1000xresist

[meikuree]

1000xRESIST is another one in the line of canons that have made me feel like I need a drink and a depressing book about grief to process it immediately after finishing it. it actually has an uplifting ending by a few metrics and it's also extremely funny, but it still puts the audience through the wringer and I respect it for that.

quick summary: it's a narrative game about a far-future sisterhood of clones cloned from a HK Chinese-Canadian teenager called Iris Kwan, but I'd alternatively call it a commentary concerned with the violence of parent-child relationships/abuse/memory/heritage/familial legacies. alternative alternative summary: this game is filled to the brim with women with mother issues, and clonecest that's both subtextual and not. and multiple matricides, because why not? party emoji. 

I'm going to put my cards on the table and say that I'm usually thoroughly lukewarm about the majority of Chinese(-North American) diaspora stories, for reasons I'll sum up at the end so I don't start this on a hypercritical note. this game, though, has an interesting and un-solipsistic premise and while I don't think its treatments of certain topics resonated (understandable! it's a me problem), in that they hewed close to familiar narrative grooves in that genre, it sticks the landing and I was taken with the clone society by the end.

fun fact: this isn't the first show/media/canon I've watched about a sisterhood of clones. Orphan Black was another one, and it was similarly concerned with genetic/personal autonomy, responsibility, and ethics.

I don't have the brainspace to write any meaty commentary, unfortunately so I'm just going to note some linguistic (foot)notes on the Cantonese lines and hilarious moments that stuck out when I watched Welonz's playthrough on Youtube (minor spoilers):

• Welonz was laughing at the game's translation of 大頭蝦 (lit. big head prawn) as 'forgetful shrimp' -- "I don't know that I would include shrimp in the translation but yeah, it describes someone who's forgetful" -- and I compared it to translating 'blur sotong' as 'stupid squid'
• the game translated 仆街 (pu jie/pok kai) as "fall on the street and die" which was amusingly literal since it's a general curse word along the lines of 'motherfucker', 'asshole', 'go and die', etc.
• without reading too much into it, it's perhaps telling that 整 is the character representing Fixer's role -- it means orderliness, not only solely physical but in relation to other parts and maybe societal (if you stretch it), and Fixer is not someone who fits that
• it's implied that two of the clone sisters recreationally do bondage with each other in their free time... or maybe even shibari?
• there's a scene where a clone asks another clone to roleplay her mother and call her a good girl, in full view of the clone nation. the poor mother-roleplaying actress ends up incredibly confused and asking, "uh... we didn't rehearse this?"
• wham line in a game of wham lines: "you don't know how I've..." "protected me from everything? sacrificed for me?" "missed you."
• "oh my god, even the alien has mummy issues!"
• "good news: sister-on-sister crime is down!"
• "don't show your face here ever again." "we all have the same face, fucker."
• there's a character who casually carries around a box of eyeballs
• yep, the parallels to self-censorship in authoritarian environments are paralleling.
• (in some NPC dialogue explaining how the clones are made in a cloning chamber):

NPC: so, this is how clones start...
Welonz: when a sister and a sister love each other very much...
NPC: we take some hair, organic material, silicone, and put them into this pod!
Welonz: ohhhhhh.

• about a scene where Iris's mother threatens to beat her with a feather duster: yeah, it's widely acceptable to cane or beat your children where I'm from too; there used to be a cottage industry of canes purpose-made for beating your children, and you could buy them from corner shops. it trips me up when people in the UK/North America say common practices here would get people calling the cops on your parents. 1) somehow I'm sceptical that similar abuse isn't rife in the west too; 2) even seeing it recognised as abuse (i.e., beyond the pale) is uncanny though not wrong at all, because people rarely bother to intervene, and the line between overbearing and paternalistic but ~normal~ discipline and actual unacceptable abuse is more blurred than it should be; 3) it's allowed to happen because children are considered their parents' private property; 4) I'm reminded of the Sophie Lewis line (not a redeeming one!) that "the consolation of parenthood is being able to act a little bit like the state". those parents certainly act like it -- like they are sovereign, untouchable authorities.

and a few reasons I don't gel (broadly) with the genre of Chinese diaspora stories:

• I'm going to state upfront that this is in 70% of cases a problem with what publishing industries have ossified and defined as the few recognisable, marketable, and consumable Chinese diaspora narratives, often featuring tropes like linguistic alienation and a feeling of disconnection from the sourceland and so on, but I frankly find these concerns to be solipsistic and written by alienated cultural elites for other alienated cultural elites, and unconcerned with imagining experiences beyond autobiographical terrain
• too much geo, not enough politics: occasional tendencies to see sourcelands as a nostalgic or rose-tinted paradise when they are complicated breathing polities with their own ongoing power struggles, hierarchies, inequalities which have not simply stayed frozen in time upon emigration, within and without intra-familial generational trauma 
• related to the above: a lack of engagement with the historical trends, geopolitics, and power asymmetries that led to their families' migration in the first place. I get frustrated when the obvious privileges of say, a North American or Australian or Singaporean passport versus a Mainland Chinese one get glossed over -- one group gets you visa exemptions and easier access to cosmopolitan mobility, the other gets you surveillance and suspicion at the immigration border and a greater population-level likelihood of being at the mercy of visa refusals or summary deportations. the citizenship and migration regimes are completely different, and so are the spaces they allow for traversing and enjoying the right to be in other parts of the world