(Tribute to my heritage and a part of me I shall never deny.)
I tried to talk my mom into buying Grandma a Kindle again while we were both in the kitchen. “It makes reading way easier, and I could use it as well when Grandma doesn’t, and what’s more - that copy looks like it’s about to fall apart any second.” To illustrate my point I gestured towards the pocket-size Qur’an lying on the cupboard, one that accompanied Grandma to her evening prayers, the most precious among her modest collection of belongings. It was bound in dark green leather, but by that time the leather had faded to a shade of pale greyish indigo, with wears and tears along the edges and the strings that were supposed to bind everything together worn to such thinness that I could disintegrate it without effort should I wished to. A Kindle, I argued, would be a way better alternative; simply download the Qur’an for Grandma, and perhaps a dozen of other books for me.
Mom did not give an immediate answer. She was busy deep-frying slices of dough and mutton buns, for some sort of festival on the Muslim calendar whose name had long slipped my memory. Frying food is essential for most Muslim celebrations, she once told me, but neither the act of frying food nor celebrating Muslim festivals nor that leather-bound Qur’an on the cupboard, I felt, seemed to fit the large picture of my surroundings. Note that I was born and raised in Shenzhen, the young, fast, fierce southern Chinese metropolis where efficiency and profit are everything and little attention is given to religion, or indeed tradition of any kind.
“She got that book from her mother - my grandma.” Minutes later Mom finally lifted her head from her cooking, “A Kindle isn’t going to do the same thing. A Kindle doesn’t carry her mother’s fingerprints or the grease from her mother’s kitchen. She wouldn’t say her evening prayers with a Kindle on her lap.”
I was going to lift that tattered Qur’an from the cupboard and show mom how time-worn it was in an attempt to change her mind. But when I caught a glance of it this time, standing in the hot kitchen surrounded by the aroma of mutton and fried dough with Grandma’s faint coughing sounds coming from her bedroom, it suddenly dawned on me how much they had in common, my grandma and this faded leather-bound Qur’an: meek, time-battered, always there, almost invisible, yet ready to turn to at any time should one need guidance or support.
My grandma, despite being a devout Muslim like all the “old ones” in my mother’s extended family, did not use Islam as a tool to constrain herself or anyone. While she prayed every day, gave alms, and fasted during Ramadan, she did not force her daughters to wear a hijab or to marry men they did not love; she even allowed Mom to marry Dad, a layperson, something seldom any Muslim parent would have done in those days. Hence came me, bearing my father’s surname, growing up a city dweller, eating pork like my schoolmates, never having set foot in a mosque before the age of seventeen at my grandpa’s funeral, yet with the ethnic minority status that infers Islam clearly printed on my national ID card. Denial was the natural reaction from me when I was younger, partly because of having been teased by schoolmates who caught sight of my national ID card and learned that we did not cook pork in my family, and partly because I found it difficult to reconcile the stereotypes and prejudices the modern world have towards Islam with the quiet, compassionate image of my grandma.
Thinking back Grandma must have felt my reluctance to acknowledge my heritage, but she never blamed me for that. She told me about Ramadan, the month in which you fast during the day, and Eid, the day Ramadan ends, and various other Muslim festivals whose names I have regrettably forgotten. She told me about the importance of praying and penitence, about keeping an eye on one’s own conducts. She told me about being kind and generous, to help people in need. She even recited lines from the Qur’an in its original Arabic for me, she who was illiterate. She was always there to turn to, like faith itself, like that faded leather Qur’an that may have been the only thing her mother bequeathed her with.
Coming to terms with one’s heritage, I realised right there in the kitchen, is as much about reconciling with this time and age as it is about reconciling with one’s culture and society. Those around me began to show acceptance and even interest when I told them this aspect of my identity, and there is a mosque half an hour’s walk from where I live. What I had failed all these years to wrap my head around has nothing to do with space, but with time, with how praying, fasting and Arabic lines from the Qur’an fit with the modern era. Whether or not they do I may not know; the thing I understood like an epiphany right then and there was that their essence does, self discipline, penitence, generosity, the taste of fried mutton buns, and the determination to keep at least a fraction of the old ways in times of transition and uncertainty. Mom does this tangibly by frying food for us during festivals; Grandma did this intangibly by praying with the Qur’an of leather and paper passed down from her mother, something that would never be, that should never be, switched to a lifeless Kindle.
Mom caught me staring at the Qur’an on the shelf. “There’s one thing you gotta understand,” she switched off the stove, as if reading my mind, “just because something seems archaic doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a value.”
I muttered yes, took a mutton bun to Grandma’s room, told her lunch was ready, and never said anything about Kindles again.
Grandma passed away a couple of weeks before Ramadan ended that year. Mom still keeps the Qur’an in Grandma’s old room. When I went back to Shenzhen from Manchester for Easter break I saw it there, its greyish indigo cover paler still, and I could still hear Grandma’s low soothing voice reciting the Arabic lines like a train running silently across the soft snow-covered ground. I told Mom that I bought an English translation in the UK so that I could have a better idea of where Grandma, or Mom, or myself came from. She smiled.
