West Is West – the British Asian movie grows up

Ayub Khan Din has found great success by following the old maxim of writing about what you know.

The 50-year-old actor, playwright and screenwriter grew up in working-class Salford in the 1970s, the mixed-race son of a traditionalist Pakistani father and a white English Roman Catholic mother. It was this childhood that Din described in East Is East, firstly in a play and then in an acclaimed film.

I saw the film when it was released in 1999 and was struck by how funny it was and how much I recognised from my own childhood. The Khan family in the film sported gaudy fashions and the soundtrack was splashed with 70s cheese, but East Is East was, for young British Pakistanis like me, also heartbreakingly sad.

It was about the almost impossible task of trying to please one's parents while not throwing one's own life away. I remember being filled with admiration that Din had been able to escape the life he was born into and find the life he deserved.

Watching East Is East also helped inspire me to write about my own childhood growing up in Luton during the 80s, and my memoir Greetings from Bury Park is now being adapted into a screenplay to be directed by Gurinder Chadha.

Twelve years on from seeing East Is East, I find myself in an outdoor square in Granada, Spain, on a bright, cloudless morning, with the Alhambra in the distance and Din sitting opposite me sipping a coffee. I am here to talk to him about the film's long-awaited sequel, West Is West.

The original film had been so loved by audiences that Din was cautious about simply trying to remake it. He was also sure that for the follow-up he wanted to explore the story of George Khan's first wife – "Mrs Khan number one" as she is referred to in East Is East – whom he married and then left in Pakistan.

In the new film, George Khan (Om Puri) and his youngest son, Sajid (newcomer Aqib Khan), visit Pakistan to meet Khan's first wife and to find a wife for one of Sajid's brothers. The story is again based on the writer's own life – the difference being that the young Din visited Pakistan alone – and its resonant theme is of how George Khan and his son both realise who they are: the father more British than he claimed, and the son more Pakistani than he realised.

"When I was growing up, we always knew that Dad had a Pakistani wife," Din tells me, "but in this film he is forced to face the reality of meeting the woman who he left and the two daughters who resent him for it." It is a resentment shared by the children of Khan's English wife (Linda Bassett) in the film, not to mention Din himself as he thinks back to his own childhood in Salford.

"I hated walking down the street with my dad when I was a boy. There was an embarrassment because of the way we would be treated and so for a long time my Asian side felt alien to me and was something I ran away from."

Ayub Khan Din's father had come to Britain in 1930 and met his future wife on the top of a double-decker bus. The couple had ten children who grew up resigned to feeling outsiders – not white enough for the English and not Pakistani enough for the Pakistanis.

The first generation of Asian immigrants – my own father was one – are often viewed as traditionalists, and in some ways they were, but they were also risk-taking pioneers. "My father didn't recognise that the spark of rebelliousness that made him leave an agricultural life in a small village in Kashmir, travel to Bombay, board a ship, jump ship in London and then make a life for himself here was also there in his kids," says Din. "We had that same spark but he never recognised that."

So how, I wonder, did this mixed-race working-class kid from the North even manage to tell his tale?

"The arts weren't something boys like me ever imagined entering," Din admits. "You either went on the docks or you went to work in the chip shop. How did I do it? The docks closed down and the chip shop shut!"

After leaving school, the young Din worked in a hairdresser's and it was there he picked up a copy of David Niven's autobiography The Moon's a Balloon. "I came to this part where Niven writes about how he left the army and then just decided to be an actor. He was an officer and then one day thought, 'I have had enough of this. I am going to Hollywood.'

And I thought if someone like him can just do something totally different then maybe I can, too."

Inspired by Niven, Din rang Salford College of Technology, was accepted onto a drama course and entertained dreams to be an actor (he went on to feature in both Stephen Frears's My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and played Hanif Ruparell in Coronation Street).

It was towards the end of his first year at drama school that he learnt his mother had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. "It seemed that every time I went home whole sections of her memory were disappearing." Confronted by this, Din resolved to try and write a new play that would be about his own childhood.

"At the time, the only Asian on television was either being beaten up by a skinhead or owned a corner shop," he says. "I wanted to write about my experiences growing up."

Because there are so few writers from Pakistani backgrounds working in film, television or literature, it is often assumed that an Ayub Khan Din or a Hanif Kureishi somehow represents all Pakistani experience, when the truth is that every writer writes according to their own experiences.

West Is West, like its predecessor, is a very personal film based on Din's upbringing, but the fact that it is being released at a time when both Pakistan and British Muslims are viewed with fear and suspicion has left its creator feeling frustrated. "If you mention Pakistan today, you think: extremists, unstable country and a nuclear power. The world is completely different since 9/11 and 7/7, which is why we are finding it hard to get an American distributor for the new film – when you say Pakistan to them they think 'enemy'. "

The souring perception of Muslims was a factor in it taking so long for West Is West to get made. "You would have thought people would have thrown money at it because of the success of the first film," Din says, "but it was really difficult because of the new political context."

The reality is that West Is West is not a film for anyone seeking to understand Islamic extremism; it's about a boy confused about his identity and going to Pakistan to try and discover who he is. It's for anyone interested in what it means to be a good parent and a good son or daughter.

Having made his name writing about his childhood, Din is now a father himself, married to a wife who is half-Nigerian and living in a remote village near Granada. "My father left a village in the middle of nowhere and came to London," he reflects, "and now we have left London and live in the middle of nowhere."

Khan left London when he realised he could give his family a better lifestyle in Spain, where neighbours speak to neighbours and his children could be around nature and beauty. The unplanned consequence of this is that Din has become an immigrant himself.

"My kids speak fluent Spanish and my Spanish is as fractured as my dad's English was," he laughs, "so the kids now make fun of me like we used to about my dad."

It is an irony that I suspect would have pleased the old man: that having grown up fearing his father, Din is now slowly becoming more like him.