Coffee Lam is a successful YouTube influencer, yoga teacher and former TVB actress. In 2020, she got the honour of becoming the first Cantonese-language content creator to amass more than a million followers and is now one of Hong Kong's most popular YouTubers. Most people don’t look beyond her success today and realize that she actually had a very bad start in life. She grew up in a poor, sometimes violent household and also later became embroiled in a paparazzi-fuelled sex scandal in her early 20s. The scandal caused such emotional turmoil that she almost died from an autoimmune disease.
Coffee grew up in a tiny home, with seven people in a subdivided flat little more than a 100 square feet (9.3 square metres) in size. Her father was hard-working, but they were very poor. Their family culture prizes sons over daughters (like most conservative Chinese families), so Coffee was often neglected. She was even expected to do things for her older brother.
An unexpected encounter with a talent manager brought Lam an opportunity to become an actress at local broadcaster TVB in 2008. She quit university in her first year to pursue acting. At first she was only signed up to perform in one show and her salary was only HK$1,000 (US$130) a month.
In order to support her poor family, Coffee had to take on many shows at the same time. She played the roles that no one wanted such as mistress or promiscuous woman. People then started stereotyping her as such in real life.
The competitive environment at TVB drove her body to the brink. Afraid of losing shows, she once returned to a set immediately after undergoing invasive surgery, ignoring her doctor's advice to take a month's bed rest. She failed to inform her employers of her condition, but the situation soon revealed itself when she collapsed in a pool of blood.
It was then that she decided it was time to start taking better care of her body. She signed up for a yoga class and accidentally joined a session for advanced students.
Lam took a substantial amount from her savings to study for a yoga teaching qualification. "It was tough," she says. "I still stressed myself out by doing acting and yoga training concurrently, but I felt happy the whole time. Every day I did something that gave me so much satisfaction. I felt power."
It was around that time, in 2014, that Lam discovered her long-term boyfriend was having an affair, and she ended their relationship.
"I started going out a lot and drinking to forget my pain, and that's when 'the incident' happened," she says, referring to a video clip showing Lam and a man, both under the influence, entering a disabled restroom at the IFC Mall, before emerging a reported 30 minutes later to a crowd of paparazzi. The video ignited a supposed sex scandal that became indelibly associated with her name.
For years, Lam endured ridicule, including from her family, who cared little for the truth and focused more on the shame she had brought upon them. It came to a point when she was diagnosed with systemic sclerosis, an autoimmune disease that eats away at the body's tissue, with a doctor telling her that once it reached her throat, she would die.
Lam went through painful, expensive treatments before finally giving up and deciding to live out her days by travelling with friends. Removed from the toxic hometown environment, her condition healed itself.
Slowly, she learned to address the whispers she would hear behind her with a laugh, and to focus on building her yoga practice. One day in 2014, a former TVB staffer called her about joining a YouTube production company.
Soon, Lam was editing and creating her own videos, which she still does today. She doesn't feel her following grew quickly - it took a year or so of regular posts for a "death by abs workout" video to achieve a million hits. She is now one of Hong Kong's top three YouTube content creators with 1.3 million subscribers.
Lam's YouTube channel features weekly fitness and yoga tutorials, with workouts targeting specific body parts and postural issues from anterior pelvic tilt to hunched shoulders, along with personal vlogs and updates on her beauty regime, family life and aspects of motherhood.
"I'm still a bit lazy. I don't film a video a day, I just want my YouTube channel to touch and help people. I'd rather do quality over quantity and I don't want to forget my original intention. People tell me to create a premium membership, but I don't want to lose people who can't afford it. I've even cut YouTube ads that show up midway. I feel that the YouTube channel is my home, and I only want to bring in things that I love."
Lam credits her husband with helping her find balance and sanity. The couple now have a two-year-old son and she has - for the first time in her life - found happiness.
"People say I should be thankful for that 'incident' because it brought me my fame. Maybe that's true. But actually, it's what took me to rock bottom. It was yoga that raised me back up. It was my own resilience and perseverance. Scandals happen to lots of people, and a lot of people disappear from the public eye. It was my choice to work hard and soldier on, because I didn't have any other options. I was like a weed, I had to grow where I was left," she says.
"The first half of my life was bitter, but now it is sweet. And
without the bitter, I wouldn't appreciate the sweetness as much. My failures
have made me who I am today, which is a positive person."
Source: SCMP
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