That many of them went missing, you see.

They knew they didn’t go voluntarily, they knew they were forced.

Because too many of them went missing.

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The term “undesirable” originated from a Home Office fIle HO 213/926 titled “Forced Repatriation of Undesirable Chinese Seamen”. The bureaucratic language of the file reduces a community of Chinese migrant labourers—many of whom worked on British merchant ships during the World War II — to a problem to be managed, recasting their postwar presence in Liverpool as administratively inconvenient, socially suspect, and ultimately removable.

 

In the mid to late 1940s, groups of Chinese seamen disappeared from the streets of Liverpool and were never to be heard from again, leaving behind hundreds of families who lived in the belief that they had been abandoned. Three generations later, the details and violence of this history can only be pieced together through stories, family oral histories and fragmented documents.

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The project engages the archive not as a neutral repository of record, but as a site of erasure, omission, and state-sanctioned forgetting. Through portrait photography, moving image, and interventions into archival materials, <The Undesirables> explores the tension between institutional records and personal memory. Rather than filling gaps in the archive, the project holds those gaps open—reading these absences as traces of violence. 

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Developed through close collaboration with five families affected by the forced repatriations, this work is rooted in their lived experience as well as ruptures in the wider community. Disjointed first-person accounts assemble into a collective re-telling that resists closure — tracing how forced removal continues to reorganise family histories, memory, and frameworks of belonging across generations.

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Link to film