My MA thesis “But How Will I Be Remembered?” explores what community-based archiving can mean for Chinese adoptees whose histories are marked by uncertainty, fragmentation, and institutional control. The title of this work, pulled from a Tiktok comment written in response to China’s 2024 suspension of international adoption, speaks to the heart of what adoptees face at present: how will we be remembered amongst records that are incomplete, misrepresentative, or were never there at all?
This research emerges from my own lived experience as a Chinese adoptee and my engagement with other adoptees as I seek to understand how existing archives have denied our voices, and how we might reclaim them by imagining new ways of storytelling and sense-making. Following a
practice-led approach through interviews, focus groups, and co-design workshops, I trace how participatory practice can support more ethical, adoptee-centred modes of remembrance rooted in care, curiosity, and ownership over how our stories are created, stored, and circulated.
My engagement with my community reveal how adoptees navigate a landscape in which both official and unofficial records carry pain, contradiction, and fabrication, and how reclaiming narrative control becomes central to restoring agency. Further, spaces that can make room for these dynamics is also essential for adoptees’ sense of belonging.
These findings materialised in the prototype of a digital archive, where each page, design choice, and feature reflects directly how adoptees sought to address the gaps in their lived experiences. The prototype’ demonstrates how community-led archives can create space for fragmented memories, evolving meanings, and unresolved stories, rather than seeking closure or resolve in existing ones. Critically, it highlights adoptee spaces as constant sites of negotiation, where navigating power, resistance, and becoming is as dynamic as the lives adoptees live.
3rd Chinese Adoptee Symposium: 落叶归根 [Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots]
I often try to intellectualize my adoptee experience, something I’ve learned only in the last 48 hours is a way of coping with the things that hurt us most.
It’s true—I write, I read, I code, I create, and I research about adoption and about China to try to make sense of it all. I have this fantasy that one day I’ll have published hundreds of peer-reviewed journals, been featured in renowned exhibitions, and produced the most groundbreaking research for all my family, friends, colleagues, enemies, and past lovers to see, and that when that day comes, they will finally see me, and I will be happy. But perhaps deep down I chase this fantasy to cope with what I am too afraid to feel.
Sometimes, no amount of thinking can mend the pain, suffering, and heartbreak that being an adoptee is. It doesn’t explain why I find myself praying to every god I know, begging for a reshuffling of the cards I’ve been dealt. It doesn’t explain how adoption makes me feel simultaneously confused, grounded, stupid, smart, ugly, beautiful, ashamed, and proud all at once. I thought I knew what would make me happy—what would heal me—but actually, I don’t have the slightest idea.
At this year’s symposium, I asked myself to feel all of these things, without reaching into my back pocket of APA citations for help. I sobbed, I laughed, I told stories. I cut peppers into quarters. I allowed myself to have fun, and I allowed myself to grieve. I felt the comfort of reconnecting with old friends and the joy of making new ones. I got angry at the world for tearing us apart and then thanked it for bringing us together.
Like 落叶归根 suggests, I let myself fall and flow with the wind. I let myself hit the ground. I let myself wither and seep into the soil. For once, I stop fighting and let gravity take over. I rest.
<But How Will I Be Remembered?>
In September 2024, China announced they were no longer supporting international adoptions. Hearing this news brought a wave of emotions: relief, sadness, betrayal; I quickly turned to social media to make sense of what many adoptees like myself were feeling. One night I came across a TikTok that had invited a lively comment section about whether the policy was ‘good’ or ‘bad’ news. Of the thousands of comments, one user’s I recall vividly, who wrote, “But how will I be remembered?”
In posing such a simple question, her words spoke to the heart of the reality that sunk in my chest: we were the last remnants of complex history that, laced with innumerable layers of shared suffering, trauma, hopes, and dreams, felt impossible to encapsulate. She spoke to not only the difficulties adoptees face in the documentation and representation of their stories, but also to the large landscape of archives for marginalized communities, which are historically missing, inaccurate, and even oppressive (Agostinho et al., 2019). Critically, the question became not whether to the policy was ‘good’ or ‘bad,’ but rather how do we remember our soon extant history produced by a system that no longer exists.
Hence, I propose a community-based digital archive that navigates Chinese adoptees’ records which are often lost or unknown alongside the many cross-border, geopolitical challenges such as adoption policy, access to government records, and accurate paperwork that make it so. Grounded in frameworks on adoptee identity/belonging, critical data studies, diasporic memory, and the “archival imaginary,” I aim to challenge traditional, colonial definitions of the archive: linear, bureaucratic, and quantitative. Drawing on collaborative and co-design methods, I prototype an “Artifact Cloud”—a part interactive map, part multimedia database—capturing the multiple ways adoptees write, film, photograph, collect, reflect, and converse about their stories. I ask in return: how do we make records that bridge the gap between the institutionalized narratives that were pre-written for us and the lived experiences imagined throughout our lives?
![3rd Chinese Adoptee Symposium: 落叶归根 [Falling Leaves Return to Their Roots]I often try to intellectualize my adoptee experience, something I’ve learned only in the last 48 hours is a way of coping with the things that hurt us most.It’s true—I write, I read, I code, I create, and I research about adoption and about China to try to make sense of it all. I have this fantasy that one day I’ll have published hundreds of peer-reviewed journals, been featured in renowned exhibitions, and produced the most groundbreaking research for all my family, friends, colleagues, enemies, and past lovers to see, and that when that day comes, they will finally see me, and I will be happy. But perhaps deep down I chase this fantasy to cope with what I am too afraid to feel.Sometimes, no amount of thinking can mend the pain, suffering, and heartbreak that being an adoptee is. It doesn’t explain why I find myself praying to every god I know, begging for a reshuffling of the cards I’ve been dealt. It doesn’t explain how adoption makes me feel simultaneously confused, grounded, stupid, smart, ugly, beautiful, ashamed, and proud all at once. I thought I knew what would make me happy—what would heal me—but actually, I don’t have the slightest idea.At this year’s symposium, I asked myself to feel all of these things, without reaching into my back pocket of APA citations for help. I sobbed, I laughed, I told stories. I cut peppers into quarters. I allowed myself to have fun, and I allowed myself to grieve. I felt the comfort of reconnecting with old friends and the joy of making new ones. I got angry at the world for tearing us apart and then thanked it for bringing us together.Like 落叶归根 suggests, I let myself fall and flow with the wind. I let myself hit the ground. I let myself wither and seep into the soil. For once, I stop fighting and let gravity take over. I rest.](https://sp1.picnob.com/p/pt_6757487240314332362858_0_c921ade1a64b993616d356bd6dbdc31e.jpg?o=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&h=2dd697a9ff8e986fd0e7e80355ba6560)
