A Silent Farewell

This autoethnographic nonfictional fiction narrates a Chinese father’s guilt, shame, and fear for hiding his illegitimate daughter for twenty years. Through storytelling, the author crosses temporal space and finds herself speaking in her father’s voice, acting as he would have, and fearing what he feared. Storytelling has built a relational/emotional bridge and serves as a rhetorical strategy for the author. On the one hand, autoethnography connects life and death, blurring the boundaries between the author and her father. For the first time in her life, through storytelling, she is able to walk into understanding her father and engage in a dialogue that had never been possible while her father was alive. On the other hand, her storytelling serves as a powerful critique of an unjust system in which sanity and humanity are tested and contested. The author also reflects on the privileges she enjoys as an autoethnographer, the ethical conundrums in her portrayal of her characters, and her publishing concerns. With such considerations, the characters, places, and timelines in this autoethnography are modified to prevent literal interpretations of this fictional nonfiction, or nonfictional fiction.