Coffee Lam, top Hong Kong YouTuber and fitness influencer, on her tough childhood, being a TVB actress and the ‘incident’ that almost killed her
- Coffee Lam’s yoga and fitness videos have seen her become the first Cantonese-language content creator to gain more than a million subscribers
- After once collapsing on a TV set in a pool of blood, she turned to yoga to address her health, but worse was to come
Not many can claim 2020 was a good year, but if there is one person who saw a positive turn, it’s Coffee Lam.
The YouTube influencer, yoga teacher and former TVB actress’ early life was anything but charmed. She grew up in a stifling, sometimes violent household and become embroiled in a paparazzi-fuelled sex scandal in her early 20s, which resulted in such emotional turmoil she almost died from an autoimmune disease. But she is now one of Hong Kong’s most popular YouTubers, and in 2020 achieved the honour of becoming the first Cantonese-language content creator to amass more than a million followers.
“I grew up in a tiny home, with seven of us living in a subdivided flat little more than 100 square feet [9.3 square metres] in size,” she says. “My father was hard-working, but we were poor. Our family has links to Fujian [province in mainland China] and this is a culture that prizes sons over daughters, so I was often overlooked or asked to do things for my older brother.
“This really influenced how I developed and I became used to swallowing my own voice. My father didn’t think girls should have their own lives. Once when he found out I joined basketball [practice] at school, he punished me severely.”
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Meet Hong Kong’s Coffee Lam: the first Cantonese-language YouTuber with 1 million subscribers
An 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, although at first she was only signed to one show and paid only HK$1,000 (US$130) a month.
