In 1998, the island of Caspiar sinks, forcing all its inhabitants to flee and become refugees in places such as Hong Kong. Su’s fictional story about one such refugee unfolds through a seemingly stoic interview. The interviewee – a French-speaking white man – works as a domestic worker, a role that subverts colonial expectations of the white expatriate living in Hong Kong. The video concludes with a quotation from the famous “madeleine” passage in Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, foregrounding the centrality of memory and recollection in the reimagination of places, identities and histories.
