‘How a camphorwood chest led me to unearth my mother’s Asian Jewish family history’ – Jay Prosser, on writing his new book in an age of cultural division

As a child, I spent many hours beside a camphorwood chest. I traced my fingers over the pictures carved into the wood: two travellers in a Chinese sampan, passing a skyline of towering pagodas and thick foliage. I listened to my mother’s stories. This chest was the sole item of furniture that my mother – May Prosser (née Elias), a long-time member of Hurlingham – brought when she migrated from Singapore to England in 1961. This family archive holds the photographs, letters, trinkets, marriage certificates and identity cards of May’s ancestors, who came from China and Iraq and who sojourned in India. ‘Going through’ the camphorwood chest with my mother meant both unpacking these precious heirlooms, but also, via her stories, travelling to my forebears’ distant times and places.

‘I’m a quarter Jewish, a quarter Chinese, a quarter Welsh, a quarter English,’ I would chant to other children, if we got on to the subject of where you were from. But I was confused about my identity. I hadn’t figured out how these parts fit together. The Iraqi and Indian connections never even got a mention. The exotic ancestors I heard about in my mother’s stories seemed to me as made-up and far-removed as the fairytale carvings.

Then, about fifteen years ago, my mother issued me with both a challenge and a gift. To find out what exactly she did, you’ll have to read my book. But the result was that she and I made a return journey to the camphorwood chest, now with me taking out its treasures. We also travelled physically, to many of the sites along the family’s migratory route: to Singapore, where May was born and became a lead figure in the Jewish community and a high-fashion model; to India, where her spice-trading Iraqi Jewish father grew up; and to the beautiful city of Chaozhou in China, where May’s Chinese mother was abandoned as a baby by the side of a river and adopted by a fisherman-farmer.

As I wrote what turned out to be not just a multigenerational family saga but my own memoir, I absorbed my family’s Asian Jewishness. The process became more urgent as my beloved mother aged. I began to discern a pattern repeated across generations: people who came from very different cultures and religions, who spoke different languages, and who fell in love not despite but because of their differences. In marrying Keith, then a young lieutenant fighting one of Britain’s last imperial wars in Malaya, May followed her Chinese and Iraqi Jewish ancestors in this rich heritage of loving strangers.

At a time when, too often, we are told to fear, rather than to love, strangers, May’s family story of love across cultural divides felt especially important to tell.

JAY PROSSER

Loving Strangers: A Camphorwood Chest, A Legacy, a Son Returns is now widely available.