Thesis Defence: Evelyn Ka-Kwok Lo

Of the thesis entitled: The Memory Mines

Abstract:

She is eighteen when she leaves home. She leaves shortly after her father’s inexplicable disappearance – an event she neither understands nor accepts. She does what everyone on the cusp of adulthood does: she moves abroad to forget her past. Now, ten years later, her ageing mother is taken away. The family home is empty. The young woman returns. It is here, in her childhood home, she makes the deliberate decision to remember.

Even after so many years, the house is the same. Here, her childhood memories still live, in the spaces between walls, in the cracks in the floor, in the weft of the brocade curtains. Stories are awakened with the turn of a brass handle, the swing of a glass door, the scent of sour yogurt. The memories surface of their own will, appearing suddenly, sometimes violently. She moves through the house, reliving each memory with startling lucidity. The line between her parents’ memories and her own begin to blur. She remembers things she never knew. 

The Memory Mines is a collection of memories, distorted through a child’s eyes, made fragile with time - the last traces of a fractured childhood. It is here, in her childhood home, a young woman seeks to discover the truth about her parents’ tumultuous relationship.