The first winter after I moved to San Francisco, there were nine back-to-back atmospheric rivers. Rain and wind knocked out the power in my apartment. A few blocks north, a low section of the city flooded repeatedly, and neighbors stacked sandbags in front of their homes. The storms were intense but impermanent, their damage being their inconvenience. I always knew the sun would come out again eventually.
Susanna Kwan’s novel, Awake in the Floating City, poses a fascinating question: What would happen if the rain never stopped?
In the near-distant future, it’s been raining in San Francisco for seven years without a reprieve. Most of the roads are untraversable, and most people have long since abandoned the crumbling infrastructure. Those who have stayed travel from rooftop to rooftop, where they visit open-air markets and chat with neighbors. For a while, the city tried to adapt, hosting concerts on the tops of buildings and giving out mycelium walls to residents to supplement their food. But the gray went on for so long that the city eventually went quiet.
The book doesn’t so much explore this new dystopian terrain as depend on memory and scenes from the past as told through the eyes of its two main characters, Bo and Mia. When the novel opens, Mia is 130 years old and slowly dying, tethered to her high-rise apartment building over the water that has absorbed San Francisco. Bo, her neighbor, is an artist who has spent the past few years of her life caring for those in their final years until their deaths.
Bo is mourning the disappearance of her mother, who almost certainly drowned in the floods a few years prior. She drags her feet on her departure from San Francisco. One day, when Bo has nearly found the nerve to leave, she finds a note from Mia tacked onto her door asking Bo to be her part-time caretaker. After meeting Mia, Bo accepts.
In the following weeks, Bo cooks and cleans for Mia, and Mia’s history reveals itself to Bo in small movements, such as when Bo finds a gown in the back of a closet or makes a mistake while preparing a beloved recipe. As they spend time together, Mia begins to open up, sharing stories of her migration from China, her resilience as a young woman and mother, and her time in Chinatown in San Francisco. Listening to Mia’s descriptions of the city awakens Bo’s memories of the time before the floods started, before her mother died and her family left. All the while, the streets are flooded, the air is wet, and the rain continues to pour.
Amid this recovery, Bo begins to paint again. Author Kwan, a visual artist herself, spares no detail on the bright canvases and glowing holograms that Bo crafts, first to return to her creativity and later to pay homage to Mia’s life. Kwan’s descriptions of art and creation are vibrant and living. “Her head filled with color. Sheer yolky swipes, washes of fuchsia, transparent fields of green, spills of rich royal blue,” she writes. Inspired by Mia’s tales, Bo travels to the San Francisco Public Library archives—at least, what remains of them after the rains—and collects photographs and ephemera that translate Mia’s stories from words to images. Bo’s work goes beyond the space of her own apartment and extends outward into the city, moving a living history into a dormant space. She allows herself to see the city as something more than its current state, to use the gray as merely a canvas for something richer.
The challenge of reading about this homogeneous landscape, however, is that, beyond conversations between the two characters and lengthy passages about creating art, very little happens. Kwan’s poetic sensibility takes precedence over plot concerns. A bit of potential conflict toward the end of the book concludes without any action or resolution. And at one point, Bo misses one of the key events of the book, which prevents the reader from fully experiencing the story. Bo and Mia’s burgeoning connection is a testament to the living community that still lingers in the mostly abandoned city, but readers meet and see very few of the rest of the members of this community.
There are a few notable exceptions. Bo has an affair with an environmental scientist living in the building for work and accompanies him on a research trip, bounding across the bay and witnessing the wildlife that remains. And the grand reveal of Bo’s art project is beautiful to read.
In the quiet of the rain, in the solitude of the apartment building, the book is full of heartfelt reflections on finding meaning at the end of a world. Kwan’s artistry as a wordsmith is apparent, and many of the chapters end on a propulsive exhale. “In this strange, indelible season…what was more right than staying awake and seeing her promises through?” Bo wonders at the conclusion of one chapter. “For a moment she felt the tides holding all their lives in place. For that one moonlit moment she knew her exact position in the great net of things,” another chapter ends.
As Bo reawakens to her sense of wonder and the city over these pages, Kwan clearly ties Bo’s past to Mia’s. The result is a tribute to the profound bonds of love that can form in the direst of circumstances, and to how we remember and honor a person—or a place—even while they’re fading away. •
Jessica Blough is a freelance writer. A former associate editor at Alta Journal, Blough is a graduate of Tufts University where she was editor in chief of the Tufts Daily.
