For Sara Jane Ho, Etiquette is Everywhere

In September, etiquette expert Sara Jane Ho returned to her alma mater, Phillips Exeter Academy, to promote her self-help book “Mind Your Manners: How to Be Your Best Self in Any Situation.” But instead of telling an inspirational tale about her career, Ho delivered a speech — written in two hours on the train ride from New York to Boston — about how she struggled as a student at Exeter. Ho told the students that she’d felt stress going to the dining hall, found it difficult to speak in class, and emotionally isolated herself following her mother’s breast cancer diagnosis.

Etiquette, with its focus on politeness and public opinion, may seem superficial. But Ho sees etiquette (guidelines for respectful social behavior) as inextricable from the messiness of people’s personal lives. An etiquette expert, Ho is best known as the host of the Netflix series “Mind Your Manners” and for founding Institute Sarita, China’s first finishing school.

In 2013, Ho started Institute Sarita with two goals.

She had recently graduated from Harvard Business School and was fascinated by the drastic economic change she saw happening in China.

“At that time, China had already proven itself as a global power. And no other country had gone through so much change as China did,” Ho says. “In the span of 30 years, you had the industrial revolution and the services and the technological revolution.”

Personally, Ho was also processing a major change. In her senior year at Georgetown, Ho’s mother passed away from liver cancer. This was the second time Ho had learned her mother had cancer, the first time being when Ho was 14. Ho remembers her mother as a vibrant, social woman who kept Ho’s childhood home alight with social gatherings. She was Ho’s first and foremost etiquette teacher.

“My life really changed,” Ho says of her mother’s passing. “My home went from being very lively and full of people to very empty. Holidays weren’t the same. I didn’t enjoy going back to Hong Kong because it reminded me of how lonely I was.”

In 2013, Ho was searching for a way to merge these two changes: something to honor her mother’s legacy and to address China’s new market needs.

“Everything I’ve done in my career is amongst two realms. One is bridging East and West, and the other is helping women move confidently through the world,” Ho says.

Out of this synthesis, Institute Sarita was born.

The finishing school primarily teaches wealthy Chinese clientele — most of them women — how to smoothly interact with Western business partners, from eating an orange properly to graceful dating practices. Institute Sarita also highlights international culture — etiquette from everywhere.

Institute Sarita, however, is not for everyone. Prices range from $200 to upwards of $14,000. Comparably, Institut Villa Pierrefeu, a Swiss finishing school of which Ho is an alum, costs roughly $30,000 for a six week course.

“I wanted to have a boutique finishing school that was very elegant,” Ho says. “My costs are very high. My business model is not to be a mass finishing school.”

Still, Ho says, she has made some of her content more accessible through books, shows, and Q&A videos on Instagram.

Ho says she has always seen her finishing school’s impact as more than just the money it brings her.

Before Ho attended HBS, she lived in Beijing and worked for a non-profit. One day, a friend, who Ho describes as a successful businessman, sought her advice because he was nervous about a business meeting with their American partners. What food would be served? How should he behave? How would the success of this business deal be brokered over the smallest of interactions at a seemingly innocuous breakfast meeting?

These are the stories Ho shares in abundance, where, for her, etiquette becomes emotional.

Ho gave one “painfully shy” student a special homework assignment. For 30 days, Ho’s student was to have an “intimate” conversation with at least one stranger everyday.

“By the end of the month, she went for a haircut, and a new hairdresser she was trying out told her she was a lively and outgoing young woman, and she said she cried because nobody had ever called her that in her life,” Ho says. “People come for etiquette, but they all have their own personal journey.”

“I never tell people how they should act or how they should behave, but I give them the tools, and I give them the suggestion and give them the path, and then it’s up to them to take it and choose their path,” she adds.

Ho herself practices what she preaches as she’s carved her own nontraditional path as an etiquette expert.

“I think that it’s a misconception, like back in the day, etiquette was for a certain type of person, but no more today — everything is very democratic,” Ho says. “We all need a bit of etiquette in our life, no matter what culture we are, where we are in life.”