How Netflix star Sara Jane Ho teaches etiquette through emotions

“The highs are very high, and the lows are very low. And everybody has a story, everybody's going through something. I operate on this kind of energy. I really believe in energy, and I feel what they feel. So, usually, after I finish teaching for the day, I’m completely depleted. I’m just like, I could totally just go home,” she says.

Ho tells Tatler that, as much as the show was about helping other people better their lives, the filming process taught her a lot about herself—including the fact that she was in an emotionally abusive relationship. The packed production schedule involved her starting her day at 4.45am with a walk before shooting began at 8am. Normally, they would wrap up by 7pm, having taken just an hour for lunch, and the working day would end at 9pm after meeting with the team to go over the lesson plan for the following day. But it wasn’t so much the long days that left her with puffy eyes. She discovered that she was arriving on the set each day dealing with her own emotional baggage as a result of being in a relationship with a “controlling partner”. On the show, she was constantly offering advice on how to improve oneself; how to cut out the bad, and keep the good. “Suddenly, I realised that I had to first do that myself.” She broke up with her partner, and while she acknowledges that choosing to do that by text message wasn’t really “good etiquette”, it was the best thing for her well-being and to ensure she walked onto the set feeling the best version of herself.

“I draw on my own personal experiences to share with my students, so that they don’t feel alone,” she says. “I see myself as a micro cultural anthropologist. Whether it’s with my students, family or with friends, I feel like I’m in the field, and I’m just observing.” That doesn’t mean she watches without getting involved. In the first episode of Mind Your Manners, for example, Ho notices her student Stef was hiding her insecurities with layers of make-up. In one scene, she asks Stef to remove it and reveal her true self, wiping off her own make-up to show her freckles and ensure Stef “did not feel alone”. She explains that she wants her students to see their true selves because “self- love starts with self-acceptance”.

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The same occurs with her students at the finishing school. “I recall one of my students telling me that her husband would drive her every morning to class because she lived a two- to three-hour drive from Shanghai. He would wait around in the city, then, when class was over, pick her up from our door and bring her back,” Ho says. The other women in the class thought that the student was lucky to have such a loving, caring husband; sensitive to red flags, though, Ho said to the student: “That is unusual, don’t you think?” The student then added that every time she packed for a business trip, she would leave her luggage by the front door; her husband would then go through the cases, asking why she had packed certain items and not others. This was “not a great healthy way of showing love”, says Ho, who “wanted to make sure [the student] was okay” without explicitly pointing out that she was in an abusive relationship. After the class, she spent an hour wondering if the student had understood her situation; she felt vindicated, however, when the student messaged later, saying: “I feel that in just a few hours, you really know me and what I’m experiencing better than my closest friends.”

While Mind Your Manners and the finishing school have helped many people, they have also benefited Ho personally and mentally. Her understanding of etiquette and EQ have helped her become more aware of her own emotional needs, and opened her up to new possibilities: she met her now husband in Shanghai soon after filming wrapped. She stresses again that while what she teaches is partly about good manners and considering other people, we must also apply those when dealing with ourselves. “There are times when you don’t have the strength to deal with something, but people push you to the point where you’re about to snap. You suddenly feel liberated once you make the decision that you can no longer deal with this. And at that point you realise: this is it.”

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