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Kelly Marie Tran deleted her Instagram accountdue to the online harassmentshe faced. Now, two months later, she is opening up about persevering through the “self-hate” and breaking her silence about the marginalization of minority groups.
“It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them. Their words seemed to confirm what growing up as a woman and a person of color already taught me: that I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories,” the star, 29, wrote in an op-ed for theNew York Times.
Tran starred in 2017’sThe Last Jediand made history as the first Asian-American actress to land a major role in theStar Warsfranchise. However, not all fans were welcoming to the new character of resistance fighter Rose Tico or her ethnicity (Tran is Vietnamese-American).
“For months, I went down a spiral of self-hate, into the darkest recesses of my mind, places where I tore myself apart, where I put their words above my own self-worth,” she shared.
Kelly Marie Tran and John Boyega inStar Wars: The Last Jedi.David James/©2017 Lucasfilm Ltd.
The San Diego native, who was born Loan Tran, recalled past experiences of forcing herself to assimilate, including a time when she was mistaken for an exchange student and even abandoning the Vietnamese language to stop school children from “mock[ing] me.”
“Their words reinforced a narrative I had heard my whole life: that I was ‘other,’ that I didn’t belong, that I wasn’t good enough, simply because I wasn’t like them,” she wrote. “And that feeling, I realize now, was, and is, shame, a shame for the things that made me different, a shame for the culture from which I came from. And to me, the most disappointing thing was that I felt it at all.”
It was after bookingStar Warsthat the online harassment “awakened something deep inside me — a feeling I thought I had grown out of it,” she explained.
WATCH:Star Wars: The Last Jedi‘s Kelly Marie Tran Opens Up About Her Overnight Fame
“This is the world I grew up in, but not the world I want to leave behind,” Tran poignantly said, adding, “I want to live in a world where people of all races, religions, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, gender identities and abilities are seen as what they have always been: human beings. This is the world I want to live in. And this is the world that I will continue to work toward.”
At the time Tran was being harassed on social media,The Last Jedidirector Rian Johnson and Mark Hamill, who plays Luke Skywalker in the series, called out the trolls and defended her.
source: people.com
