Paper Short Abstract:

This poster grapples with who to approach writting unspoken understandings, that have come to be the bulk of my PhD data. Through allusions and implications, the unspoken understanding of Hong Konger's quasi-refugeeness shadows most of my fieldwork. What does one do when silence unwrites data?

Paper Abstract:

Initially based on recording oral histories, much of my PhD data was to remain unwritten. However, during my fieldwork, I found that most of the things people ‘told’ me were unspoken, alluded to, and not recorded in the oral histories. Warned before every new introduction to ‘not talk politics or ask why [the Hong Kongers] left,’ conversations around the political tensions in Hong Kong and the reasons for migration shadowed most of my conversations and interactions in the field. It was well known, and never explained to me, why the BN(O) visa had been created by the UK government, and why so many Hong Kongers chose to apply for it. Since the mass protests of 2019 in Hong Kong, the creation of the National Security Law, and the persecution of any business, emblem, song, or person seen as too pro-Hong Kong independence, with particular focus on publishing housing and university students, hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers have migrated. This poster tackles the dilemma I face when much of my research comes from allusions and unspoken implications, occasionally elaborated on through comments in private homes, where my position as researcher or friend became more ambiguous to my interlocutors. How does one reflect and write about what remains unspoken? When participation was explicitly driven by a desire to preserve oral migration histories, what does the ethnographer do with largely silent, compelling data on remembering unspoken quasi-refugeeness?