In high school, Deryck Hak’s friends casually called him a slur that meant Asian on the outside, white on the inside.

He recalled crossing his arms and furrowing his brow, watching his friends start to worry they had offended him. Finally, he smiled – he was flattered. His white friends thought he was one of them, and he was finally fitting in.

“High school is a period where everyone is learning who they are and where they fit in. When you grow up surrounded by a community that has a predominant group of people, it becomes the norm, and you don’t want to stick out. But I had something I couldn’t change: my skin color,” he said. “My family and I were the color in a sea of white.”

Hak, 21, a Chanhassen High School graduate whose parents emigrated from Cambodia and moved to Carver in 2002, recounted the story in his one-man show “Between.” The 45-minute play, produced and performed in January, follows Hak’s journey through his family history as he comes to terms with his sexual identity and his place between cultures growing up in Carver County.

Now a senior studying fine arts at the University of Minnesota Duluth, Hak began work on the play three years ago. With the help of mentor and play director Tom Isbell, his proposal received a grant through the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program, and recently won the John Cable Short Play Award from Region 5 of the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival.

“Initially, I had a completely different storyline, about how social media and anxiety affects our generation. But I found myself thinking constantly about my family’s history during that time in my life, and my inspiration shifted,” he said. “It almost started like therapy. I’d sit at my computer and write about what was going on in my mind.”

Isbell, a UMD professor who has directed Hak in several plays throughout Hak’s college career, gave feedback on at least a dozen drafts, encouraging the new focus.

“I appreciated that Hak got more and more personal. It’s easy to stay at arm’s length while writing, but he starts to bring in more personal elements that come out in the play and show his journey,” he said.

Though “Between” focuses on Hak’s experiences as a gay Asian-American person in Minnesota, he wants viewers to leave the show feeling inspired to dig into their own history, whatever it may be.

“It’s something I don’t think we pay attention to as much. We’re always thinking about the future and what’s next. But what about where we come from? How we got to where we are now? Are you happy with who you are now? Those are some of the questions I want the audience to ask,” he said.

Fitting in and standing out

Hak graduated from Chanhassen High School in 2017. During his time, the school had around 3.8% Asian students and was just under 80% white, according to demographic information from Eastern Carver County Schools.

“You could say the diversity within my school was as present as the Asian role models in the U.S. film industry: next to nothing,” he said.

Hak spent years trying to look and feel more American. In sixth grade, he tried to fit in by dating a girl, who eventually became the first person he came out to. He attempted the “Bieber” swish with his thick black hair (named for celebrity musician Justin Bieber), and some nights, he’d hold his eyes open because he thought it would make them bigger.

When he was assigned a history project in high school, Hak wanted to write about the Cambodian genocide: the systematic persecution and killing of Cambodians by the Khmer Rouge under Communist Party General Secretary Pol Pot. It resulted in the deaths of 1.5 to 2 million people from 1975 to 1979. Nearly a quarter of the country’s population.

The Cambodian Genocide was the reason his parents came to the U.S., but frustratingly, Hak’s textbooks had no mention of it. In the play, he brings out a world map and speaks directly to the audience, offering a prize to the person who can point out Cambodia.

“The play tackles these enormously weighty subjects and Hak’s own personal journey. But it also has these moments of whimsy, where he tosses a container of Pocky to anyone who can identify where Cambodia is,” Isbell said. “It’s a one man show, but the audience becomes a character.”

The project was the beginning of a change for Hak – he started to feel ashamed of hiding his culture, “like it would die if I didn’t wear it on my forehead,” he said. He began watching anime, took Chinese instead of Spanish, ate Pocky every waking moment, cosplaying and cutting out non-Asian friends because they didn’t understand.

“I felt like a grandfather clock. I swung from one side to the other and was nowhere closer to figuring out who I was, where I belonged, where my community was. I felt out of place. Lost,” he said.

Family history

Freshman year of college was a fresh start for Hak, and the beginning of his dive into his own family’s history. Around 30 minutes in, the play shifts to him recounting the stories his family told about their lives in Cambodia – stories he hadn’t heard until he came back home for Thanksgiving break.

“There would be little snippets and moments when I was growing up, but never a full story. But when I started to shift my script idea to my family’s history, I sat down with my mom, dad and grandma and recorded their conversations,” he said.

Hak’s parents had slowly introduced their children to the family’s past as they grew older and started to ask questions, said his mother Saryna. But they never wanted to scare him.

“When they were growing up, we’d only watch international news when they weren’t around. We felt that they didn’t need to be bothered with that, because they have enough problems becoming a teenager,” she said.

His mother told him how she had to take care of her brother and sister, hold a gun and see death, all at 9 years old, Hak recounted.

His father was sent to work camps, where food was a scarcity: one bowl of food to share with five. When he and his brother were caught leaving to search for food, officers tied them to poles all night and left them to the mosquitoes – “he felt like he was being eaten alive, tortured.”

The second time they went to search in a jungle, and an enormous python wrapped around his father’s leg. When the brothers finally killed it, his father’s face was mixed with terror and joy – for they finally had something to eat.

After five years in the work camps, Hak’s father left for the U.S., his only possession a makeshift journal written by his other brother. After Hak asked to read it, his grandfather translated the journal from Khmer. The last entry was to a woman named Lily, someone Hak’s uncle loved dearly.

“I found out after reading that my uncle died of starvation. His photograph is in a portrait on a glass table in my living room. I ran past it countless times growing up,” Hak says in the play. “His long face and wide eyes, I see every time I look into the mirror.”

The conversation was a turning point, where Hak began to accept his history, both Asian and American. And though his parents only told a few stories, he felt much closer to his family – and Saryna felt relieved, she said.

“I feel better now that they know about our story. But we remind them that they don’t need to worry about the way we grew up, or do the same thing we did … because they live here, in the United States, in a different culture,” she said. “As long as he feels comfortable with who he is, we’ll keep answering those questions.”

Future exploration

The show ends with Hak in an airport, preparing to board a plane to Cambodia. He wears a denim jacket with a Cambodian flag pin and carries a backpack with a rainbow button, ready to go meet his family and learn more about where they come from.

Though Hak’s outfit is simple, each aspect was intentionally chosen to represent an aspect of his family history, explained the show’s costume designer Casper Pichotta. The skinny jeans and denim jacket follow American style trends, while the accents and accessories – like the inside of the jacket, lined with authentic Cambodian cotton fabric – are inspired by Cambodia.

“I wanted to articulate the point of paying tribute to being in the ‘inbetween’ state of both cultures,” Pichotta said.

The airport scene is the only part of the show that’s fictional – Hak was hoping to go to Cambodia after graduating college in May 2021, but has pushed it back due to the pandemic. Part of him thought he had to go, because it would awaken a part of him, help him accept who he really is, he said.

“I realized I don’t have to go. I have everything I need right here, in the farmlands of Minnesota. My family, their love and their history. But I’m still gonna go because knowing where you come from, is just as important as knowing where you want to go,” he says in the play.

Though the play was recorded in January, it’s not the last time he’ll perform. Hak’s still rewriting the script, and once theatres begin to reopen, he’ll be on stage in Duluth and hopefully, Minneapolis. Isbell will continue to direct Hak’s Duluth performance, “but my hope is that he has a million different productions, produced in all kinds of theaters with a bunch of directors. I think the show has a real future,” he said.

And when the time comes, Hak will take a trip to visit the places his parents grew up, follow his grandmother around the community, volunteer at the temple and immerse himself in the culture.

“One day I will go to Cambodia. I will be in that airport, thinking about this play, this plotline. And I’ll text my parents, my professor, ‘Thank you so much for everything.’”