Bugged By My Own Name

Like a meandering wolf, I saunter trails that only my senses can detect. What captivates my attention often reveals a path to self acceptance.

One such journey, one that began before my birth, determined my handle's nom de plume: the last cicada.

For those of you who'd like to know what a cicada is, I would describe it as a bug that looks suspiciously like a gigantic fly. Wikipedia has a page devoted to cicadas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada

.

Chinese customs and traditions vary from region to region, none of which I claim to understand. I simply know that in my family, my father's mother chose one part of my name and my mother chose the other part. My complete Chinese name begins with the family name, followed by the name chosen by my mother, and ends with the name chosen by my grandmother.

As the matriarch of the family, my grandmother could have gifted any name to her sons' first born daughters. For her own private reasons, she gave my cousins and I, Sim, the cicada.

Worried that I'd inherit the homely cicada gene, my mother called me Mai, a word that meant pretty, to counteract the homely cicada curse.

Whether by coincidence or by design, a slight syntactic mispronunciation of my Chinese name roughly translates into the last cicada; a phonetic prophecy that fulfilled itself when I became the third and last girl to bear the name Sim.

Knowing how my mother disliked the cicada part of me, I subconciously dropped the Sim whenever I introduced myself. Slowly, over the years, it cautiously emerged in another form on writing.com. For a short while, I called myself Nth Cicada, although mathematically speaking, I was never the Nth Cicada but the last.

Today, I'm allowing myself to be the last cicada. I'm still struggling with my identity although I've come to terms with at least this part of it.






Word Count: 315

http://www.writing.com/main/tools.php?action=word_count&item_id=1816807