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Where Did My Father Live? An Autoethnographic Study of the Chinese Diaspora in Hong Kong and the United Kingdom

Part 2 Dissertation 2022
Yan Ki Ng
University of Sheffield | UK
“It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.” - Donna J. Haraway.

Beginning of Autumn, Sheffield, 2021. Sitting in my student accommodation, trying to connect to my father back home over a poor wi-fi signal, I convinced myself to step up with my prolonged dissertation. I am extremely burnt out from the pandemic and I feel the full weight of being two years and 2,400 miles from home. But despite all the challenges, I am motivated by the thought of using this dissertation as a bridge between me and my dad, the old and the new, architecture and power, lived experience and society.

The dissertation is a medley composed of language, generation, politics and culture, jumping back and forth fictional chapters based on facts and factual chapters that started as fiction.

It is a product of my architectural journey, using autoethnography to explore my father’s lived experience as a Mainland Chinese immigrant in Hong Kong. I am interested in how he interacted with the places he lived in and how these are an embodiment of the political and social conditions of his time. It is by no means his biography, but my imagination of what life was like in China and Hong Kong from 1967 to 1986, contextualised by theory.

Yan Ki Ng

Tutor(s)
Luis Hernan
2022
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