Work Text:
Cleopatra St. Oppolie had felt for a very long time a truly gaping divide between herself and her heritage.
Born to a family of Magicals and Non-Magicals alike based in Britain, there was first an odd divide between the self she was at home and the self she was visiting Bác Hai and her other Non-Magical family members. At home she was Cleo, she ate with forks and shallow spoons even when eating phở, and she spoke English for the most part. At family gatherings breaks she was Khanh, she ate with chopsticks and soup spoons, and she tried to follow along as the adults spoke in mixed languages. She never did pick up Vietnamese properly.
When she went to school, she only drifted farther. No one called her Khanh. They struggled to pronounce it, they wouldn’t even say it the easy way, and her family reminded her they’d picked “white names” for a reason. So, even with the most common of Vietnamese last names, Khanh Nguyễn faded into Cleopatra St. Oppolie, and Cleo shoved aside how silly she felt with a ridiculous first name and an even stupider last name and told herself at least now her classmates would say her name. At least they would call her something and not butcher it horrifically.
And maybe she forgot how to pronounce Khanh the right way, maybe she could only pronounce the anglicised way, maybe she lost the accent in Nguyễn and said “win” instead. Maybe she went home and stopped calling her mom mẹ, maybe she stopped calling her dad cha, maybe she said “Hi, Grandma” because she was too embarrassed about her butchering of “Thưa Bà Nội, con mới tới” to even bother trying even at her parents’ insistence. Maybe she didn’t talk at family gatherings any more because her Vietnamese had deteriorated so much that she couldn’t hold a conversation with her favourite aunts and uncles anymore.
Maybe Cleo spent her time desperately cramming herself into box after box, contorting in every which way so her classmates wouldn’t stare at her, wouldn’t sit a centimetre further from her than they sat from everyone else, wouldn’t ask questions she didn’t have answers to. Maybe she drifted further away from the family she loved, knowing full well she could embrace them if she put in the effort and instead chose to smile wide and stay inside. At least she wasn’t nearly as much of an outcast now, after years of these efforts. At least she fit in, a square peg rounded shoddily, but rounded still.
She’d spent so long like this that the moment she heard one of the new kids, the exchange students from America of all places, mention changing her name, she had to speak up.