"My mother escaped from Vietnam on a boat... She was on that boat for a week without food or water"
In an interview with SCMP, Asian American fitness YouTuber Cassey Ho talked about her parents’ immigrant story.
The internet celebrity has over 4 million YouTube subscribers and over 1.5 million followers on Instagram.
However, Ho recently suffered from social media abuse and a went through a rough patch in her career. After gaining 6.4kg in one year, trolls and a lack of motivation started weighing her down.
“I felt lost,” the 32-year-old entrepreneur said. “I had built this whole thing, and yet it didn’t feel like I was truly being authentic to myself. As my brand gets bigger, criticisms come in on every little thing, and I started modelling myself to appease the people who were criticising me.”
Fortunately, Ho found her way back on track and took on a 90 Day Challenge in which she exercised six days a week and adopted a “lazy keto” diet plan. Ho now hopes to lose 16lbs by mid November.
Ho, who was born in LA, then talked about how her Vietnamese parents moved to America.
“My mother escaped from Vietnam on a boat, getting first to Malaysia then Canada and finally the US,” Ho explained. “She was on that boat for a week without food or water. Both my parents left Vietnam midway through college. They had to stop and start over and learn a new language.”
The family relocated to San Francisco when Ho was 5-years-old after her father took on a tech job in San Francisco. As a tennis coach himself, he pushed his daughters to take up the sport too but Ho hated it.
“He trained us really hard. He was an Asian father in that kind of way,” Ho recalled. “I just had to get used to being yelled at on the court by my dad.”