For much of his life, Jay Prosser was uncertain of where he belonged. He was “Jewish and not, British and Asian, Iraqi, English, Welsh, Chinese”. With a military father, his family moved often. At a boarding school, he was dubbed a “half-caste”. At synagogue, he felt like an imposter. Prosser’s memoir, Loving Strangers, tells the story of how he forged a sense of belonging, and a deep appreciation of his multicultural heritage and Jewish faith, through the excavation of a camphorwood chest.
The chest holds a family archive. Layer by layer, its contents propel Prosser, and the reader, through a journey that crisscrosses a continent. Moving backward in time, the narrative has the literary verve and immersive drama of a multigenerational family novel. But it is grounded in research that unspools from Prosser’s camphor-scented trove of letters, photographs, clippings, and keepsakes.
May was a local girl nursing a broken heart; the family of her first great love had deemed her the wrong kind of Jew.
In the first stratum of the excavation, we encounter the story of May and Keith, the author’s parents. Their whirlwind romance took place at the end of empire: Singapore, 1960. Keith was a Brit fresh out of the jungles of Malaya, where he had led a platoon during the euphemistically-named Malayan Emergency, an anti-communist war to the British, and an anti-colonial war to the Chinese. May was a local girl nursing a broken heart; the family of her first great love had deemed her the wrong kind of Jew, probably because of her mixed parentage: Baghdadi-Jewish and Chinese. After a two-month courtship, May and Keith were separated for over a year, a separation that produced hundreds of letters and ended with May’s arrival, camphorwood chest in tow, in England.
In the second stratum, Prosser explores the Singapore May left behind, twice. As a three-year-old, her family miraculously escaped on a Bombay-bound ship on the eve—the literal eve—of Japan’s 1942 invasion. She returns after the war, to a changed and changing place. Earlier, in the 1930s, Chacha Haron, May’s uncle, embodied Singapore’s festive, hybrid cultural milieu as he performed “Malay cabaret”, or bangsawan, in the amusement complex called New World. During the Japanese occupation and after, bangsawan was censored first by the Japanese and then by the British, and “Chacha Haron went mad.” Singapore was losing some of its cosmopolitan dynamism.
But it remained home to May’s cross-cultural parents, Jacob and Esther. The third stratum of the chest reveals how Jacob and Esther’s story of “loving strangers” anticipated that of May and Keith. An immigrant to Singapore from Chaozhou in Southeast China, Sim Koh-wei was Jacob’s employee before she became his wife, Esther. Prosser and his mother took a trip to Chaozhou to seek out his grandmother’s roots, but so little is known about her early life that Prosser embellishes his scant evidence by letting “facts merge with the imagination.” Even the “facts” are unstable. The Chaozhou merchant-landlord he introduces as Hong Chen-ci is in fact Chen Cihong (he confuses the surname). To a Sinologist, this would be a troubling error. But in Prosser’s memoir, the misnaming feels almost fitting, for even the correct Chinese of his grandmother’s name is uncertain. Of all the places that had to come together to make Prosser’s family, China was the one that was most left behind.
More is known about Prosser’s grandfather, Jacob, his past and his lineage. But not everything that is known, or knowable, has a tangible trace in the camphorwood chest. To tell Jacob’s story, the story of the Elias family, Prosser must go beyond the archive intentionally curated by his mother as he rewrites the history of Baghdadi-Jews in Asia (a history dominated by the Sassoon family). As Prosser uncovers scandals of the past, his mother urges him to leave such details out of the book. But he convinces her otherwise, not for the sake of historical fidelity, but because he is proud of his family, messy details and all. He is proud to come from an Asian Jewish family that embraced cultural hybridity, that sanctioned “marrying out”, and that recognized the belonging of former “strangers” and converts. This is the Jewish identity and legacy to which Prosser “returns”.
What does it mean to return?
What does it mean to return? At the end of his journey, Prosser reflects on Zionism.
In long-held mythologies, and too much in politics today, I think, Jews are equated with ideas of return and a homeland, and with a particular country, of course – Israel. What I find troubling about this identification is not only the collapsing of Jewishness into Israel, a key error of antisemitism, but also the assumption that any one of us can simply go back to the origins of our earliest ancestors and erase the aeons of mobility and mixing undertaken by subsequent generations. My family’s Jewishness was not formed in Israel but in diaspora: in Babylon, Iraq, India, Singapore.
The place Prosser returns to is not a fixed site but a non-site, a condition of mobility. When I first read the book’s subtitle, “A Camphorwood Chest, a Legacy, a Son Returns”, I found the last phrase a bit awkward, thinking “a son’s return”, would be better. But when the legacy you return to is one of mobility, one of loving strangers, there is no destination that makes the act of return complete. One is always in the process of returning as one moves through the world. This is one of many insights in this gripping, evocative, and important book.