My flight lands in Marrakesh at night. Seen from above, the city is a cluster of sparse lights nestled in darkness. Under the cabin’s fluorescent blue lights, passengers are asleep like frozen fish in transit. Yesterday was the last day of Ramadan.

When I arrive, a thin crescent moon with a crispy outline hangs low on the velvety sky. The friend with whom I am going to stay comes to pick me up from the airport. Her eyes glow strangely under the orange light of the car park’s floodlights. Adapting to the sudden change of temperature and humidity from London to Marrakesh, my skin sweats in the dry, warm evening breeze. The city smells of dust and fumes. It is a simple and comforting scent.

Away from the old city centre, my friend’s apartment is on the fifth floor of an old residential block. The flat has terrazzo flooring with pale green speckles and windows made of brown glass, both commonly seen in old buildings in the city I grew up in. I feel like I am walking into a dream about something else, and my childhood home just unexpectedly appears. In the dark, yellow light from a nearby road lamp gently soaks the bedroom. The soft light seems to muffle all the sounds that drift into the room: revving motorbike engines, a dog or two barking. The rhythms of music in the distance blend into the city’s low hum, lingering mid-air like the residual heat from the day.

*

Before my grandmother passed away a few years ago, I had thought very little about the fact that I am Hui. The Hui people are a Chinese ethnoreligious group predominately composed of Chinese-speaking Muslims. My family’s Hui heritage is passed down matrilineally – my mum, grandma and great-grandmother, whom I never met, are Hui. So am I. However, while most Hui people distinguish themselves from the ethnic Han Chinese by their religious identity as Muslims, neither my mother nor grandmother is an adherent of Islam. I remember being confronted at school by a classmate about my Hui identity when I was six or seven. ‘You are not really Hui - you eat pork!’ she announced one day, when a small group of us were kneeling on the ground and looking for snails in the school garden. I bounced up from the ground immediately, feeling invalidated and confused. But I can’t remember if I said anything. Maybe I made a protest, a barely perceptible one, so quiet that it has disappeared in my memory.

I know the exact year when my widowed great-grandmother and her children stopped following a Halal diet. It was 1938, one year after the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, when the horrors reached my great-grandmother’s home city. She fled with her three young kids, living her life in exile for years. In my mum’s version of our family history, told as a bedtime story when I was little, mutton and beef became too expensive for my great-grandmother to afford, so she was forced to buy and cook pork for herself and her kids, and they had never been able to revert to Islam.

‘In the beginning, they threw up every time they made a pork dish. They would try to eat everything but would end up vomiting because of the urine-like smell of pork,’ my mum told me. ‘But Granny told herself that they would starve to death if they didn’t get used to a non-Halal diet.’

In my grandmother’s memoir about her early memories of days and nights spent on the road, she wrote about an afternoon when her mother insisted on making Hui-style fried oil cakes in the kitchen of an abandoned house, instead of going to a bomb shelter. The cake is a kind of Halal snack often made by grieving Hui families as an offering to their deceased relatives. Grandma wrote that while an air raid took place outside, she and her siblings watched their mother, from under a half-collapsed worktop, as she fried the oil cakes.

The fried oil cakes in my grandmother’s memoir are the only hint of the Halal diet our family used to follow. Thereafter we become non-Muslim. We continue to call ourselves Hui for practical reasons. Despite being only half Hui, my mum was registered as Hui by her parents when she was born because Hui people in the seventies received extra quotas of beef and vegetable oil from the government every month. Grandmother wrote ‘Ethnic Hui’ on my mum’s birth certificate to secure proteins for her during a time when everything was rationed and everyone was starving.

Twenty-six years later, I was born and registered as a Hui too, despite being only 1/4 Hui, because Hui students would receive five additional points in the University Entry Exam as an ‘ethic minority.’ Growing up, I had joked about that extra five points I would get as a fake Hui girl. I knew I was what is called Hanified Hui – Hui people who have been assimilated by the Han Chinese culture so completely that they are almost not Hui anymore.

*

The sky has only started turning silver when I am awakened by a distant hum. It is a faint but firm and persistent sound, insisting that I should wake up from my dreams. Very quickly I realise this is the first adhan of the day, the first call to prayer. I lie on my side, facing the tinted windowpanes, and listen to the adhan. I imagine a crowd of people walking towards a mosque. The rhythmic drone of the recitation rises from the ground like smoke.

After breakfast, we walk to the Medina, and I feel the hot breeze quickly dry my damp hair. The sun is already blazing. Under the strong glare, Marrakesh’s distinctive pinkish clay-coloured walls are almost too bright to look at. Palm trees stand erect with their gigantic trunks and dry crowns.

‘You have to paint your buildings pink in Marrakesh because they made it illegal to build anything in any other colour,’ my friend says. ‘They decided they liked how the colour made the city look rustic, and exotic.’

Who’s ‘they’? I think for a while. Who decides if a place is exotic?

I think of tales about the Hui people’s exotic origin my mother used to tell me. ‘Ancestors of Hui people came to China from Persia to trade silk and spices. Or maybe some of them were fleeing a war waged on their country. They stayed, married local people, and their descendants were called Hui,’ she told me. When we were alone, Mum would claim my sclerae were pale blue, just like hers and her mother’s. ‘We have bluer eyes because our ancestors came from the west. They were Caucasian.’ she would say. She only talked about things like these when we were alone, as if she had kept hidden some heirloom jewellery in her sleeves and tried to hand them to me when no one was looking.

I was excited to be told that I was special, though I wasn’t able to tell whether my eyes were really different from others.’ Once my mother told me that my great-grandmother was a renowned beauty because she had an extraordinarily light complexion. ‘Persian blood ran in her veins,’ Mum concluded with a tint of pride. I remember I was troubled and wondered why my mum and I looked just like Han Chinese – how do I prove my ancestors were from the West if my skin was not white enough?

I am slightly amused by the thought of all these claims. We approach the weather-worn ramparts of Marrakech’s fortified citadel, the Medina. A few street vendors selling fruits and trinkets have already set up their stalls outside the gates. Passing motorbikes and cars bring up yellow dust from the uneven ground. We enter the Medina through an ancient-looking archway built of pinkish clay.

*

‘I knew you were not a Hui the moment you walked in,’ the Hui imam of the mosque next to my grandmother’s grave once said to me, ‘Because you didn’t say sàlāmǔ when you entered.’

The mosque was a small two-storey building with a concrete patio in the yard. The whitewashed walls of the mosque were dirty. It was difficult to tell it apart from other houses in the area. I saw a Hui woman in a lilac hijab rinsing some vegetables in the yard. Leaning forward on a small wooden stool, she held a neon-green plastic colander in one hand. Between her feet was a large stainless-steel basin full of water.

I had wondered what sàlāmǔ meant. I didn’t realise it was a loanword from Arabic until I hear my friend greet a shop owner in Marrakesh’s Medina. ‘Salaam,’ she says, smiling.

The first Hui word I learnt was also a loanword. Āhōng, transliterated from the Persian ‘akhund,’ means imam – an Islamic leader. I first heard this word when my mum called to tell me how Grandma’s funeral went: ‘The āhōng scolded me for not wearing a white prayer hat. Inappropriate mourning clothes for a Hui daughter, he said.’

I never had the chance to attend Grandma’s funeral. She died when COVID-19 forced the world into lockdown. I hadn’t moved to London at that time, still completing my study in Scotland. Trapped by the lockdown and travel restrictions, I couldn’t fly back to China in time. When I had that call with my mum, I was surprised to hear her use a word that I had never encountered before, and something in her voice told me that she, too, had only recently learnt the word. She clung to the word almost as if saying it would make up for her wrong mourning attire. Yet she also tried her best to blend it into the rest of the sentence, as if the word was nothing unusual, just an everyday Hui vocabulary both of us should be familiar with.

But both of us knew that wasn’t true.

I didn’t know what an āhōng was and had to Google how to write the word in Chinese. Hōng訇, the second of the two characters which make up the word, contains a radical ‘言’ that means speech and language. The character itself is explained by Google as ‘referring to an extremely loud voice.’

Grandma was long gone when I finally got home a year later. When I visited her, she was already resting under a cold headstone, inscribed with gilded calligraphic Arabic letters. Her grave is in a special graveyard allotted to the Hui people by the government. Cremation is compulsory in China because land is too scarce. But the government makes an exception for the Hui people, allowing them to be buried as instructed by the Qur’an. My grandmother lies among her coethnics – all of them strangers to her – in an enclosed graveyard on a quiet little hill far away from the city’s expanding centre. My non-Hui grandfather would not be allowed to be buried by her side in this enclosed graveyard unless he converted to Islam, although she herself stopped being a Muslim 85 years ago.

Those Arabic letters - I do not know what they say.

An extremely loud voice.

Is Hui a religion, a cultural identity, or a bloodline? Is it a fantasy about our origin we keep repeating to ourselves while in exile, a story that promises to bring us home?

*

The Chinese character for Hui, 回, means return. It looks like a simple maze without an exit. Historians argue that it was a name derived from the transliteration of the word ‘Uyghur.’ But that doesn’t explain why this particular character was picked. I wonder where the first Hui people thought they would return to. Where was the home they longed for?

We walk very fast in the Medina. I lose all sense of direction soon and have to stay close to my friend. With a frosty look on my face, I try to avoid those nihaos (hello) and meinüs (beautiful girl) shouted at me. These words are one of local shop owners’ and vendors’ tricks to attract the attention of Chinese tourists. Eyes lowered, I make sure the heels of my friend’s white canvas shoes stay in the centre of my view, only stealing quick glimpses of my surroundings.

Under wooden latticework shades that bridge opposite buildings, everything around me is woven into a carpet of intricately patterned shadows. Shafts of light occasionally reveal themselves in the hazy air. When motorcycles and three-wheeled trucks bump along the paths, pale blue diesel smoke forms behind them.

The more we walk, the more crowded and disorienting the lanes get. I think of some art-historical literature I read a few years ago for an undergraduate course about Orientalist art. I have forgotten most of the things I read at the time, but for some reason I can still remember a detail about Marrakesh at the beginning of an essay. The author describes how 19th century French travellers were overwhelmed by the Medina when they first entered its maze-like alleys. Because there was no distance between them and the many unfamiliar sounds, colours and scents that engulfed them, they were no longer the disembodied, surveying Subject. A traveller wrote in his journal that he found the city ugly and noisy in reality. He had to escape to a nearby hill and look at the city from above to see its beauty. He was really scared, I had thought.

In the same Oriental maze that unsettled that French traveller, I sense curious gazes beaming at me. I know his ghost is lurking behind those inquiring, grinning eyes, and in my body.

‘Our ancestors came from the west.’ I can recall the way my mum said it, the way she seemed to know exactly where she was referring to. I find myself less certain about that, as I head deeper and deeper into the tangled lanes of the Medina of Marrakesh.

Where is the west and where is the east? Does Marrakesh belong to the west my Hui ancestors dreamed of returning to, or does it belong to the East that Western colonisers sought to make exotic?

I feel an urge to expel the ghost. I need to prove I am in some way connected to this place. I want to say I am Hui, my great-grandmother reportedly had a light skin tone, my ancestors were Muslims, they spoke Arabic, or Persian, or both. How can it be possible that I am just one of the many tourists who tramp about the city and stay at Airbnb riads, thinking they are in One Thousand and One Nights? Yes, yes, I’m not a Muslim and I don’t understand Arabic but that is only because my great-grandmother could not afford beef and mutton. I am not the they who would find this land exotic.

I will say something, I think. I will open my mouth and make a certain sound and my identity will be miraculously proven to those around me.

But I don’t know what to say – ‘You didn’t say sàlāmǔ when you entered.’

*

Before a deceased Hui person is buried, their body must be rested in a mosque for a night. Their closest kin need to put on burial clothes for them. These have to be everyday clothes, but brand new, and in solemn colours.

The day before I left for Edinburgh to start university, my mum and I went to buy burial clothes for my grandmother. She had already been very ill and in constant pain. We went to a Muji shop near our place. It had a 3-for-2 sale for woolly socks, so we got three pairs, one grey and two yellow. The grey pair was for Grandma, and the yellow ones were for me.

The next morning, I packed those socks and boarded my flight to Edinburgh. On the small screen on the back of the seat in front of mine, an animated icon of a plane, out of proportion, hovered above a blue-and-green globe. It kept gliding to the left of the screen as the plane headed west. Everyone around me was asleep, and the cabin was cold. The screen glowed like a flickering bulb in a fridge.

In Chinese, if you say someone has ‘returned to the west (gūixī),’ it means they have died. Or – at this point, I am no longer sure what the phrase means, or what the west is, or where my grandmother has returned to, or where I am or what I am.

I think of those two pairs of socks as my grandmother’s final blessing for my own journey to the west.