Founded in 2011, Miss Global is an annual global beauty pageant for single women between the ages of 18 and 35 – and the significance of Ng being the first Asian to hold the title goes way beyond physical appearance.

The fashion, entertainment and pageant industries have long struggled with diversity and inclusion. Chinese model Liu Wen took part in the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2009, making her the first Asian model to do so since its inception in 1995.

Director Jon Chu’s 2018 romantic comedy Crazy Rich Asians was the first major Hollywood film since The Joy Luck Club in 1993 to feature a majority Asian cast and crew.

But despite progress being made on representation, Ng said she is still stereotyped in the industry.

“You just hear things like ‘We’ll fix that with Photoshop’, ‘We’ll just make her eyes bigger, her jaw more oval,’ or ‘We’ll give her more of a nose ridge.’ It’s downright insulting because it’s not just me, right? You’re basically insulting an entire race of people who look like this, and there’s nothing wrong with it,” she says.

It was only recently, she says, that Asian women began to appear in mainstream media in the United States – on magazine covers, in advertisements and films.

She found her calling in life after an injury ended her dream of playing professional volleyball. “I hit such a low that I tried to take my own life by taking a bunch of sleeping pills,” she said. “And that was when I realised I had cracked, and something had to change. So I looked for a therapist and really found healing in therapy

“And basically, from that point, I realised no one should ever have felt the way that I did.”

Since being crowned Miss Global and Miss Asian American runner-up, Ng has given guest lectures at University of California, Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. She brought up case studies from her work as part of the behavioural health team at the Community Youth Centre of San Francisco, and spoke about the young people she served there.

“For a lot of these students, this is the first access they have into what therapy is. So, in that way, I was using the platform very much in that sense because I got those gigs because of those [pageant] titles,” Ng said.

She also gave a presentation at an Imagine Talk – a TED Talk-like forum featuring leading Asian-Americans – about issues surrounding mental health, and how to foster dialogue about mental health problems in a culturally sensitive manner.

With the whirlwind year of her reign as Miss Global coming to an end, Ng wants to see how far her fame will take her before she goes back to practising in Hong Kong. She also hopes she can continue to empower women and redefine what the word “beauty” means.

“Often, the word ‘beautiful’ is used to describe something physical and I think that’s a very unhealthy thing,” she says. “I really wanted to redefine ‘beauty’ as having a kind heart, standing up for what is right, standing up for others, having a voice, having an opinion and being a leader.

“Those are all beautiful things and, if anything, the most beautiful people I know are actually the ones who make you feel good about yourself. I really wanted to bring that to the forefront.”