TRACING THE UNMOURNED PHANTOM IN AN ERASED HISTORY: QINGHAN CHEN RESPONDS TO HESTER YANG’S THE UNDESIRABLES

In Hester Yang’s film The Undesirables (2022), we encounter specific aesthetic qualities in the voice-over narration. She deliberately avoids showing the Eurasian descendants of Liverpool's repatriated Chinese seamen, instead presenting them as disembodied narrators. As Hester notes, their fragmented first-person accounts come together to form a collective narrative of shared experiences. By interweaving fragmentary visual archive materials, such as empty street scenes in Liverpool, the boundless blue sea, and archive footage of working seamen, she establishes new contexts and novel forms of continuity, ultimately addressing intergenerational trauma and lost identity.

The potential of voice-over narration in shaping the viewer’s perception of the archive is profound, especially as it draws attention to the narrators’ distinctive voices and accents. After watching the film, I became curious about this invisible history between the British government and Liverpool's Chinese seamen and searched for related reports online. Surprisingly, while watching a relevant BBC documentary, I recognised some narrators by their specific accents, whose visual presence had been deliberately omitted in The Undesirables. At this point, accent and voice become a kind of sign, extending beyond the film and connecting with related online materials. This weaves a tight and complex network of information, ultimately increasing our awareness of the socio-political circumstances. It reconstructs the previously unknown scenes of repatriation and the prolonged, unexpressed suffering of the descendants.

In the mid to late 1940s, the Home Office’s aliens department opened a new file titled "Compulsory Repatriation of Undesirable Chinese Seamen," and the police began forcibly rounding up these men, putting them on boats, and sending them back to China. These Chinese seamen disappeared from the streets of Liverpool and were never heard from again, leaving behind hundreds of families who believed they had been abandoned. Similar forced deportations with racist undertones have continued throughout history, from the Nazis’ forcible confinement of Jews in camps to the British government's 2022 Rwanda Asylum Export plan for dealing with transnational refugees. The essence of these actions is to define certain populations as superfluous, useless, or detrimental to the public and to remove them as if cutting out the sick part of society.

In The Undesirables, Hester Yang shifts the focus to the families of the unwelcome Chinese seamen. These Eurasian descendants emphasise that although they look Chinese, they do not speak Mandarin and do not understand Chinese culture. I felt a sense of Chineseness hovering around these descendants, as though it were a ghost. Entangled with this spectral presence is the family secret that has never been mentioned or properly addressed. Unlike the philosopher Jacques Derrida’s spectre, which hovers between life and death, presence and absence, and causes established certainties to vacillate, the ghost haunting these narrators is more akin to the notion of the phantom described by psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in their exploration of transgenerational trauma and family secrets. They argue that undisclosed traumas of previous generations might disturb the lives of their descendants, even if, and especially when, they know nothing about their distant causes.

These transgenerational phantoms emerge when unspoken and shameful secrets seep through the fabric of family communication. These secrets, too painful to express directly, manifest in subtle behavioural cues and coded language passed down from one generation to the next. As recipients of this inheritance, these descendants become unwitting vessels for the unresolved past, transmitting voices and traumas. The Undesirables thus exudes a sense of melancholy, stemming from long-ignored family secrets — such as the sudden disappearance of the Chinese father, who is even considered unfaithful by his wife. The abrupt collapse of the core family structure creates a devastating rift that no one seems capable of mending.

Abraham and Torok’s attitude towards these family secrets and the resulting trauma is positive, suggesting that when these secrets are put into words, the phantom and its noxious effects on the living can be exorcised. At the same time, the repeated storytelling by the seamen’s children does not alleviate the noxious effects mentioned by Abraham and Torok.

After revealing the document about the forced repatriation of undesirables, they find a possible solution by continually exploring the truth of repatriation and the status of their fathers. On the one hand, this is reflected in the narrators’ desire to understand their own origins and invisible cultural ties with China. On the other hand, during the investigation process, they receive no official help or government acknowledgment, inquiry, or apology. Ultimately, they become the marginal man depicted by the sociologist Robert E. Park, living on the periphery of two cultures. Their father, once a cultural bridge to Chinese life, was expelled by the British government, while their British mother lost her British citizenship after marrying a Chinese. This creates an invisible, underlying tension within British mainstream society that does not recognise them. When they choose to share their family secrets with the public, this hidden tension and entanglement come to the forefront.

GUEST CURATOR’S BIO

Qinghan Chen is a graduate student in Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick. She enjoys hiking, writing, and slow cinema.