Set against the backdrop of China’s one-child policy, I Still Do Not Know Him is a photobook project rooted in my family’s personal history and my experience of growing up as part of the one-child generation. Before my birth, my mother was pregnant with another child—a boy—who was stillborn. According to a folk belief my mother held onto, such a child is a temporary spirit bound to the parents by karmic ties, destined to return to the Buddha after repaying a debt. For many years, she made annual pilgrimages to pray for my “brother.”

Centered on this absent figure, the project examines family memory, intimacy, and the emotional and social structures that shaped my upbringing. As a child, I imagined having a sibling, only later realizing that if he had lived, I might not exist. Over time, family roles also shifted: once I waited for my parents, and now they wait for me. With the introduction of the two-child policy in 2016, followed by the Chinese government’s approval of a third child in 2021, one-child families like ours seemed to be swept away by the ceaseless current of the Yangtze River, gradually disappearing into history.

Through family photographs, staged images, archival materials, and fragments of everyday life, the book reflects on how personal identity is constructed within historical and political systems. Moving between documentary and fiction, I attempt to visualize this “absent” brother—an existence both present and not—and to approach what remains unknown within family history. In doing so, the project opens a space to reconsider the relationship between private memory and collective experience, and to excavate the submerged emotional legacy of the one-child generation.