The Woman in the Chinese Collar

‘My family story is a catalogue of losses and surrenders, of people sailing away never to return. This sense of loss permeated my childhood, hung in the air with my father’s cigarette smoke and his silence.’

Hannah Lowe’s aunt Nelsa was a mysterious figure in the family, her life surviving in hearsay, rumour and scraps of story. Then, by chance, Lowe discovers a striking monochrome photograph: a beautiful woman in what appears to be a cheongsam. The photograph opens a door onto a life that had almost disappeared.

So begins a search across space and time, taking Lowe from England to Jamaica and back again, in pursuit of a woman who carved out an existence for herself in twentieth-century Kingston. Nelsa was known as a healer, restaurateur and nightclub hostess, a woman whose spirit and strength seemed to touch everybody she knew. But what happened to her, and why?

Through photographs, memories and fragments, Lowe explores politics, poverty, disability, sex and crime in this narrative of diaspora and home. Along the way, she draws on the knowledge, imagination and generosity of others, asking what it means to seek help in recovering a life of a marginalised woman. Told with lyricism and tenderness, The Woman in the Chinese Collar is a family memoir and an act of love – an exploration of how writing and research can trace routes and roots when the archive falls silent.