asianamlitfans | A Review of Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon, 2025)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn
Edited by Uttara Rangarajan

Ah, the call of travel is always a great occasion to bring a book onto a plan. Such was the case with Susanna Kwan’s Awake in the Floating City (Pantheon, 2025), which is an auspicious debut. The field of Asian American speculative fiction has really taken off, and this novel is evidence that this subarea is one of the most robust in the current moment. Let’s let the marketing description do some work for us: “Bo knows she should go. Years of rain have drowned the city and almost everyone else has fled. Her mother was carried away in a storm surge and ever since, Bo has been alone. She is stalled: an artist unable to make art, a daughter unable to give up the hope that her mother may still be alive. Half-heartedly, she allows her cousin to plan for her escape—but as the departure day approaches, she finds a note slipped under her door from Mia, an elderly woman who lives in her building and wants to hire Bo to be her caregiver. Suddenly, Bo has a reason to stay. Mia can be prickly, and yet still she and Bo forge a connection deeper than any Bo has had with a client. Mia shares stories of her life that pull Bo back toward art, toward the practice she thought she’d abandoned. Listening to Mia, allowing her memories to become entangled with Bo’s own, she’s struck by how much history will be lost as the city gives way to water. Then Mia’s health turns, and Bo determines to honor their disappearing world and this woman who’s brought her back to it, a project that teaches her the lessons that matter most: how to care, how to be present, how to commemorate a life and a place, soon to be lost forever.”

The novel is primarily told through Bo’s perspective. Both are Chinese American characters, which is a crucial element to this story precisely because so much Chinese American cultural history is woven in throughout. The other important element is the city of San Francisco, which emerges as a kind of third character here. I tend to think that Kwan’s novel is really a response to the COVID pandemic. Bo’s experiences being isolated in a flooded high rise seems to be something of a refraction of the experience of so many in that early lockdown period, but Kwan really takes it in a different direction with the climate fiction elements. The rains seem to be neverending and most residents of the city have taken flight, off to drier areas or at least somewhere where produce can be grown more easily. Given Bo’s status as an able-bodied individual, you might think that she would have left, but San Francisco is her home, and she just can’t quit it. When Mia reaches out with request for help (Mia is a centenarian from what I remember), Bo can’t really say no. After all, Bo has been a caregiver in the past, and she develops a soft spot for the irascible Mia. What I loved most about this novel is that it is both a plot of friendship and alternative kinship, one that rises over and above any romance element. At the same time, Kwan is really attentive to issues of archiving and grief, as she sees her city transformed into something basically unrecognizable. The novel is also a kuntslerroman. Bo sees herself as a failed artist, but connecting with Mia allows her the opportunity to rekindle her connection to her creative endeavors. As Mia’s condition begins to worsen, Bo gives herself a deadline: to try to draw up a huge archival production that is partially based upon Mia’s past. While Kwan’s work is a quiet work, one that is primarily a character study, there is a level of narrative urgency that occurs once readers discover that Bo has one clear opportunity to leave. But this leavetaking would require that Bo leave Mia in a state of debility. Bo eventually makes a cataclysmic choice, which may maroon here in San Francisco, but for Bo, who has gotten used to foraging from her own mycelial wall and who cannot seem to think of anywhere else as home, you know that she’s made the right decision. Mia dies, but not before she seeks Bo’s masterful work, one created with the help of an erstwhile romantic partner. With the power of drones and projecting technology, the city is awash in images and colors, and a past that many will understand is part of what makes San Francisco so beautiful and so melancholic. An elegant work constructed with impressive restraint.

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