stresses the ways people necessarily and miraculously adapt post-collapse. Thanks to her status as a long-term resident, Kwan’s futuristic San Francisco is both recognizable and foreign. Her characters commiserate, snipe and aid each other in ways that feel like prescient missives from the future. In one scene Bo watches through binoculars as several people decide to throw a birthday party for a large untended pothole in the street. One year of it not being addressed by the municipal government, cue the streamers. It’s the kind of defiantly human scene one could imagine being virally shared on social media as hopecore content in dark times.

Throughout the book Kwan detangles the nuances of Bo’s decision to sacrifice her safe exit to do care work for a stranger, the selfless aspects of that impulse and the selfish ones. Bo is an incredibly complex character, frustratingly stubborn and yet noble. The note is an excuse not to leave, but it also gives her a clear purpose, something she hasn’t felt in her work and life since the floods. As the two women’s lives become entwined via the complex bond of carer and client, the friction and warmth that emerges powers the run-down world of the book.

While Kwan was completing the book, her mother was in hospice care for nine months. The experience of caring for her during multiple health crises prompted deep reflection on the subject.

“Care work is very invisible,” Kwan notes. “This accepted labor that we’re all doing and not acknowledging or properly supporting [includes] people who are raising children, people who are caring for elders and neighbors, [or] doing all of those things at the same time.”

The way we overlook it is alarming, she points out, because “it’s what keeps society running.”

In addition to pulling from her own experience, Kwan found ample research material on the Instagram accounts of hospice nurses. “Some of them have these silly skits,” she explains. “I really liked the ones that reenact visions that people will have on their deathbed.”

But the real appeal for Kwan was the way the nurses are trying to normalize the process of dying by initiating frank discussion about care work and end-of-life realities.

Through the character of Mia — who represents a growing class of “supercentenarians” in the story — Kwan wrestles with the idea of living for too long. What might that mean for our bodies, our relationships, our sense of time? Mia’s own family has left; she only communicates with them via hologram messages. Meanwhile, Bo’s mother has gone missing. Caring for Mia offers her work and connection that keep her from lingering on that loss.

Within their contractual work relationship, a necessary companionship and proxy mother-daughter relationship sprout. Their dynamic — which bears a significant age and experience gap, with Bo on the cusp of her life and Mia nearing the end of hers — is so emotionally loaded it almost escapes definition.

Another strong strand braiding them together is Bo and Mia’s shared identities as Chinese American women, a cultural link which Kwan uses to call attention to the historical significance of Chinese immigrants to the Bay Area. “San Francisco is a really important place in Chinese American history and American history in general,” Kwan explains. “There’s the Gold Rush and the building of the railroads, and you look out into the Bay and Angel Island is right there in view.” When it was an immigration station, Angel Island was where many Chinese Americans’ stories in this country began, often with detainment.

When each woman looks out of her window she sees a different city, or a different version of the same city, overlaid with her own memories and experiences. Kwan poetically captures the way every city is layered in this way, with one person’s memories overlapping and sandwiching another’s in invisible, paper-thin layers. Kwan’s background as a visual artist bolsters her descriptive prowess. In a scene where Bo experiments with cyanotypes Kwan writes “indigo bled everywhere …milky shapes and textures glowed where the paper had been protected from light: cascades, smoke, comet tails, flecks dribbles, blasts, grit, lines as fine as fishbones, lines as sprawling as nerve branches, rain drawn by rain.”

Awake in the Floating City is a deeply affecting sci-fi novel that unfolds like an intimate black box theater production. Its innovation lies in its ability to pare down. There is a single question animating and justifying Kwan’s characters’ actions, a question both urgent and perennial: “Who knew how much longer all this would exist?”

Years into the future, Kwan posits, when climate catastrophe has devolved and decayed everything around us, we will be all we have. We should care, her writing suggests, because care is all there is in the end.