Reading Kohinoor Sahota’s article (In Buckingham Palace and outside it, we know what it means when people ask ‘where are you from’, 30 November) brought to mind a jarring encounter some years back. As people gathered for a meeting in the panelled boardroom of a well-known cultural institution, one attender (whom I considered a colleague) handed me a Chinese newspaper article and asked me to relay its contents to them.
Nothing odd about that, you might say. Except that, aside from my name and skin colour, there was no reason whatsoever to assume I could read Chinese. I can, and did, but that’s beside the point. I am a child of the Commonwealth. My parents came to London from Singapore in the 1960s. They met and married in London. I grew up in a colourless north-west London suburb and attended an all-girls independent school. (It was a nicer house or a better school, my parents said. They couldn’t afford both.)
