But how will I be remembered?

Prototype

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.