My life: Brigitte Mitchell-Da Silva

I come from a multiracial family in Cape Town [in South Africa]. I don't like to play the apartheid card, but I'm from that era and it was hard. My parents didn't care about race - my mother is white, my father a Polynesian/Indian/Portuguese mix; and I looked like an islander, with curly hair. Anyone who wasn't pure was thrown together in a pigeonhole. I remember going to a water park once and my brother - who has blond hair and green eyes - was allowed to go in but I was stopped. It was always a fight not to be judged or pushed away. My dad had two jobs: one was singing in clubs; the other as an engineer, working on ships. My mum was a dressmaker. She was brilliant; very talented, but she was forced to stay home because she had six kids. She had worked in a clothing factory but she carried on sewing at home and began her own little line. It started doing really well so my dad quit his job to help her run the business, and they have been going ever since. They managed to put us all through school - schools were segregated but my dad didn't want that for us, so he worked hard to put us through private schools, which weren't segregated.

I started singing at a young age in church - happy-clappy church music; and I did a lot of musical theatre growing up. I started making clothes when I was about 10 years old. The first item I made for myself was a white polka-dot bell-sleeve mid-riff top that I wore all the time. I should check if my mother has thrown it out! After school I got a degree in fashion and was a senior menswear designer by the time I was 23. I was really ambitious and I think I was too young for the job that I had. I kept getting offers to travel with singing and eventually I gave up the design job - there was always time to go back to fashion, so I went off and travelled, doing musical theatre. I did that for a while before receiving an offer to come to Hong Kong to sing at a VIP club called Green Spot (in Happy Valley), which was popular at the time with local celebrities. This was about 12 years ago and I've been here ever since.