We Do Not Part 等著你回来 begins with my parents’ repeated migrations and an uneasy question: does leaving a place ever mean escaping what continues to haunt us?

My parents left Hong Kong for Toronto on 30 June 1997. More than two decades later, they began moving again between Hong Kong, Singapore and the United Kingdom, before eventually returning to Hong Kong. Across these departures and returns, I began to wonder whether migration always carries us forward, or whether certain trajectories lead us back towards where we began.

The project approaches this family history through archival photographs, narrative, surveillance logs, speculative investigation and fiction. Photographs from my parents’ 1968 honeymoon form one point of departure. Looking at my father’s unexpectedly distressed expression, I began to imagine that he had somehow glimpsed the future course of their lives: repeated departures, attempts to settle elsewhere, and an eventual return to their point of origin.

Observation of Tranquillity takes the form of surveillance logs constructed from still images extracted from recordings outside my brother’s bedroom window in the United Kingdom. Through repetition, an uneventful view gradually shifts from observation into scrutiny.

Across the project, documentary material sits alongside speculation and invention. Family history becomes entangled with memory, fear, surveillance and redaction. The work culminates in the fiction of a “plane from the future”: an imagined force that turns migration from a geographical movement, into a condition shaped by recurrence, controlled by a force that grasps our lives, regardless how far we go and how many times we leave.

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Donna Chiu’s We Do Not Part (2026) is presented at the 10th Singapore International Photography Festival as part of Shifting Images: Photography from Singapore 2000–2025, under The Stories We Carry.