You hold the silk handkerchief in both hands and stare at it for the umpteenth time that evening. Night has fallen, but you have not bothered to switch on your desk lamp; the computer screen you sit facing is the only source of light in the room. You have no idea whether you have been sitting like this, blank-faced, for three minutes or three hours, waiting for an email you do not know when would arrive, or what message it would carry.
You read and re-read the handkerchief in your hand. “Read” may not be the correct word, for the only word on it is in a language you do not know. Your maternal grandmother had stuffed this handkerchief into your hand the last time you went to visit her around five years ago. You were not looking forward to traveling from your bustling city to the tiny town where your extended family resided, but you were indeed expecting treats from your grandma, in the form of pretty much anything, from fried mutton buns to beaded necklaces. The form it took that time was a silk handkerchief, its sole pattern being an Arabic word embroidered in white thread onto the emerald green background.
“This,” said your grandma in her usual soft low voice, “is your Arabic name.”
“What does it mean?” You asked, despite that your mother had told you the answer before.
“Zahira.” Your grandma muttered with her eyes half closed, in a prayer-like manner, “Splendor. Shining. Moonlight.”
You nodded in response before leaving the room with the handkerchief in your pocket. “Zahira” could as well have meant the scale of a dragon, or the feather of a phoenix, or anything unconnected with your life, mundane as everyone else's around you. You cannot read Arabic. Every literate member of your mother’s extended family can at least read a couple of Arabic lines, but you were exempted from this requirement by your grandparents because your father’s family is not of the same ethnic group. You have only half of their blood running in you, hence no commitment is demanded from you, whether to their faith or the Arabic language.
The computer screen dims as a result of ten minutes of inactivity. You strike a random key on your keyboard to light it up again. Your email inbox is still empty; all the application materials you had dumped into it felt like needles tossed into a stormy sea, no splash, no answer. You cannot recall how many essays you have submitted, how many transcripts you have requested, or how many statements you have ticked and electronically signed. Each one you signed as Xinyue, for that is your name, the name present on all your IDs, the name you actually go by, unlike Zahira whose sole existence is on a worn-out handkerchief.
Your parents had two weddings, the first one at your father’s place in traditional Chinese style, the second one in your mother’s town, in proper ethnic etiquette. A couple of years after they got married your parents left the small inland town they spent much of their previous lives in, and moved all the way south, to the youngest coastal city in China. When you were born on a midsummer evening they named you Xinyue, meaning “crescent”, after the waning moon dangling in the sky that night. You have often wondered whether your name has got anything to do with the crescent symbol often found in homes of your mother's relatives, but never got the chance to ask.
And you grew up, in that young, fast, fierce southern Chinese metropolis, where efficiency and profit are everything and little attention is given to tradition of any sort. You were classified as “ethnic minority” on your national ID card, yet no one bothered to teach you Arabic, and your heritage, like the name Zahira, is more of something to be perched on top of the shelf and forgotten, like a dusty vase, than something that makes up part of you.
Then one day, when you were nine or ten, you were told to bring a copy of your national ID card to school as they were doing some sort of registration. Some of the most disruptive boys in your class caught sight of it and noticed your ethnic status, and began yelling at you slurs you were shocked that they knew. Luckily you were not taunted at school for a long time - kids have short concentration spans. But soon afterwards you began to have access to the internet, and the hostility you saw there, towards various ethnic groups including the one you officially belong to, was enough to make you remove your heritage from the shelf and hide it among all the clutter in the attic. That, in a sense, was easy because you were raised secularly in a place where homogeneity prevails over diversity; you tried to brainwash yourself that you had never fit into your mother’s extended family anyway, despite treats you received from your last visit still sitting in the snack plate on your dining table. You started to refrain from all discussions regarding ethnic minorities, refused to eat the delicious mutton buns your mother fried for traditional festivals, and stopped responding to your grandma calling you “Zahira”; once you even snapped at her disrespectfully, stating that “my name is Xinyue”.
You cannot remember how your grandma reacted to that, only that your mother told you off much more severely than before. That was the part of memory lane you would rather not tread upon. You scroll somewhat impatiently through your inbox, looking for anything unread from that university distributing admission results tonight. University of Cambridge, University - of - Cambridge, Cam-bridge. The River Cam and the bridge across it are so often referred to together that it seems that they have merged into one, yet they are indeed two entities, existing independently of each other yet complementing one another so perfectly.
Sighing again you rub the handkerchief, its smoothness caressing your fingertips. You could have spent the rest of your life dodging your identity, half of who you are, had it not been your grandma’s passing. On hearing the news you slowly picked up the handkerchief lying on your bookshelf, in such a careful manner unlike any time before, and realised that while your grandma had always been trying to slip dribs and drabs of her language, her “sacred words”, to you, you had never responded to her in that language, in that tongue that mattered so much to her. Only then did it hit you that you had been denying half of who you are, and since human beings are not like a river and a bridge that can easily be divided, you had been denying who you are, as a human, all along. At the funeral you knelt down, for the first time, along with other relatives with prayers echoing in your ears. You did not wear a headscarf for you were not ready yet; no one made you wear one, for no one expected you to ever be ready.
That was two years ago, when you were in Year 10. Upon returning home the first thing you did was to cross out all the intended majors on your list, from Literature to Philosophy to Psychology, and put down “Middle Eastern Studies”. Your friends called you crazy, your teachers told you to think twice, and your parents asked out of real concern what your career plans were, yet you answered all questions in such an assertive and affirmative manner that no one dared to object any further.
You started to actually study hard, something you had never genuinely put your mind to, for you knew that you needed good grades not just to get into good universities but also to redeem yourself from what you owed your grandma. Before you had seldom enjoyed visiting your mother’s extended family, yet during the summer before Year 12 you visited that small town on your own, carrying out oral history projects and figuring out a past you had not bothered to delve into before. It turned out to be more intriguing than you had expected, as you were able to trace back your family’s history to somewhere far away, thousands of miles from China, from the land you were accustomed to. You swore to travel there someday. You never taught yourself Arabic, though; those cursive letters have something to do with your memory of your grandma, and you decided to start it only when the time is right.
If judging solely by your name, it would seem that you have been Xinyue all along, yet nothing could be farther from the truth. Among all this you have gradually come to acknowledge Zahira as part of you, to your schoolmates who were starting to become somewhat interested in your culture, but more importantly, to yourself. When you went to Cambridge to interview for Asian and Middle Eastern Studies all your schoolmates wanted a picture with you, and when one of them half-jokingly called out “Zahira!” you turned around, grinning in response.
You grin as you stuff the handkerchief back into your pocket. Scrolling through your phone you can see some of your schoolmates who have applied to Cambridge already receiving their results, but your inbox is still empty. This time, instead of waiting idly, you click on the folder containing your application essays to US universities and begin re-reading your Common Application personal statement, until reaching its final line: “I may be half ethnic minority and half 'majority', I may be half Xinyue and half Zahira, but I am forever one hundred percent ‘Crescent’, as my names bear the consummation of both halves of my identity.”
The moment you glance at the final full stop you hear a beep from your inbox. An email has arrived. Yet instead of checking it, you raise your eyes and gaze at the night sky outside your window. There, a waning moon glitters splendidly, a crescent as perfectly formed as any decorations you have seen at your grandma’s funeral. You face it, close your eyes, mutter something to your grandma in a voice you can barely hear yourself, before turning back to the computer again. You see your keyboard steeped in creamy moonlight.
