What Connects “3 Body Problem” & “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overload”
Juxtaposition of Our Perspectives on Humanity in Suffering
3 Body Problem is a Netflix show adapted from the award-winning Sci-Fi trilogy story of the same title, written by Liu Cixin. Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overload (“Sweatshop Overload”) is a one-person play by Kristina Wong, based on her true story during Pandemic.
In terms of background of stories and genre, they are so different. One is futuristic Sci-Fi TV series with amazing computer graphics and the other is a memoir like comedy in theater with minimal props. But both stories have something in common — they are both about how humans fight against invisible enemies (aliens or COVID-19 virus) in an extremely uncertain and ambiguous situations.
What’s most interesting in comparing these two stories is the stark contrast in terms of perspectives on humanity in suffering.
3 Body Problem: No Compassion — More Suffering
In 3 Body Problem, the struggle is perpetuated and amplified due to deeply rooted disgust and distrust against humanity. Dr. Ye Wenjie got a reply to her message from a pacifist alien in a hostile alien civilization, warning her not to send more messages again as it will prompt an invasion to the earth. As she had become extremely cynical with human society from the series of traumatic experiences during the Cultural Revolution in China, she replied anyway, promising to help whatever alien civilization wants to do to humanity. “Humans cannot help themselves” was her reasoning.
It’s natural that so many traumatic experiences in China during the Cultural Revolution crushed her trust in humanity down to pieces or nothing. It was extremely hard for her to fathom why humans created so much suffering against one another as shown in her father’s death, and how no one repented of their actions. Hence, she made a single-handed judgment about humanity and invited more suffering to humans on earth as a result with anticipated alien attack. She swung from one extreme of the utmost frustration and depression to another extreme of the utmost fury.
In the Green mythology, “fury” is a spirit of punishment, often represented as one of three goddesses who executed the curses pronounced upon criminals, tortured the guilty with stings of conscience, and inflicted famines and pestilences. Like in the Greek mythology, with fury, Dr. Ye Wenjie volunteers to assist the “god” who she thought could punish humanity.
As a scientist , she might have felt strongly convinced that her “solution” was correct, but she was wrong after all. The judgment call she made at the moment she replied to the aliens was just a knee-jerk reaction out of her own suffering. How could she make a call for the entire humanity based on her own limited personal experiences?
What if she could have fully accepted and tended to the wide spectrum of heartbreaking emotions with care rather than ruminating with anger and jumping to a solution based on anger? Instead of trying to “make sense” of why others inflicted so much pain against her, what if she could have imagined at least once, “Just like me, they are also in pain in their own circumstances”? What if she could have been able to offer compassion to herself in the moment of the utmost pain? She wouldn’t have inflicted so much pain to humanity by not replying to the aliens again. By just being compassionate to herself, she could have truly saved humanity.
Sweatshop Overload: Compassion — More Hope
In “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overload”, Kristina Wong chronicles the series of tragic events that we all went through during the unprecedented suffering of our lifetime with COVID-19. As an actress, her job was on hold with the global lockdown. With extreme uncertainty with her profession, finance, and life in general, she felt frustrated, anxious, and fell in despair, like most of us did during that time.
Yet she saw suffering of others as well. Through news, she encountered stories of so many health workers and essential workers who were at constant risk due to the shortage of mask supply. She realized she could do something about it with her sewing skill! Immediately, she creates a group on Facebook, “Aunties Sewing Squad (ASS)”, calling for anyone who can sew, to provide masks to those in need. The squad soon swelled to 800 “aunties” (applied to all genders and all ages, regardless of their actual auntie status), sewing and delivering hundreds of thousands of homemade masks to communities in need for 504 days during Pandemic.
So many tragic events happened during that time. There were total 1 billion COVID-19 cases in the US and over 1 million Americans died of COVID-19. If you remember the early days of COVID-19, no one really knew what to do or how to be with each other in public. I remember I used to wear a mask even when I was going to the outdoor park. Remember that there were curfews in big cities to prevent people from being outdoors too long or too often?! So many died before vaccine came out; and many more died even when vaccines were available, because they refused to get vaccinated. Even worse, it wasn’t just COVID-19; George Floyd was killed by the police officer and the mob attacked the Capitol. Societally, culturally, and politically, it was a wild time, which continues to now to a certain degree.
In this extremely turbulent time, Kristina Wong and her fellow “aunties” could have stayed in despair, feeling anxious and doubtful of humanity. Yet they didn’t. They chose to act by “giving” with their simple skill rather than making a judgment call on the situation. What prompted Kristina Wong and her fellow aunties to act by “giving” was their compassion.
Compassion is often misunderstood as an emotion but it’s actually a multidimensional mental state with four key interacting components as follows:
Kristina and aunties were all cognitively aware of suffering with COVID-19. They felt emotional connection to suffering of theirs and others as well — sadness, anger, frustration, despair, etc. But they didn’t pause there. They hoped for suffering to end for all. Out of their genuine intention to end the suffering, they were motivated to respond to relieve suffering by doing whatever they could do within their control — by sewing masks.
And what they were able to offer was more than masks — it was more hope for humanity. Hope — because they gave hope to those in need with masks handmade with care, because they felt the strong sense of connection with one another in acting together, rather than feeling lonely in the middle of Pandemic, and because they actually helped saving lives.
Rebecca Solnit, the great San Francisco writer of our time, writes about hope in her book “Hope in the Dark”:
“Hope is not the belief that everything was, is, or will be fine. The evidence is all around us of tremendous suffering and tremendous destruction….the hope I’m interested in is about broad perspectives with specific possibilities, ones that invite or demand that we act.
Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.” — <Home in the Dark> by Rebecca Solnit
No, I am not concluding that “ASS” didn’t fix COVID-19; but they strengthened hope, the critical element to sustain humanity in the midst of Pandemic and many other events that brought so much suffering.
Compassion: the Only Way to Respond to Suffering
These two shows two different responses to humanity in suffering. Sure, if Dr. Ye Wenjie responded with compassion, there would be no “3 Body Problem” TV series on Netflix. Through our own mistakes, we get to remind us of what we need to remember. But there are also ample real life examples that show compassion is the only way to respond to suffering, like in the Sweatshop Overload.
How would you respond to suffering of yours and others? If you want to learn more about how to be compassionate to yourself and others, check out the Compassion Cultivation Training!
