26 Quotes by Nikesh Shukla

In 2013, 2.4 million heterosexual interactions on the Facebook dating app ‘Are You Interested?’ were analysed and showed that ‘all men except Asians9 preferred Asian women’. 10 ALL. The fetishisation of the Asian female body is highly problematic. Sexual submissiveness, sexual voracity, and voicelessness is a particularly tricky and damning combination.

I do think it’s interesting that this idea of being a model minority is tied up with essentially being quiet,’ she says. ‘Just sitting back, not complaining about stuff, and getting on with making money. Being quiet is considered a really good quality.

One of the many online arguments I’ve had about the importance if language, how language can hurt, has been about tea. Chai tea means tea tea. The number of times you see this on a menu makes you wonder why people can’t be bothered to do their research. Like naan bread too. Bread bread.

Integrate well. Move upwards in society. Be praised – until people worry that you’re doing too well, and then they remember that you’re foreign.

We laughed over our difference then spent years bonding over things that made us the same.

We’ve never really been split, never been cut in half, we’ve just been silent about how we’ve been empowered because we haven’t always felt it, have been too busy being good immigrants, not making a fuss, and quieting down when people felt uncomfortable.

Fitting in, it turns out, is a very physical process. I have spent years in a battle with my body, trying to make it compliant to the needs of others. I have tried to shrink it as though that could shrink my difference. Am I more welcome if I take up less space?

To be an immigrant, good or bad, is about straddling two homes, whilst knowing you don’t really belong to either.

I had long since realised that if there was greatness in Britain, then it lay in its everyday citizens, and not in its institutions.