This is the businesswoman who teaches self-improvement through good manners

On the ninth day of filming Netflix's “Etiquette Classes: Mind Your Manners,” the show's host, Sara Jane Ho, the Shanghai etiquette teacher, broke up with her partner after a four-year on-and-off courtship via text message. text. Ho, a poised 37-year-old who grew up on four continents, was in a car outside Sydney, Australia, in late 2021, on her way to perform a “Pygmalion” makeover for a party girl named Stephanie Osifo.

But before Ho could confront Osifo's net dresses, he had a revelation. “Here I am, telling my students how to live their best lives, and I realized I had to do the same for myself,” Ho said recently during a breakfast in Manhattan. “I thought, 'I can't show up on the forum with red, swollen eyes because you're making me cry.'

“We were arriving at Osifo's house and I sent that text message and it was over,” he said. “It's probably not the best etiquette to break up with someone via text,” Ho acknowledged.

Later, he elaborated on his approach. “Things are contextual,” she said. In Ho's philosophy of social graces, the only constant is consideration. And even then, one can be forgiven for an inelegant breakup when self-actualization—and an expanding transnational label empire—is at stake. “You don't get a second chance to film a Netflix show, do you?” he said. “It is all or nothing”.

In “Etiquette Classes: Mind Your Manners,” Ho’s self-assigned mandate is ambitious: “Come with me and you will know what to do anywhere, with anyone, in any situation.” Both the show and Ho's new international personal brand promote the idea of ​​etiquette as a tool for interpersonal harmony and a vehicle for self-improvement. (He also has a book in the works.)

The first episode sees Ho in a rainbow of impeccable outfits and switching languages ​​(she speaks four and is fluent in three dialects of Chinese) as she instructs a diverse cast in table manners, dress codes, and self-improvement. Standing in pink puffed sleeves under an umbrella, she guides an archery lesson; In a cerulean blue shift dress with a mandarin collar, she demonstrates how to peel a banana with fork and knife.

“I spent 10 years studying in the United States, and the last 10 years living and working in China, so what I bring to the table is an East-meets-West perspective,” Ho says on the show. She emphasizes the logic behind certain norms and bluntly rejects others that she finds distasteful.

“Etiquette Classes: Mind Your Manners” belongs to a genre that includes “Tidy Up with Marie Kondo,” in which life coaches act as fairy godmothers to ordinary people. They shower their clients with emotional affirmations and opportunities to deconstruct their insecurities, new haircuts and advice.

Created by a Singapore production company with international audiences in mind, “Mind Your Manners” was initially supposed to be filmed in Shanghai, where Ho lives and runs the Sarita Institute, the manners school he founded in 2012. (Where he met to a businessman she married). With a curriculum that included courses with names like British Afternoon Tea and Pronunciation of Foreign Luxury Brands, Ho initially catered to wealthy Chinese interested in learning Western-style snobbery.

But China's Covid lockdowns forced Ho to close his schools in Beijing and Shanghai; She now operates out of luxury hotels, teaming up with high-end brands and private banks to entertain elites with lessons in the art of manners. The show was filmed in Australia.

Originally from Hong Kong, Ho grew up in Papua New Guinea, Taiwan, Britain and the United States, and attended Georgetown University in Washington and Harvard Business School.

There's a moment in the Osifo episode of “Etiquette Classes” when Ho waves a white fishnet minidress like it's a flag. “I have absolutely no qualms with what you would wear in the bedroom or in the clubs,” says Ho, who describes the problem with Osifo's wardrobe as one of “everyday attire.”

Or, as Ho said over breakfast, with his wrists raised and the tines of his fork angled: “There is a time and a place for everything.”

By: MAUREEN O'CONNOR