The school principal refused to yield. For the second time in a month, she called me into her office to unravel an administrative puzzle that had perplexed her. The problem was that my identity card stated my race as ‘Malay’. My surname, however, would indicate that I am Arab. The name ‘Aljunied’ represents a Hadhrami-Arab family in Singapore. What added to the principal's confusion was that the train station adjacent to the school was named Aljunied, in honour of the Arab contribution to the making of modern Singapore. Why, then, wasn't a child of one of Singapore's merchant families paying school fees? Why was I – an Arab by birth – enjoying the same privileges as the Malays, who are acknowledged in the constitution as the indigenous people of Singapore?

I was unsure of how to clarify my fuzzy identity to the principal of the Christian school, where I, a Muslim, was enrolled because my father believed that Muslims could learn a lot from non-Muslims. I vividly remember explaining to the principal that I am Arab through my paternal side and that my mother has Indian ancestry, but that my family brought me up in the Malay culture, that we spoke the Malay language at home and that I was living in a Malay neighbourhood at Jalan Eunos. I was registered as a Malay when I was born, as was my father before me. The matter was left unresolved. The principal, a loyal servant of the state, became even more confused by my explanation but did not get the fees that she wanted. Many years later, I found out that my responses as a thirteen-year-old teenager were common answers given by localised Arabs when asked about their identities. Like me, they became ‘both locals and cosmopolitans’ in a region known historically as the ‘Malay world’.1 Like them, I fell in love with the locals and ended up marrying a Malay lady whose mother is half Chinese. My children will have a harder time explaining to school principals what their ‘real’ identities are, should I choose not to pay their fees.