Hong Kong model Mia Kang on her eating disorder, traumatic childhood and love of Thai boxing as she releases memoir
- Kang’s memoir Knockout offers a window into her life as a third-culture child, the personal demons she has battled and the cutthroat modelling industry
- After taking up Thai boxing in 2016, she says that she is now at peace with her body for the first time in her life
For a seven-year-old Eurasian girl at Discovery Bay International School in the 1990s, where the kids thought sandwiches were “cooler” than the kimbap she would take in for lunch, it was easier to fit in by pretending to her classmates that the bori cha tea in her backpack was apple juice.
That relatively unstructured time, combined with trauma, provided the perfect foundation for eating disorders and body dysmorphia, she says.
“I would say it’s the root of my eating disorders: not feeling safe in the world and needing to have control and get control,” she tells the Post from Phuket in Thailand, where she is now spending much of her time.
The sad effects of Kang’s upbringing are laid bare in her new memoir. Knockout, released this week by Abrams Books, opens a window into Kang’s life as a third-culture kid growing up in Hong Kong: her past traumas, addictive tendencies and eating disorders.
It also provides a raw, unfiltered insight into the modelling industry during the almost two decades Kang has been a model.
