But how will I be remembered?
Themes: co-design, community archive, storytelling, adoption narratives
London, United Kingdom, Fall 2025
This project, in completion for my MA thesis is a prototype for a community-led digital archive created through my own search for agency and belonging as a Chinese adoptee. The work began by confronting the gap between instituionalised records and lived experience, mediated through state documentation, redaction, and loss. Out of this encounter grew a collective design process with adoptees who continue to question how they are remembered, represented, and recorded.
The title echoes a question left in a TikTok comment by a Chinese adoptee in the wake of recent policy changes suspending international adoption from China. It is both a plea and a provocation, asking what remains of us when our history is missing, altered, or never written at all. The prototype reimagines the archive as a space for agency and participation, where adoptees reclaim the authority to write, share, and preserve their own stories beyond bureaucratic control.
London, United Kingdom, Fall 2025
This project, in completion for my MA thesis is a prototype for a community-led digital archive created through my own search for agency and belonging as a Chinese adoptee. The work began by confronting the gap between instituionalised records and lived experience, mediated through state documentation, redaction, and loss. Out of this encounter grew a collective design process with adoptees who continue to question how they are remembered, represented, and recorded.
The title echoes a question left in a TikTok comment by a Chinese adoptee in the wake of recent policy changes suspending international adoption from China. It is both a plea and a provocation, asking what remains of us when our history is missing, altered, or never written at all. The prototype reimagines the archive as a space for agency and participation, where adoptees reclaim the authority to write, share, and preserve their own stories beyond bureaucratic control.