Yue-Sai Kan, who just launched her first English biography, ‘The Most Famous Woman in China—And how she did it’, talks to Tatler about sexism in showbiz, the importance of Asian representation and her newfound fame on YouTube.
Yue-Sai Kan believes in the magic of timing. According to the Chinese American TV host, producer, author, entrepreneur and humanitarian, it was timing that has made her arguably “the most famous woman in China”—as she has been dubbed by several media.
“Unlike the Kardashians, or influencers, my aim in life was never to be famous,” she says. “My fame was purely accidental and happened at a time that will never repeat itself in history.”
Indeed, when the Guilin native moved from Hawaii to New York in the early ’70s and produced the TV series Looking East, Asia was “completely unknown to Americans, and China was enclosed,” she says.
But the world was opening, and Kan, who was then in her early twenties, took a well-timed leap of faith. “My colleagues thought it was a stupid idea to produce a show about Asian cultures because they thought nobody would care,” she says. “While it wasn’t mainstream news, I knew there was an audience for it: the whole diaspora and the curious souls.”
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But the media industry came with its set of challenges. For starters, it was deeply dominated by white men and Ivy League graduates. She recalls an interaction with American journalist Mike Wallace, an American TV institution.
“Mike Wallace watched my show by chance one day and told me ‘You looked so beautiful on camera, I didn’t think you’d have anything bright to say,’ which despite being a sexist [comment] was thought to be quite a compliment in those times,” she says. Kan said that Wallace later introduced her to his agent, who refused to represent her as she wasn’t “mainstream” enough. From that point on, she knew she could only rely on herself.
“Finding resources and support to produce the show independently was exhausting,” she recalls. “It was a one-person show: I had to produce everything, get advertisers, send tapes to 12 different parts of the country, learn how to dress and do my make-up. I’d make 100 phone calls per day, and be lucky if two people called me back.”
It was a hard time for Kan and it took a toll on her marriage and her health: “By the time I had finished my television series, I weighed 95 pounds. I was exhausted. It was hard work.”
