Growing up Asian in Bolton, Patel ‘wanted to be white’. Now the superhero fantasies into which he escaped
racism have won him a major art prize
Hetain Patel remembers what it was like to grow up in Bolton as part of the “only brown family in town”. He still recalls the vicious abuse he’d receive whenever there was a special occasion and he was forced to wear his Indian formal suit: “Even just walking from the house to the car was difficult.” And he still remembers discovering kung fu movies for the first time, seeing heroes fighting in similar robes, and the transformative effect they had on him.
“It was old Hong Kong movies late at night,” he says, “and much later it was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. This freeing up of the idea that a man just wears a shirt or T-shirt.”