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[Essay] “1000XRESIST and Immunity in the Chinese Diaspora” by Nick Admussen

Sunset Visitor (developer), 1000xResist, Fellow Traveller Games. 2024.

1000xRESIST is a 2024 narrative video game created by the Canadian studio Sunset Visitor. It tells the story of Iris, a second-generation Canadian immigrant whose parents fled Hong Kong after taking part in the 2019 protests.

As a teenager, Iris exists in constant conflict with her stubborn and mentally unstable mother, is isolated at school, and behaves cruelly towards Jiao, a newly arrived Chinese immigrant to Canada who idolises her. Students at her school begin to fall ill and die from a disease that drains all bodily fluids through the eyes. Iris survives, seemingly immune, and encounters the Occupants, colossal crimson visitors to Earth who have brought the disease with them. As the first person identified to be immune to their affliction, Iris is taken deep underground, subjected to experimentation, and cloned; she never grows old. In time, she becomes the All-Mother of a society composed of her own clones, and the narrative moves between their world, her memories of her parents, and the night she and Jiao first encounter an Occupant.

There is much more to it. It is a fascinating game and well worth playing. This essay will not, however, be about the game as a whole, nor will it concern the gameplay, which is notably minimalist. Instead, it will focus on one small element of the game and its circulation within culture more broadly, namely Iris’ immunity to disease and a wider conversation about immunity as it relates to people, particularly women, in the Chinese diaspora. Lurking in the background throughout is Ling Ma’s 2018 novel Severance, in which a Chinese American woman living in New York finds herself immune to a zombification plague that traps its victims in loops of repetitive memory. Projected into the blank margins of the essay should be the deadpan face of Superorganism’s lead singer Orono Noguchi as she sings the lyrics “you do you, I’ll do me / chilling at the bottom of the sea” in“The Prawn Song.” Immunity is not necessarily a lack of affect, but rather a lack of effect, a resistance to susceptibility and to transformation by external cause. What is special about Iris? About Candace? When the plague arrives, why are they the only ones left?

What seems clear is that Iris is not metaphorically, emotionally, or practically quarantined. She is not separate from society, nor is she uniquely individuated by some inherent immigrant difference. Her classmate Jiao, herself an immigrant, succumbs swiftly to the disease. Iris’ performance of emotional distance is paper thin, concealing an angry volatility that appears to stem from a combination of being othered by her peers at school, which perhaps explains the viciousness with which she rejects Jiao’s affection, as she does not wish to be as visibly different as Jiao is, and from her mother’s dehumanising style of parenting. When her mother learns that Iris is immune, she responds, “So? I raised her tough!”, simultaneously claiming and diminishing Iris’ gift while justifying her own harsh treatment of her daughter. That toughness, inherited from parents who met amid the tear gassing of Hong Kong civilians and who fought at great personal risk for the city, seems less like a superpower than a legacy of trauma, something Iris carries as both a burden and a latent danger of self harm.

The question of Iris’ rugged individualism is cast into even deeper shadow by her gender. Iris is a woman. Almost all the characters in 1000xRESIST are women: Iris’ clones, who build a society underground, found a religion, open libraries and taverns, have sex, and eventually go to war with one another. Donna Haraway has pointed out that one definition of individuality required by immunity is indivisibility: an individual is something that cannot be cut in half without being destroyed. Reproductive women confound this definition, none more so than Iris, who learns to create her own clones and splits into half a dozen, then many more unimmune, partial selves. She is related to them and susceptible to them, just as she is related to and consanguineous with her mother. The fight for freedom in Hong Kong is handed down from generation to generation through culture. Iris’ clones eventually build a city that closely resembles Hong Kong, complete with an overclass and an underclass. They create their own Red Guard, literally so, as they all wear red, have a police state of their own, and engage in their own bloody cycle between authoritarianism and terrorism. Iris gives her daughters her mother’s stubborn survivalism and her father’s love for the city of Hong Kong. For all her strife with her parents, she has never truly been separate from them.

Haraway’s replacement for this failed outside and inside binary is what she calls a more postmodern concept of immunity. We are immune not because we possess the power to keep other organisms out, which we mostly do not, as we contain multitudes, but because of bodily knowing: a training our immune systems undergo, after which they can identify and survive interactions with entities that might cause harm. When Iris faces an Occupant, a being both immensely powerful and immensely strange, it is not resistance, strictly speaking, that keeps her alive. She already carries a little of that other within her; something in her recognises something in the alien. On this basis, the game’s insistence on memory feels entirely fitting. We are not separate beings, but rather a mesh of experiences, recognitions, habits of response, things that exist both in the body’s memory, its immune cells, and in the mind’s. Immortal Iris’ practice of sending her clones into her own memories to re-experience her life and to see Hong Kong through her parents’ eyes is, for all her faults, the act of a mother attempting to pass down the protective power of her experience to her many daughters. Their repetition of the mistakes of Iris’ mother and of early twenty-first century society is not a natural susceptibility, but one predicated on denial and forgetting.

Iris’ immunity is therefore not a form of separateness, but the result of past vulnerability and transformation. It is a practiced immune response. This is also true of Candace in Severance, who is by no means a stranger to the nostalgia and repetition that trap plague victims in loops where they endlessly put on and take off dresses, or set the table. Candace retains an almost transcendental memory of being in China as a child, what she calls the Fujian Nighttime Feeling, and she takes a strange pleasure in the minute labour of endlessly reproducing books at the printing house where she works. It may well be her deep intimacy with nostalgia, with the patterns of memory and the memory of patterns, that allows her to negotiate with the disease.

Shu-mei Shih has argued that the diaspora has an end date, a moment after which it no longer feels distinct from the peoples and cultures into which it has migrated. This may be true in terms of our capacity to see the diaspora, to name it and organise it as a social force. It is not true, however, in terms of its meaning or its impact. The body politic resists. It others the migrant. It produces distinctions and stereotypes, often inaccurate ones. It struggles against the diaspora without recognising that the struggle itself is already transforming its social body. Whether a host culture ultimately forces full invisibility upon migrant cultures or produces a stable hybridity, the process itself constitutes the identity of the host. Iris is not special, and in many ways she is not even a very kind person, but she understands this process instinctively. Resist, re-form, recreate. Alien, other, mother.

At the end of the game, the player is asked to make one of the only truly consequential choices of the entire experience. Having travelled across thousands of years, and having watched generation after generation of Irises suffer, build, and destroy, the culminating scene demands a decision: which memories should be carried into the future, and which should be erased? It is a diasporic question, one that requires the kind of discernment native to the adaptive immune cell. Players are not permitted to remember everything, and some traditions or memes will ultimately destroy their host. The experience is a stressful one, less a victory condition than an insistence that the player assume personal responsibility for the pain of forgetting. Yet it is also a question faced by any historian, by any parent, and by anyone preparing to survive the great changes to come.

^{How to cite: Admussen, Nick. “1000XRESIST and Immunity in the Chinese Diaspora.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 17 Dec. 2025, chajournal.com/2025/12/17/1000xresist.}

Nick Admussen is an associate professor of Chinese literature at Cornell University, the author of Recite and Refuse: Contemporary Chinese Prose Poetry, the translator of poet Ya Shi’s Floral Mutter, and the author of Stand Back, Don’t Fear the Change, a collection of parables from the New Michigan Press. Visit his website for more information. [Nick Admussen & ChaJournal.] [All contributions by Nick Admussen.]