When the first season of Bling Empire aired at the beginning of 2021, Kim Lee switched her television off. It had been one thing for her to film the show, but reliving the pilgrimage she went on to seek out the biological father she had never met—only to discover in the painful reveal that he had passed away two years prior-was wholly another.
“I didn’t watch it for a while, ” she says pensively over Zoom one afternoon. “I just couldn’t. Even though I had taken time to heal, the messages I started getting once it aired were reminders of what had happened. I knew what was coming and I didn’t want to feel it again.”
To have experienced pain like that for the first time on camera, and for it to be witnessed by millions of viewers ( became an instant hit once it dropped on Netflix), had been a surreal experience for Lee. When her friends and castmates Kevin Kreider and Kane Lim broke the news about her biological father’s passing in the season’s final
