From the tree of TV series Reset to the woods of the PRC
Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: screenshot of Xiao’s blurred figure in front of the moving conveyor belt with toy buses in Episode 5 of the TV series Reset.
“There is no document of civilisation,” writes Walter Benjamin in Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940), “which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” “All men are created equal,” the founding, slave-holding fathers of the USA once avowed, except women, Blacks, Chinese coolies, Native Americans, and other types of non-whites. Similarly, for thousands of years, the Chinese civilisation has revered the Darwinian doctrine of the strong devouring the weak. From the flesh of Monk Tripitaka that gives immortality to whoever partakes of it in Wu Cheng’en’s sixteenth-century Journey to the West to Lu Xun’s “man-eat-man” world of the turn of the last century, meat-eating has sustained the longevity of Chinese civilisation. Human flesh, in theory, is suitable for dumpling or mantou [steamed buns] stuffing. In Chapter 26 of the fourteenth-century Outlaws of the Marsh, Sun the Witch nearly chops up the Tiger Killer Wu Song as mantou stuffing, as in “the fat ones become filling for dumplings [mantou], the thin [lean] ones fill up the stream.” In ancient times, fatty meats filled the stomach, lean meats the rivers, contrary to the modern diet that favours lean meats. One human body, Sun the Witch, divides up into parts for humans and parts for rivers. Fatty meats represent the weak, gobbled up by the human world. Lean meats are also called muscles; they escape to the marshes and the waterways. Indeed, Song Jiang, Lin Chong, and the other one hundred and eight haohan (good fellows) are forced to abscond to Mount Liang, taking up banditry, largely on account of their reluctance to be eaten alive.
Our great Chinese civilisation, a nation of grace, etiquette, and benevolence in name, turns out to be a tribe of cannibals in practice. Everyone pretends not to know. Yet the word rou (肉 meat or flesh, pronounced ROE), as in cow rou for beef, pig rou for pork, even renrou (人肉 human flesh), consists of two ren (人 persons) entering ko (口 mouth) opened at the bottom, an image rife with ambiguity. Rather than easing into the usual interpretation of humans eating meat to live, the enigma of rou begs the question as to whether humans are eating or being eaten, having a toothy bite or being the bite itself. To elaborate on the latter scenario, two humans, one atop the other, are shoved down the meat grinder for food. If the horseshoe square in rou (肉) denotes the human mouth or body, the person above has either nearly risen out of it or has sunken waist-deep into the digestive tract. The man below must be the fatty meat chopped up by Sun the Witch. The man above must be lean meat, his noodle head still showing, not yet slurped down. Perchance the one in the belly happens to be Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Macau; therefore, the one above with his countenance visible yet must be Taiwan. Once digested, they will all be expelled from the hole below. The TV series Reset foreshadows the fate of Taiwan as dessert and the finishing touch to the gourmand People’s Republic of China’s century-long feast.
Why bother to deny? As French poet Baudelaire declares: “mon semblable, — mon frère!”
Sun the Witch and Wu Song are both good fellows and outlaws of the marsh. Fatty and lean meats come from one body. The eater and the eaten belong to the same civilisation. The heritage lasting for thousands of years specialises in mutual, intratribal endocannibalism. Precisely because it borders on cultural taboos, we all keep mum, and even deny it vociferously. Let us consider a recent case in point and see how pop culture intimates, without leaving any conspicuous traces, that the PRC is gently, subtly, and lovingly nibbling her own people.
The fifteen-episode TV series Reset (2023) is an adaptation of Qidaojun’s (祈禱君 One Who Prays) 2019 web novel. A chuanyue drama (穿越劇 dramas on crossing over, time travel, akin to Edge of Tomorrow and Groundhog Day), it follows an explosion on a city bus identified by its route number 45. The two protagonists are a pair of strangers-passengers dozing off side by side: the young woman and college student Li Shiqing (Li Poetry Emotion) and the young man and videogame designer Xiao Heyun (Xiao Crane Cloud). Li, followed by Xiao, wakes up repeatedly from a shrill, antiquated cell phone ringing tone that delivers them from the horror of having been blown up to smithereens near or on a bridge. The exact details of the explosion vary in each reincarnation, cast as dreams-within-dreams. Despite each reset by death, which returns them to zero, they do not exactly start from scratch. Rather than being wiped clean like hard drives, they retain memories of all the violent deaths. They come to accumulate knowledge of the eight passengers, their family backstories, and of the Deputy Police Captain Zhang Chen to be in charge of the investigation. More crucially, they come to identify the suicidal/homicidal bomber who detonated and will detonate again and again her home-made bomb in a pressure cooker packed with nitrate explosives as well as her reluctant accomplice—the estranged husband who is the bus driver. In the final cycle and episode, they are able to alert the police and apprehend the criminals without firing a single shot.
In Episode 5, Xiao intuits, subconsciously and in a dream state, the ritualistic, even cannibalistic, nature of terrorism. Figure 1 concludes a series of dreamscape shots from close-ups of plates holding colourful miniature buses to a medium shot of Xiao’s blurred figure in front of the moving conveyor belt with toy buses, a design common at all-you-can-eat sushi buffets. The sushi comprises, needless to say, raw meat wrapped in rice, oftentimes coated in a thin sliver of seaweed, like the human skin that shrouds flesh and multiple organs. Readers may not be able to see that on each miniature bus are painted, at the front and the rear, triangular recycling logos, as if heralding repetitious conflagrations that consume the passengers. Indeed, the whole series’ opening credits show the Dutch painter M. C. Escher’s favourite symbol of the Mobius strip, on which roll around not only bugs and centipedes but also faceless puppets and robotic cyborgs.
By Episode 8, Li Shiqing has increasingly zeroed in on one of the passengers, Tao Yinghong, as the suspect. She even brazenly tries to strike up a conversation with Tao. Feigning the coming of her monthly period, she inquires, coquettishly, if Tao carries any sanitary pads in the red plastic bag between her feet. She even abruptly stretches out her arms to open up the red bag. It turns out to carry a gaoya guo (high-pressure cooker). With the excuse of its fragrant smell, she queries what kind of good food it contains. Figure 2 captures Tao’s curt, monosyllabic answer: “rou” (meat, flesh). Truth be told, Tao omits one word: “renrou” (human meat or flesh). All passengers will be barbecued. That scent tickling the nose may well be sulphur.
The surname Tao (陶) is a homophone of peach (桃). Her first name, Yinghong, means, literally, “mirroring red.” Indeed, “peach red” is so closely allied that it comprises a compound word. Her name comprises a mise en abyme, two images reflecting each other like dead ringers. Given its nomenclature since 1949, peach red resonates with Mao’s “Red China.” Tao not only carries the pressure cooker, but she is the pressure cooker, and she is China. The People’s Republic of China is a pressure cooker, compressing the West’s hundreds of years since the Industrial Revolution into the short span of decades after Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, speed-cooking a raw third-world country into a modern superpower. This boon to the Chinese people mutates into a terrorist boom, a bomb blast in the born-digital web novel Kaiduan (開端 Genesis), reverberating into a born-again, platform-streaming series.
The TV series attributes Chinese endocannibalism to Tao’s hatred. The terrorist is a grieving mother who avenges her college-age daughter, Wang Mengmeng, who, five years ago, fled from a bus for unknown reasons, only to be run over by a truck coming from behind. Police incompetence and social media sensationalising and demonisation of the victim have outraged and eventually hardened the bomber to wreak havoc with the aid of her husband. Robbed of her daughter, the mother opens the lid—pulling the jigger valve, rather, which functions as the detonator—of the pressure cooker not to feed the living, but as a burnt offering to feast the dead.
Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美) is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specialising in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Chinese Serial (2026); Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, including Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016); he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).