After months away from social media after being attacked by Star Wars fans, Last Jedi star Kelly Marie Tran has seemingly decided to start going by her birth name. In an emotional New York Times essay about her life as a woman of color, Kelly Marie Tran ends her piece by revealing her real Vietnamese name: Loan, pronounced “Lu-awn.” We have reached out to Tran’s representatives to confirm if she is indeed changing her stage name, and we’ll update when we hear back. “You might know me as Kelly,” reads the closing lines of her Times essay. “I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie. I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. “My real name is Loan,” she adds. “And I am just getting started.” The significance of Tran revealing, and possibly going by, her Vietnamese name cannot be overstated. Simply put, it’s an act of defiance for a person of color to go by their “unpronounceable” name instead of an adopted Anglo name — aka “normal” names — as Tran explains in her essay. While nearly all actors and entertainers adopt “normal” names — Natalie Portman’s real name is Neta-Lee Hershlag, and Fred Astaire was actually Frederick Austerlitz — there’s an extra layer for Tran, a Vietnamese-American woman who was the target of bigoted harassment over her appearance in The Last Jedi. Earlier this year, Tran was chased off social media by fans of Disney’s Star Wars franchise who so strongly disliked her appearance in the film that they bombarded the social profiles of the film’s actors and its director, Rian Johnson. They disapproved of Tran’s character, Rose Tico, but the vitriol was focused on mocking her weight and race. On Wookiepedia, a fan-run Star Wars encyclopedia, a user edited Rose Tico’s entry with racial slurs. While Johnson and others dealt with the usual crop of trolls, Tran uniquely dealt with racism and sexism from (mostly) white male fans. A known Facebook page with the actual name “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and Its Fanboys,” a group that expressed declarations to “Bring back the Straight White Male Hero” to Star Wars, claimed responsibility for harassing Tran. 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi' (2017) Lucasfilm “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” begins Tran’s essay in the Times. “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.” Throughout her essay, Tran recalls little moments of seemingly harmless social interactions that harshly reminded her that, simply because of her ethnicity, she is the “other.” “It reinforced within me rules that were written before I was born, rules that made my parents deem it necessary to abandon their real names and adopt American ones — Tony and Kay — so it was easier for others to pronounce,” Tran writes, “a literal erasure of culture that still has me aching to the core.” Tran’s entire essay is a necessary read, especially because it isn’t unique. Identity erasure in the effort to assimilate is a colossal, and quiet, struggle for all immigrants and peopled who have been “othered” by society because of their skin color or culture, not just Asian and Asian-Americans. Tran puts it: “I am not the first person to have grown up this way. This is what it is to grow up as a person of color in a white-dominated world. This is what it is to be a woman in a society that has taught its daughters that we are worthy of love only if we are deemed attractive by its sons. “This is the world I grew up in, but not the world I want to leave behind,” she writes. In using her unique position as a lead character in one of the most popular film sagas of all time, Tran is finally being the most important thing she can be: Herself.<doc-sep>It was Obi-Wan Kenobi who said “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine” and now “the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie”, Kelly Marie Tran, has acted like a real hero by responding for the first time to the abuse she suffered at the hands of internet trolls in the wake of Star Wars: The Last Jedi. Speaking to The New York Times, the Rose Tico actress said that she “won’t be marginalized” by the online harassment which forced her to close her social media accounts earlier this year. During an impassioned statement, she said that it wasn’t necessarily the toxic words that hurt the most, but that she “started to believe them”, going on to say:- “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, only valid as a minor character in their lives and stories………….I believed those words, those stories, carefully crafted by a society that was built to uphold the power of one type of person — one sex, one skin tone, one existence.” It’s a very personal statement, but one which Tran knows will echo with countless other people around the world who’ve suffered at the hands of online abuse, and she ends it on a note of beautiful defiance, befitting of a real Star Wars hero: “You might know me as Kelly. I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie. I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.” SEE ALSO: Why are Star Wars fans acting like Kelly Marie Tran smothered their inner child? In Lucasfilm’s Star Wars: The Last Jedi, the Skywalker saga continues as the heroes of The Force Awakens join the galactic legends in an epic adventure that unlocks age-old mysteries of the Force and shocking revelations of the past. Star Wars: The Last Jedi sees returning cast members Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker), Carrie Fisher (Leia Organa), Adam Driver (Kylo Ren), Daisy Ridley (Rey), John Boyega (Finn), Oscar Isaac (Poe Dameron), Lupita Nyong’o (Maz Kanata), Domhnall Gleeson (General Hux), Anthony Daniels (C-3PO), Gwendoline Christie (Captain Phasma), Billie Lourd (Lieutenant Connix), Andy Serkis (Supreme Leader Snoke), Peter Mayhew and Joonas Suotamo (Chewbacca), Tim Rose (Admiral Ackbar), Mike Quinn (Nien Nunb) and Warwick Davis joined by new additions Jimmy Vee (Pan) as R2-D2, Kelly Marie Tran (Ladies Like Us) as Rose, Benicio Del Toro (Guardians of the Galaxy) as DJ and Laura Dern (Jurassic Park).<doc-sep>Who: Star Wars ingenue Kelly Marie Tran. Why we care: It used to be that if you were a fan of something–like, say, fictitious wars that take place in space–you looked forward to and actually enjoyed new installments of the thing. Modern fandom, however, seems to involve fighting to protect one’s particular vision for a property, even (or especially) after the creators have expanded that vision. I’m talking, of course, about Star Wars purists, who have groused endlessly about the series’ recent more female- and POC-centered films. These enraged, white nerd-men feel displaced and excluded, and even though they are wrong to feel that way, they somehow fail to extrapolate the realization that this is how people from certain other demographics feel all the time, and then go the extra step of developing empathy. Instead, what these dudes seem to do is focus their ire for a changing cinematic universe on one element of it: Kelly Marie Tran. After the rising star appeared in last year’s The Last Jedi as Rose Tico, tyrannical fans began denouncing her online and even editing her Wookieepedia page with racist attacks. Why they would attack her–a person simply living her and their dreams, rather than the creators who hired her–remains an unfortunate mystery. Eventually, Tran even deleted her Instagram to free herself from the scores of bellyaching nerdlingers. Months later, however, the actor has just written an essay for the New York Times about her experience with online harassment, and her evolving thoughts on it. In this must-read piece, not only does she take these shameful men to task, she also takes ownership of her identity, her success, and her right to it.<doc-sep>
Kelly Marie Tran has spoken out for the first time since wiping her Instagram in June amid reports of extensive harassment about her role in the Star Wars franchise. In a New York Times op-ed that was published on Tuesday, Tran—who played Resistance mechanic Rose Tico in The Last Jedi—reflected on her decision to delete her account after being subjected to months of sexist and racist comments. Tran is the first woman of color to appear in a lead role in a Star Wars movie. “It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” she wrote. “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 29-year-old Asian-American actor went on to discuss her lifelong battle with racial and misogynistic persecution before vowing to continue fighting for a better future. “I want to live in a world where children of color don’t spend their entire adolescence wishing to be white,” she wrote. “I want to live in a world where women are not subjected to scrutiny for their appearance, or their actions, or their general existence. 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.” Tran concluded the essay with a powerful announcement of her real name. “You might know me as Kelly,” she wrote. “I am the first woman of color to have a leading role in a Star Wars movie. I am the first Asian woman to appear on the cover of Vanity Fair. My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.” Write to Megan McCluskey at megan.mccluskey@time.com.