ADMA 2025-2026

Imagining the Lives of Others: Making Narrative Violence Visible

This research asks: How can storytelling in comics make visible, rather than obscure, the narrative violence in representing others’ experiences? It grows from my confusion during fieldwork in a Chinese restaurant run by immigrants, where I realized that any act of narration is never neutral. Even without intent, simplifying or romanticizing other people’s life can still produce narrative violence, because it may obscure the opacity, contradictions, or unknowability of lived experience.

When I first began working in the restaurant, I thought I was collecting material for a non-fiction comic or written narrative. I noted down conversations, gestures, jokes, kitchen routines, work shifts, family histories, visa problems, gossip, misunderstandings, and moments of tenderness. My colleagues came from different backgrounds, Chinese, Tibetan, and Bangladeshi. Their lives were full of contradictions that resisted any simple narrative: exhaustion and humor, illegality and family stability, religious belief and bodily desire, political trauma and everyday pragmatism, loneliness and social intelligence.

I believed that careful observation could help me approach their lives with more accuracy. But the more I wrote, the more I became aware of the violence hidden inside this desire to understand. To write someone else, I had to choose what mattered, which details were meaningful, which contradictions should be emphasized, which gestures could stand for a life. In this process, lived experience was sorted and filtered, and real people became characters.

This realization became the starting point of my research. I became interested not only in the lives I was trying to represent, but in the process through which those lives became representable. Things happen between observation and narration. Something is lost when a person becomes legible.

By narrative violence, I do not mean only false representation or malicious distortion. I am more interested in the quieter violence of explanation, the tendency to make another person's life coherent too quickly, to turn opacity into meaning, to transform someone into a story that can be understood, judged, or emotionally processed. In the context of immigrant lives, this feels more urgent. Migrants are often represented through familiar frames: suffering, resilience, sacrifice, illegality, cultural difference, or social threat. These frames may create empathy, but they can also flatten lives into recognizable types.

At a moment when immigrants' lives are not only represented but constantly circulated, consumed, and judged under intensifying anti-immigrant discourses, I see urgency in developing alternative narrative strategies. The aim is to ask how artistic writing can reveal the construction of representation itself, how a work can show its own gaps, projections, and ethical failures, how misunderstanding can remain visible rather than be edited away, how partial perception can become part of the form.

The research developed through two related experiments, a participatory writing experiment and a meta-narrative experiment. The participatory writing experiment began with a simple question about what happens when fragments of a real life are turned into keywords and given to someone else to imagine from. I invited participants to write from limited factual descriptions, not in order to produce accurate portraits, but to observe how imagination begins. The experiment became a way of looking at the speed with which information becomes narrative. Details were expanded, gaps were filled, contradictions were interpreted, and lives were moved toward recognizable story structures.

This experiment also revealed an ethical tension that cannot be resolved by explanation alone. Because the materials were drawn from real people, the act of asking others to imagine from them was itself risky. Even when identifying details are removed, a person's life can still be exposed, simplified, or transformed into something they might not recognize or accept. For this reason, I do not understand the participatory experiment as a public storytelling work. I treat it as a research situation, shown only in limited and obscured forms, and as a way to examine the mechanisms of projection rather than to reveal the truth of the people described.

The main body of the project is a meta-narrative writing experiment. Rather than turning fieldwork materials into a smooth narrative, I construct a text that keeps showing its own making. The text brings together fragments of observation, fictional attempts, participant responses, translations, annotations, doubts, refusals, and corrections. It does not ask the reader to believe in a finished version of events. It asks the reader to remain inside the unstable process through which another person's life becomes a story.

In this meta-narrative, the narrator is not a transparent observer. She is also implicated. She wants to understand, but she also imagines. She cares, but she also selects. She is moved by others' lives, but she also uses them. The text therefore does not try to hide the writer's desire, shame, curiosity, or failure. It treats these unstable affects as part of the material. The question is not how to purify the act of writing, but how to make its violence, pleasure, and uncertainty perceptible.

This approach allows the work to resist a single completed narrative. Rather than offering a coherent portrait of others, it follows interruptions, repetitions, failed descriptions, conflicting versions, and moments when the writer no longer knows whether she is understanding, inventing, or consuming. The work sits with what happens when a story refuses to become satisfying, when a character remains partly opaque, when the reader can see not only the life being represented but also the pressure that turns life into narrative.

The ethical problem is therefore not outside the research. It is one of its central materials. I do not claim that making narrative violence visible removes the harm of representation. Anonymization, masking, and limiting visibility can reduce risk, but they cannot make the work innocent. The project remains situated in an unresolved ethical field. It asks how to continue writing when writing is never harmless, and how to remain responsible without pretending to be pure.

The outcome of the research is a meta-narrative text, supported by a participatory writing experiment and a process archive. Together, they form a space where narrative violence can be observed rather than denied. The project does not aim to reveal the truth of the people I encountered. It asks how their lives, and the lives of others more generally, become legible, consumable, and distorted through narrative imagination.

My interest is in a more self-aware practice of artistic writing, one that keeps opacity, misunderstanding, partial perception, and unresolved ethical tension visible. The goal is not to remove narrative violence, but to acknowledge its presence, limit its harm, and work with it as a condition of writing about others. Writing about others is always partly violent. The task is to stay responsible inside that violence, to slow it down, expose its mechanisms, and refuse the comfort of a story that explains too much.