Can you share with us about your family’s refugee journey from Cambodia to the United States?
This is probably one of the first times that I have been asked the story of my family’s refugee journey, and I think that that’s why it makes me a bit nervous because how do I answer this question when I’ve never had to before. The only story and perspective that I am familiar with is that of my mother’s mainly because she has had a significant presence in my life compared to my father.
My mom was born and raised in Battambang, Cambodia. She told us many stories about her childhood while we were growing up, including about her first marriage which was wrought with domestic violence. When my mom immigrated to the United States, she was married to her first husband. The reason they were married in the first place was that my grandmother believed that this marriage would protect my mother from the possibility of rape and assault and other terrifying alternatives while she was in the refugee camp in Thailand. I have three older siblings who came from this marriage: one born in a refugee camp in Thailand and the other in a refugee camp in the Philippines. The rest of my siblings, including myself, were born in the United States. My mom and older siblings were ultimately resettled in Georgia where there is a community of Cambodian Americans right outside of Atlanta.
She later relocated to Tennessee, where she met my father, and about six months after I was born, they decided to move to Lake Elsinore in Riverside County, California. From what I know, only two children out of my mom’s siblings are here in the U.S., with my uncle still residing in Georgia. On my father’s side, I think about three or four of his siblings came to the United States, and though I am not as familiar with his side of the family, I have met them.
A significant story I want to share about my mom is how she learned to sew. When she was a child, she would peep through a window at a garment factory where she watched a group of women sewing and it made her curious; she wasn’t officially allowed to learn, but by watching the women, she was able to learn by observing. Later on, this skill would lead my mom to a long-time job as a seamstress here in the United States, though she was often paid under the table. My eldest sister Kwin and I had to learn how to use industrial sewing machines at a very young age in order to help my mom. She had a reputation for being one of the better and faster seamstresses but I’m not sure that anyone knew that she had the help of child labor! I like to tell this story about my mother using her skills as a seamstress as a way to survive in the United States because this experience instilled discipline in Kwin and myself, and it’s how we learned the value of a hard-earned dollar and about resilience.
Having spent most of your life in Southern California, what was it like for you growing up Cambodian American there? Did you grow up around Cambodian American or other SEA communities?
I’ve spent all my life here: first in Lake Elsinore, then in Orange County for college at Cal State Fullerton and about 8 years more afterward building my career, then in Los Angeles for a few years, and am now back in Orange County.
In Lake Elsinore, there was a small Cambodian American community but nowhere as large as the ones in San Diego or Long Beach, both about an hour away. I actually wasn’t allowed to hang out with or befriend any of the other Cambodian kids because my mom was worried that they would be bad influences. This meant that I didn’t have the opportunity to connect with my community and culture. I didn’t really learn anything about the Southeast Asian diaspora or Cambodian culture outside of my house.
Kwin, however, did have friends who were Cambodian and when she went to college, she joined United Khmer Students (UKS), an organization dedicated to Khmer students. I thought it was so cool that these Cambodian students got together to have these meetings and talk about culture and to host Culture Nights where they put on plays, shows and events. Because of this exposure, when I went to college at Fullerton, I joined the Cambodian Student Association and was in a number of leadership roles, including as Culture Night Coordinator where I was in charge of the whole show. As a creative person and someone who loves the spotlight, this was definitely a proud moment for me.
As a Southeast Asian American woman, you were held against both Western and Asian beauty standards, including for your hair. In a recent interview with NaturallyCurly, you said, “Hairstylists told me they loved my curls, but then elders from the Cambodian community, including my own mother, were telling me that I needed to straighten my hair because my curls were unacceptable and unsightly. Simultaneously, I felt like I was highly fetishized and sexualized by men of other races who found my hair to be “exotic.” Can you tell us about your own hair journey? How did these experiences shape how you define beauty now?
I was less aware of Asian-specific beauty standards as a child, and I believe that it’s because I measured up to some of those standards: I was very skinny, I had very straight hair. My mom never really commented on my skin color until after I graduated high school, which I thought was bizarre because I had always had a darker skin tone, and if anything, I spent more time in the sun as a kid than as an adult.
My father’s side of the family has curly hair traits. Me and my youngest sister Sam have curly hair. Sam keeps her hair short though so you can’t really tell she has curly hair. But we both were born with straight hair and had straight hair up until we graduated high school when everything changed.
I like to say that my body blossomed after I graduated high school, and suddenly I was too curvy, I was too dark, my hair was too curly. At 18 years old I started at Cal State Fullerton, and before then I had never been to Orange County; I just chose a college with a reputable Communications program that accepted me. I also moved into an apartment with roommates that I had never met. I was going through so many changes at the time, so to have my hair change too, it was a lot to take in.
After my hair texture and pattern changed, I was in denial for a really long time, not really acknowledging what was happening because growing up, I didn’t necessarily participate in wearing make-up or did a lot of stuff around my own sense of beauty -- you can say I was pretty apathetic about it. So for me to acknowledge that I had curly hair, I couldn’t really see what difference it would make for me until I started getting these comments from my mother or other men, each telling me something different about my hair.
I started seeing a professional hairstylist in college because Kwin, who is like a second mother to me and someone who has guided me throughout my life, had exposed me to it. The hairstylist, Andreka, complimented my curls and gave me curly hair care tips. But at the time, I wasn’t in a position to really receive the information so her tips just went in one ear and out the other.
When I moved to Pasadena in 2015, I met my friend and colleague Tiffany, an Afro-Latina who has the most beautiful curls ever, and through our friendship I learned about how she cared for her curls, which encouraged me to have a stronger curiosity about my hair and identity.
Later on another one of my friends became a hairstylist. She needed a volunteer for her curly cutting class and she asked me to do it. It was one of those moments where the universe is telling you something about yourself but you don’t realize it because you’re not thinking about it. During the session she made some comments on my hair that really opened my eyes, like how up to this point no one had told me that my fair was frizzy. Months after that class in Fall 2017, I decided that I really wanted to embrace my hair and learn about it, and the internet is where I got most of my information from.
There is a small and moving trend of companies developing products for Asians with naturally curly hair, specifically in the South Asian and Filipino communities. API Curls recently shared on social media a post about Curls by Zen Nation who has products catered to the Filipino community. I have confidence that we will see more curly hair products catered towards the Asian community coming out in the future, and I do have some ideas for my own product line.
Do you have a #HOMECURL? As defined by Crystal, one of our team members, a homecurl is that one curl that is just so strong, always there for you even when you’re having a bad day.
I do! I have this one strand that just beautifully spirals.
In 2019, you started API Curls “to build and empower a community of people who identify as API (Asian and Pacific islander) that want to challenge and live beyond the straight hair standard. We are transforming outdated narratives on what it means to have beautiful hair and championing greater representation for the stories of our community.” What was the moment(s) that led to the inception of API Curls? How can folks get involved?
When I started documenting my curly hair journey starting in 2017, I did it for myself because I wanted to talk about how I felt really alone in embracing my own hair texture, to use my platform and my skills to share my experience as an Asian American woman with naturally curly hair. Along the way, I’ve grown my level of confidence and sense of self-worth, and I feel so much more affirmed in my identity and my life purpose through this particular journey. I’m always trying to preach to other people to share their story and to pitch them to other brands and companies because we need more representation of our community -- it can’t just be my story alone.
I wanted to be everyone’s hype coach and encourage them to get on all these curly hair platforms to magnify our representation so I started the #APICurls hashtag. What I learned from these conversations was that people were less inclined to share in these spaces because they didn’t feel that these platforms were built for them, that it wasn’t a safe space for them to tell their stories, that it wasn’t the most appropriate place for them to take up space.
So one very early morning in December in 2019, around 4am, I woke up and decided that I was going to do something about this, that I was going to create a platform. I wanted to design and build that table that everyone felt we were missing. So in a coffee shop in Pasadena, I did all the necessary steps: buy the domain name, get all the social media handles, and got to work.
In January 2020, I had this grand plan of launching the platform that March, in line with my birthday -- it was going to be this big thing. But as we know, in March 2020 things kind of turned upside down. With the pandemic and building the website taking longer than I had anticipated, I didn’t have the capacity to do everything that I wanted to do. But I didn’t want all these things to stop me so I started focusing on the social media side and began developing content and posting in all these different places.
I was very lucky to have had some community members who are content creators themselves and were very enthusiastic about being on social media. We made a video called the #AsianCurlsChallenge, in the same style as the Pass the Makeup Brush challenges, and from there we started receiving a bit of traction for what that video represented. It helped us grow the community and got people more excited about sharing their story.
For anyone who is interested, we have a couple different ways you can get involved.
We have a Submit Your Story form on the website that is just a straightforward way for you to add your information, upload your photos, and have a section for freeform writing.
Another way is the Commit to the Curls Club where we identify an intentional quarterly theme that people can create content off of, something that challenges and inspires them to be a little bit more creative. At the end of the day, what’s really lacking in our community is the ability to see who we are, and one way to address this is to create content, through photos and posts, through storytelling.
HEADLINER is a content series featuring individuals doing great things in our community. It’s for people who have always felt that they were alone in thinking that they were the only person who looked like them. When you get caught up in that mindset, you end up believing that you are not important or that people who look like you are not important and not worthy of being recognized.
The goal of HEADLINER is to flip this narrative around: we are not only a community that exists, but a community that is worth celebrating and recognizing. I want others to see that we are not just curly haired people who want to buy products or talk about curly hair and share our stories, but that we are also people who are doing really amazing and impactful things in the community.
It’s a content collaborative series where everyone we are interviewing can decide how they want to do the storytelling, and where the topic is a little bit different with every HEADLINER. I don’t want to limit the person to an Instagram Live or an audio format because everyone has their own style of storytelling, and it will hopefully also open up the pool of people who will participate.
There is also a portion where we will work on a concept that we want to bring to the community, usually a tool and a resource. For example, one of our recent HEADLINER features was Vijaiam, doing all these really great things in Singapore for the curly community. Together we decided to highlight online shops that are selling curly products specifically in Asian countries. I don’t think that people know about this movement and so no one’s talking about it.
On your blog and Instagram you reflect on your decision to become your own boss, specifically describing how difficult that was. In fact, one of your blog post titles in April is “The Not So Pretty Way I Started My Path to Self Employment.” You confronted so many barriers in your journey towards freedom and autonomy, including redefining independence and coping with men who perpetuated trauma in the spaces that were supposed to provide you comfort and a sense of belonging (home and work), all while navigating your new career path. It’s been almost a year since that decision. What has been the most rewarding part of this journey?
The most rewarding part of this journey toward independence, autonomy, and healing, especially as a Southeast Asian woman, is being able to demonstrate to others that this is all possible. Every time someone in a disadvantaged or minority position achieves a step of success, that step ends up creating a path for someone else to follow; our success as individuals can cause ripple effects for others, and I feel that that is the epitome of the way I have been able to grow as a woman.
In some ways, I was pulled by others before me to follow that path of success, and in other ways I was pushed toward that path because I didn’t have a choice.
In that particular blog post, I talked about the time when I decided to move out of my house to Orange County, I didn’t really have a choice because it was either I stay in an environment that would destroy me, or abruptly move out for my safety and well-being. This moment is a reminder of how I have had to be in survival mode my whole life, and only more recently have been able to come out of that. Every time I reflect on how far I have come, I am reminded that I was built for this life and that I have a greater purpose: to serve other people.
Are there any Southeast Asian community organizations that you would like to spotlight?
US-ASEAN Youth Council: The US-ASEAN Youth Council (UAYC) is a nonpartisan, youth-led organization that supports the enhancement of US-ASEAN relations and spreads awareness of matters relating to youth populations in the respective communities. Key areas include youth empowerment, economic enhancement, and social volunteerism.
My friend Vannary Kong is the Founder and President of this organization and she has done such a fantastic job of connecting people to each other. I remember when we first connected, we had talked about the possibility of a curly hair product line, what that would look like and what would getting it over to another country look like, specifically ASEAN countries. It was so exciting to have somebody ask me what I wanted to do in the future and how could they help connect me to resources. Sometimes we need people in our networks and support systems who ask us the questions that we sometimes don’t think about. The Youth Council is such a great team and they are doing great things.
The Khmer Student Coalition: KSCC was created in 2004 to connect, unite, and empower Cambodian students across the nation. Every year, they come together at the Khmer Student Coalition Conference to network and discuss the many different issues that the Cambodian and Cambodian American community are faced with.
The KSC is basically a network of Cambodian clubs and organizations at universities across California. I was part of the conference committee many years ago and it’s a great way to put together all these students from different parts of the state and to have these really important conversations regarding the Cambodian American diaspora.
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