On the ninth day of filming Netflix’s "Mind Your Manners,” the show’s host, Shanghai etiquette teacher Sara Jane Ho, dumped her on-again-off-again boyfriend of four years in a text message. Ho, a preternaturally poised 37-year-old who grew up on four continents and can eat a sunny-side-up egg without spilling a single drop of yolk, was in a car outside Sydney, Australia, in late 2021, on her way to perform a "Pygmalion”-style makeover for a party girl named Stephanie Osifo.
But before Ho could confront Osifo’s fishnet dresses, she had a revelation. "Here I am, telling my students how to live their best lives, and I realized I had to do the same for myself,” Ho says recently, over a breakfast of smoked salmon and eggs at Park Lane Hotel in Manhattan. "I was just like, ‘I can’t be showing up on set with red and puffy eyes because you’re making me cry,’” she explains.
"We were pulling up to her house, and I sent off that text message, and that was that,” she says, with a knowing shake of the head, as she slices her salmon. I got the impression that, if her hands had not been occupied with silverware, Ho might have dusted them off.