I've Lived Nine Lives. Here's How I Keep Starting Over.

Hi! I’m so excited you’re here.

Hmm, who am I? Honestly, I’m still figuring that out. After getting sober 12 years ago, spending more than a decade in spiritual work, and doing a lot of therapy, I feel like I’m constantly changing, evolving, and hopefully growing. I definitely feel like a completely different person than 2016 me.

2016 me had bangs

This is a free post! Consider it the deep dive. I wanted one place where I could share everything you've ever wanted to know about me with anyone who's interested. The real tea usually lives in the VIP section, where we go much deeper, but you'll also find essays and series on everything from starting your life or career over, cultural criticism, Gen X nostalgia, and what it was like growing up Asian American in the 2000s to building a creative life on your own terms. If there's a common thread, it's this: questioning the stories we're given and creating lives that feel more like our own.

I’m a cat person, so maybe that tracks.

I was born in Lawrence, Kansas, which surprises people, mostly because in my early twenties, I apparently thought it sounded cooler to say I was born in Taiwan. So I did.

Here’s the start of my IMDB bio, which I’m pretty sure I wrote when I was about 20:

“Kaila was born on May 16th on a cold night in Taipei, Taiwan. She moved to California when she was three years old and grew up in the Sunshine State, California.”

As you can see, I was not exactly born to be a writer, much less an author. But we’ll get to that later.

Also: Why was it a “cold night”? And why did I call California the Sunshine State? That’s Florida.

Anyhow, the truth is I was born in Kansas because my dad had an engineering scholarship at the University of Kansas. I have zero memories of that time, because we moved to Upland, California when I was three. Upland was a lovely, sleepy suburban place to grow up, if not extremely boring.

I have a younger brother who is three years younger, and we had a very normal childhood—very typical East Asian American. I skipped second grade, was in the Gifted and Talented Education program, became a National Merit Scholar, practiced piano an hour a day (cue my teenage fury), went to Kumon after school, and attended Chinese school on Saturdays.

My mom was the classic fierce Tiger Mom. She taught me to be fearless, to finish what I start, and to have a tireless drive for endless achievement. We grew up with no internet until it finally appeared during my high school years (exciting times! Can you even imagine what it was like to exist without the internet?). When we got one of those free AOL disks that seemed to be everywhere and signed up for an account, hearing “You’ve got mail!” after logging in became the most thrilling moment of my day. I became addicted to chatrooms and meeting people online. As a shy introvert, I felt much more empowered connecting with people that way.

As a child, I wanted to be a veterinarian, which used to be the standard kid answer before everyone wanted to be an influencer. I also loved performing. But I’ve never been someone who thought much about future planning. In high school, I had vague dreams of becoming a singer, but I didn’t think there was any possible route to make that happen. I hadn’t seen anyone like me doing it in popular media back then.

In college, I entered UCSD undecided and briefly considered majoring in biology and becoming a plastic surgeon. This was mostly because I was already a consumer, and later a supporter, of plastic surgery, and also because it seemed like it paid a lot. I hated UCSD, honestly. I hated UCSD, honestly. Not because there was anything wrong with the school. La Jolla is beautiful, but it was way too sleepy for me. I’m an LA girl at heart, and I was crushed that I didn’t get into UCLA.

I also had a far-fetched dream of becoming a pin-up model like Asian American icon Sung Hi Lee. I write about her in an entire chapter of my book, partly because she deserves to be remembered, and partly because her existence showed me how much representation matters. I eventually started pursuing a pin-up career myself, with horrific consequences at first, which I also detail in the book.

Around this time, I, along with seemingly every other Asian American, discovered raving. It was a magical time that pulled me out of a recent trauma I had faced. Through a series of events, including drug abuse, my GPA dropped precipitously, and I had to drop out of UCSD for over a year, return home, and attend junior college to get my grades back up. I quickly realized how ridiculously easy junior college classes were—honestly, far easier than my high school AP classes.

I later transferred to my first-choice school, UCLA, and chose Asian American studies mostly because it seemed like the easiest major and my parents would probably disown me if I never graduated. I didn’t get the full UCLA experience as a transfer student who didn’t live on campus, but I was much happier there. I was definitely proud to be a Bruin.

I always say I didn’t succeed because I was the most beautiful by far. I absolutely wasn’t even close. I made it to the top of that industry by knocking down doors relentlessly and forcing my way in. The Asian American import scene was also taking off during this time, and I became one of the name models of that era. It was a dream to be around 21 years old, traveling the world, and getting paid thousands of dollars to do it.

Around this same time, the internet was entering its magical early blogging era. I had a hard time deciding whether to invest time in Substack, but now that I’m thinking of it as blogging, I feel much more inspired. I miss the days of LiveJournal, AsianAvenue, and random Myspace thoughts.

Many models, myself included, launched our own paid monthly subscription websites. It was basically the old-school version of OnlyFans, except way better because there wasn’t a platform taking a 20% cut.

I learned HTML and built the first version of my website

Man, those were simpler times. Leveraging the internet audience I’d built through pin-up modeling, I quickly became the 2000s version of a viral sensation (though far from as big as Tila Tequila), eventually gaining about half a million followers. It was only because of Myspace that I finally had my own platform to launch the singing career I had dreamed of as a kid. Suddenly, because I had built my own audience, it felt possible. No one was asking me to launch a music career, but once again, I aggressively knocked on doors. I found a producer, figured out mixing and mastering, got CDs printed, and hustled sales at car shows.

My Myspace page, circa April 11, 2006, courtesy of WayBackTimeMachine

Because I already had a built-in audience, I was able to get booked around the world to perform and became one of the top 10 female artists on Myspace. I had a nice run, but eventually my singing career faded.

I was later inspired to start a band from scratch with my bestie, Kitt.E.Katt, whom I still miss deeply. Again, **activate hustle mode**: I found new producers, posted auditions on Craigslist in LA, and built a band from there. Because of my built-in audience, our first show as Nylon Pink was in Australia. Along the way, for various organic reasons, Asian girls replaced the white-guy members, and suddenly we had something unique. Back in 2010, Asian all-girl bands were incredibly rare, if not nonexistent. As always, I aggressively marketed the band, and we eventually toured the world.

I won’t post any photos of that lineup with the white dudes because the styling was atrocious and embarrassing.

After I quit singing, Kiki and I started a travel blog. We had no backup plan in life, but we knew we wanted to travel more. We loved traveling the world with my bandmates. But unlike my bandmates I hated the actual act of performing….just way too stressful. The travel blog got a boost at launch because our band website already had some traffic, and we aggressively grew it through SEO.

Travel bloggers get sent on sponsored media trips, and on some of those trips, I met travel journalists. Their work seemed so much more legitimate than blogging, with bylines in glossy publications. More importantly, the journalists were sent on much better trips than bloggers were. Anyhow, blogging was on its way out, so I pivoted at the right time.

Kiki and I on a totally epic blogger media trip to India

I took pitching courses, including Pitch Like a Honey Badger, which immediately resonated with me because I was tiny, ferocious, and not giving up until I got what I wanted. I also took a magazine feature-writing class at Gotham Writers and listened to "How to Break into Travel Writing."

I had zero contacts in the industry and pitched editors completely from scratch. (You can do it too!) I had no experience in this style of writing, so I hired a pitching and writing coach, Mike Dunphy, whom I highly recommend, to help me shape pitches for major editors.

Eventually, I got a bunch of bylines. Then I got a lot more, simply by fearlessly pitching and following up. That led me to my current dream job as a luxury travel writer. I truly can’t believe this job exists.

Disclaimer: travel writing is not usually a super lucrative job in cash. It often pays more in $10,000 trips than actual money. There’s a joke that you either need to marry rich or be independently wealthy to do it, but the real point is that it usually can’t be your only source of income. At the beginning of my travel writing career, I had a part-time job as an event planner, which I eventually quit once I was making more money. These days, I also earn income from social media posts as a content creator, a handful of PR influencer campaign clients, and as an author.

On a journalist media trip to Thailand with the Thailand Tourism Authority, thrilled to be with baby elephants at Patara Elephant Farm in Chiang Mai.

I always tell creators it’s so important to diversify. Do not put all your eggs in one basket, because a platform can disappear overnight. (Look what happened to TikTok’s engagement in the past few years) Even though I tried to post on Instagram when it debuted, I do not excel at beautiful aesthetics. I call my content “chaos content.” I don’t know how to maintain a perfectly curated feed, which was a problem before Reels launched, when Instagram rewarded people who were good at that.

When the pandemic hit, I suddenly had the unique opportunity to focus on building my TikTok account. I never had the time to invest before, and now all my travel-writing gigs have been canceled. My former bandmate Kiki and I went all in on TikTok. We had a social media influencers' Facebook group, and we started a 30-day TikTok challenge to hold ourselves and others accountable. As the leaders, we had to make sure to keep going no matter what.

We did what we called throwing pizza at a wall, trying every kind of content under the sun to see what would stick. We each posted on our individual channels three times a day, then started two additional TikTok accounts together: one food-themed and one travel-themed. For at least a year, both of us shot, edited, and posted four to five videos a day, including a full-on cooking video.

Eventually, we both started to take off in our respective niches: Kiki as a guitar player, and me with 2000s throwback content and Asian American news. That eventually led to the book deal I never knew I wanted: writing my memoir for the biggest publisher in the world.

So that brings us to today. I published Fetishized almost a year ago and plan to spend the next year continuing to tour the book at colleges. I’m still living my dream as a luxury travel writer and creating content online.

But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that I’m happiest when I’m building something new. I’m not entirely sure what the next chapter looks like yet, and okay with that. I really do feel like I’ve lived nine lives. Maybe that’s why I’m so excited to start from scratch again.

This Substack is where I’ll document whatever comes next: the wins, the failures, the ideas that don’t work, and hopefully the ones that do.

Want to come along with me?