Kelly Marie Tran, actress of “Star War: The Last Jedi” spoke out about the online bullying which led her to shut down her social media account earlier this year for the first time.

The 29-year-old actress, born in an American-Vietnamese family after her parents moved to the US, deleted her Instagram account in June, due to the racist and sexist abuses against her. In an op-ed for the New York Times, she broke her silence for the first time since then.

“It wasn’t their words, it’s that I started to believe them,” Tran’s article opened like this.

In the op-ed titled “I Won’t Be Marginalized by Online Harassment,” the actor said that as a woman and a person of color in the white-dominated US, she has been taught since her childhood that “I belonged in margins and spaces, valid only as a minor character in their lives and stories.”

She recalled that she stopped speaking Vietnamese at nine, because she was tired of hearing others mock her. Her parents have to give up their Vietnamese names and adopt American ones, Tony and Kay, only because they are easier to pronounce.

“I hand been brainwashed into believing that my existence was limited to the boundaries of another person’s approval,” the actress wrote.

Tran has been harassed and abused online after receiving her role as mechanic-turned-Resistance fighter Rose Tico in the 2017 Star War movie. She is also the first woman of color to get a leading role in the franchise. She didn’t refer to any of those hate messages, but it is clear that they have affected her life deeply.

In her piece, Tran said she spoke out because she wanted to bring some changes.

“I want to live in a world where children of color don’t spend their entire adolescence wishing to be white. 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.”

The racial representation in the US film industry has been a controversial problem. After the #OscarsSoWhite in 2015, the situation of the actors of color has seen gradual improvement in recent years.

An increasing number of films and TV dramas have seen more diverse casts, such as "Black Panther", which brings the first black superhero to big screens.

Tran ended her article by revealing her Vietnamese name.

“You might know me as Kelly,” the actor wrote, “My real name is Loan. And I am just getting started.”