Bao Quyen Phan Tran
Illustrator & Mural Artist
Also co-founder of
Digital Creative Marketing, s.r.o.
Studio DC Space in Prague.
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Identity: Lost in Translation
When I was younger, I always wished that I looked like my classmates and felt disappointed that my family wasn't Czech like theirs. Despite being born in the Czech Republic and having Czech as my first language, I looked different from my Czech friends and my parents were stricter than theirs, leading to some misunderstandings between us. On the other hand, when I'm with my Vietnamese family, I struggle to express myself and have been called a "mulard" or "vịt lai ngan" in Vietnamese, which refers to a crossbreed of two different types of ducks and implies that I don't belong to either group. I've often felt like I live in two worlds and behave differently depending on whether I'm in a Czech or Vietnamese context. I believe that many of my friends from the Vietnamese diaspora feel the same way. However, I eventually came to accept that both of these identities are a part of me and began to embrace and explore them. In the accompanying illustration, you can see my two identities represented side by side - one in traditional Vietnamese clothing and the other in a white dress adorned with Bohemian embroidery.