From the tree of TV series Reset to the woods of the PRC
Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: screenshot of Li uncovering the video clip online of the victim trying to exit the bus in Episode 13 of Reset.
Following the first half of the article on how Reset serves as a metaphor of cannibalism, Figure 3 freezes a moment in Episode 13 when Li 13 holds up her smartphone to play the video clip, supposedly from the on-bus surveillance camera, documenting a hysterical Wang pounding on the bus door, trying to flee. The bullet screen on the smartphone records viewers’ immediate feedback, theoretically enlarged on the frame of such streaming devices as a TV set, iPad, laptop, or cell phone. A mise en abyme between the large and the small screen, or the-screen-within-the screen, is constituted, which mirrors layers of viewing. Both screens signify viewers of the victim’s accident five years ago, posting malicious remarks such as “A pest that poisons others and herself,” “Simply a cursed star in the universe,” and “Is her skull full of shit?” In the-frame-within-the-frame, Li’s hand with friendship bracelets chances upon what instigated the revenge by Wang’s parents. The viewer sees previous viewers’ bullet screen slanders that partly constitute the cause of the inexcusable terrorism; the viewer may empathise with the perpetrators biting back at the public and the police who devoured their daughter.
Let us revisit the two hands in Figure 3. One hand is Wang’s, pounding frantically at the door; the other is Li’s, with friendship bracelets, gifts between female friends. These bracelets suggest that Li would right wrongs and render justice to Tao and Wang, albeit delayed. Yet Figure 3 misses one other hand, the proverbial xianzhushou (鹹猪手 “salty pig hand” for the fondling, “p-ssy grabbing” hand), never brought to justice for five long years. The government’s dereliction of duty, amplified by the netizen public’s apathy and cruelty, has incensed Tao, whose name embodies the nation, to wrap the high-pressure cooker of Red China inside a red plastic bag to avenge the deceased.
This high-pressure cooker occupies the centre of the circle, waiting patiently to blow up at 1:45 PM in honour of Wang Mengmeng’s death (si, a pun on death and four) five years ago at 1:45 PM, run over by a truck. The bus happens to be Route 45, circling around and around in the city centre. Qidaojun’s web readers repeatedly click on the next chapter, and streaming viewers click on the next episode, both anticipating the next fiery ceremony onscreen, over and over again. A round-shaped high-pressure cooker expands into the circumference of the bus, distributed around the globe via digital technology and platform streaming, day in, day out.
To avoid missing the woods for the tree, this revolving conflagration must be traced back from the series Reset to the true fountainhead: the New China commences, in theory, a new era that is anti-imperialist, anti-feudalist, and anti-plutocratic. The dictatorship of the proletariat turns out to take after the dynastic dictatorship of emperors. Baptised and stimulated by the Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist ideology from the West, a “foreign body,” Chinese tradition is mutated, Russianized (homophone of e’hua for Russia and malignant metastasis), nativised as Mao-Deng-Xi-ism. Literary and other creators are fearful of “stroking the tiger’s whiskers,” running afoul of State censorship; accordingly, they resort to Sino-fi time-travel fantasy as an analogue to critique the here and now, raging, in an underhand fashion, against the so-called “people’s police” and millions of people on the internet.
Four plus five makes nine, a number the Chinese have long favoured, since ten denotes fullness before the eclipse and the fall set in. Yet April fifth is the lunar Tomb-Sweeping Day. The whole family would gather together at the family gravesite to pay respect and to perform rituals of ancestral worship. Four and five recur in the series. Figure 4 comes from Episode 15. In the final episode and final cycle, the passengers unite to thwart Tao’s plot. Despite wielding a sharp knife, Tao is ultimately subdued. The knife is a sharpened ruler, its markings of four and five clearly visible. Originally, Tao was a distinguished high school chemistry teacher. Her ruler and chemical expertise were once tools to educate and cultivate young minds; they are now weapons of choice to commit mass murder.
I will refrain from other details in this devil of a series; rather, I circle back to the subject matter of “Taiwan: China’s Dessert.” Now satiated with a full belly after thousands of years of gorging, what’s next for dessert? Given the PLA military exercises of blockade and incursion swarming Taiwan’s territorial waters and airspace, and given the historical lot of Taiwan, the Orphan of Asia, the delicacy to sate China’s sweet tooth would most likely take the form of desertification of the democratic Taiwan, arguably after desertion by the US, a reprise of Hong Kong after desertion by the UK. Faced with such a dead end, indulge me for one more double entendre, a silly joke and a last laugh, before the sandman swoops down from the sere north to sprinkle soporific sand to shut the eyes and stuff the mouths: the sp(l)itting image of de(s)sert points further afield to the wordplay of “dessert” (甜點 tiandian) and “blind spot” (盲點 mangdian). As the Chinese proverb goes, “a melon wrenched off by force will not taste sweet,” nor will a sweet dessert finally clutched and clinched after having been tantalisingly within yet out of reach for seven, eight decades, ever since 1949. So overjoyed and full of hubris, one is likely to bite the tongue, setting in motion the flare-up of canker sores, inflammation, and internal rotting. This recalls how the Monkey King in Journey to the West transforms himself into a wingèd insect, swallowed by the monster, only to nibble slowly from the inside out, bit by bit. By the same token, the fly has always introduced the motif of optical illusion and deception in trompe-l’œil, distorting human senses, in the West. Moreover, the fly symbolises carrion and putrid meat, signalling ominous decay and mortality.
Chill out, Big Brother Beijing, why such haste to cook and eat me? To borrow from retroflex sounds in Beijingnese, please suffer this Junior’s one more piece of advice: wait at least until the Taiwanese people can witness the “tou’er” (頭兒 end-game or “hea-de,” as in pidgin English that turns any consonant into a vowel), their own “tou’er” (heads), rising above the ideograph of rou, rather than inextricably sunken to the bottom of China the high pressure cooker—to be blown up again and again, to be consumed meal after meal. . .
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).