Family Chains: The Chinese Family, This Behemoth

        A Hong Kong family who emigrated and then returned
　　A Hong Kong journalist, long concerned with the vulnerable, uncovers her own family's long-sealed wounds

　　Truth is murky, and family is a tangle of love and hate. In this private world, without love, the years of unwavering care could not have been sustained. Like an immigrant unwilling to abandon their beloved cat, my parents firmly believed they were the most capable people to care for my brother.
　　I examine the records of my interactions with family; the emotions emerging from our communications are fragmented and mixed. The bond of kinship is real, but the overwhelming sense of suffocation is also incredibly real. This behemoth called family often both nurtures and harms its members simultaneously. —Tam Wai Wan

　　To outsiders, this was a model, happy family. The parents had middle-class financial means; the children excelled in public examinations, becoming "HKCEE top scorers." These excellent conditions allowed them to emigrate to Canada before 1997. Later, the author returned to Hong Kong to study and work, becoming a highly respected professional journalist and a lecturer in the journalism department of a top university.

　　However, in her heart, she was constantly tormented by the vast discrepancy between her family's public image and its inner reality. Her elder brother had emotional problems before leaving Hong Kong, and in Canada, amidst various cultural shocks and the Chinese family's emphasis on "face" above all else, he failed to receive continuous medical treatment. The family did not actively integrate into immigrant society; in an isolated large house, interactions between them were full of tension yet lacked boundaries, accumulating into an excessively entangled and pathological structure. Each time she visited, the author clearly felt that the family situation was constantly deteriorating, but her parents chose to evade it. While her father was proud of the author's professional achievements, he also demanded that she not mention the family's situation or her brother's condition in her reports. This was a gag order placed by the father, as the family's authority figure, on his youngest daughter.

　　Due to age and the pandemic, the elderly parents could no longer care for their middle-aged son, who had been ill for years, and the carefully maintained façade finally shattered. In 2020, as Hongkongers once again emigrated in large numbers due to major changes, the author went against the tide, returning to Hong Kong with three family members—the elderly, the frail, and the sick. She had to face double the long-term care, a mentally ill brother who had been trapped for nearly thirty years, and her own accumulated physical and mental stress and pain from being in this family for so long.

　　This book is journalist Tam Wai Wan’s in-depth writing and dissection of her own family, tracing back all the opportunities the family missed, reconstructing the lost past and the brother she could never truly approach or understand. It also chronicles how she managed to reverse the family's nearly thirty-year predicament in three years. The author believes that reconstructing family history is very similar to transitional justice within a family: when old values or authorities are eliminated, the first step is to acknowledge what happened, allowing the oppressed and the vulnerable to publicly tell their stories.

　　The unique vitality of the text also brought about changes for family members. To write this book and better understand her brother's inner world, the author sought an artist to interpret her brother's long-sealed creations. By chance, these works were selected for exhibition at Art Basel Hong Kong 2025. It turns out that the creations born from the depths of his illness were her brother's way of speaking; her brother could finally convey his voice to the world.

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