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Paper short abstract

My paper explores non-academic, artistic routes that have enabled me to narrate what remains deliberately unexposed in my family ethnography. I trace opportunities to navigate the tightrope between multivocality and writing with silence in efforts to protect family secrets.

Paper long abstract

When anthropologists work on life projects that are part microhistory and part memoir, learning how to protect—or when necessary, break—research participants’ unspoken secrets becomes fundamental. By examining how what is left unsaid sustains both secrecy and trust as interconnected social practices, this paper outlines the challenges of probing into secrets and of knowing when to refrain from doing so. Treating my own extended family connections as a field-site, I piece together the lived experiences of my father and wider kin as a Chinese–Finnish mixed-race family living in Beijing under Mao Zedong’s rule, at a time when careful monitoring and mutual surveillance shaped everyday life. Secrets, self-enforced social forgetting, repression, and disremembering shape the biographical narratives of my family story, and of many others who grew up in this insulated environment. In my project, I am frequently confronted with silence whereby my interlocutors frequently warn me that undoing, exposing, or even naming the unspoken past can carry fatal consequences. Rather than attempting to salvage the past or awaiting the sudden exposure of the “unspoken,” this paper explores the non-academic artistic routes through performance that have enabled me to express narratives that remain deliberately unexposed. I consider how multivocality in the arts provides an avenue to both respect and protect my family secrets.