Life.Culture.Discovery.

ProfileA fitness lover on racism, a suicide attempt at 15 and the cancer diagnosis that helped her be kind to her body and focus on her mental health

Emily Tan, the founder of Mental Muscle, which offers fitness workshops for the body and mind, explains the importance of paying attention to both together

She talks about working her way through school in Malaysia, her experience with racism in the US and Dubai, and getting over a suicide attempt and cancer

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Emily Tan is a Malaysian-born, Hong Kong-based fitness coach and performer who has overcome racism and cancer to found a studio focusing on fitness for mind and body. Photo: Pole Ninja/Kenneth Kao

Published: 8:15am, 16 Apr 2022

My parents are from Kuala Lumpur, but my grandparents were from Guangzhou, China. My dad came from an affluent family. He and his brothers grew up with maids and they went to university in the UK. His father was knighted, there was prestige and status in the family.

My dad studied engineering – his whole family was in construction – but he had an entrepreneurial side, and ran a disco and a bar. He was into fitness and used to coach bodybuilders.

Around the time I was born, in 1985, he opened a muscle gym and from a very young age I used to play at the gym. My two younger brothers and I had a safe, sheltered childhood. I went to church and Sunday school, I had piano lessons. I went to a Chinese school from kindergarten to sixth grade, which was where I learned Mandarin.

The school believed in corporal punishment, which they inflicted if you did anything wrong, from forgetting your homework to getting a bad grade. I was hit on my hands, arms and legs with a bamboo rod and slapped across the face in front of the class by a male teacher, which was perhaps the worst as it came as such a shock. At home, my mum also used a bamboo rod; that’s the way she grew up as well.

Tan experienced a lot of racism and got called all sorts of names in the US. Photo: Cherry Li Photography

Downwardly mobile

The Asian financial crisis in 1997 hit our family badly and my dad lost a lot of money in the stock market. My mum’s brothers had both settled in the US state of Tennessee and set up restaurants, and our family moved to the US soon after my 13th birthday. We went from living in a middle-class environment in Malaysia to a low-class environment in the States.