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 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 realised I had to do the same for myself,” Ho says, 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.