Portrait: Myura Trawick

I’m African-American and Cambodian.

Technically a lot of other things too, but those two ethnicities are what my parents mainly identify with, so it’s what I grew up calling myself. There’s a sort of innocence when you’re a child, not really knowing why everyone gives you such odd looks at family reunions when your friends at the playground couldn’t care less what you looked like.

It was a cultivation of micro-aggressions that lead to an identity crisis as I got older, as I experienced more of the world and learned what race meant. What it mean to be black. What it mean to be Asian. These sort of experiences that my friends, my parents, my peers would project onto me and then get upset when I didn’t know how to react.

Perhaps the most poignant memory of mine is when I went to a wedding for one of my mother’s relatives. It was at an extravagant Cambodian restaurant, with the floor opened up to allow for dancing while people could watch over plates of expensive duck and curry and baked goods. People who wanted to dance were doing a very traditional dance – I can’t recall the name of it, but it involved moving your hands as you moved around in a circle to the music.

I remember my father being the only non-Cambodian person there and when we went to go dance with my mother, I could feel a shift in the tone of the restaurant. It was still jovial, but I can still remember overhearing some drunken men loudly talking in Khmer and asking why a black man was on the dance floor. Even as a child, hearing this was particularly jarring to me.

For my self-portrait, I decided to celebrate my own identity. Celebrate this coming of worlds that made me. I depicted myself in a traditional Cambodian aspara headdress, with minor artistic liberties taken. But instead of the long, sleek black hair many are used to seeing, I have drawn myself with my usual, brown, kinky curls. My afro hair.

Perhaps I could be called a race traitor, in the same way those men wanted to know why my mother was with my father. But this is who I am. And nothing is changing that.