Inside Mai Pham’s Re-Created Childhood Bedroom: From YouTube Dreams To Family Healing

MaiPhamhas meticulously recreated her childhood bedroom in her New York apartment — perhaps as a vehicle for periodic escapism, since she doesn’t sleep in it.

A “Don’t Bug Me” Miley Cyrus poster hangs on the door, teen heartthrobs plaster the walls, and Littlest Pet Shop figurines — the same ones she unboxed in her first YouTube video at age 7 — keep watch. The YouTuber’s vision board, complete with a mock-up of 2 million subscribers, hints at dreams she once longed to manifest. Today, she has more than 3 million. The pink room brims with fragments of her adolescence, a playful archive of the girl she used to be.

But the room I’m standing in as I interview her is not just a replica of her childhood bedroom. It is a carefully constructed set where the 22-year-old records her podcast, “MaiSpace.” Each detail is a testament to the child she once was and the room she wished she’d had. The bedroom she grew up in often felt suffocating and watched; this one is built to be the opposite, a space where she can finally share her story on her own terms. (Watch the video above.)

“I think as a child, I had a lot of sadness in me,” she tells me. “Honestly, for as long as I can remember, I was pretty depressed. But there was also a light in me — a joy, a desire to create and be a kid.”

The room is an answer to that younger version of herself, a lovingly staged rebuttal to the limitations and loneliness she felt as a child. As she talks, she gestures around her at the memorabilia, keepsakes and scraps of paper that once offered glimpses of freedom beyond her family home. “I always loved decorating, and I did room tours and stuff, but my room didn’t look like this.”

In her actual childhood home, the fantasy bedroom she longed for technically existed — but it belonged to her older sister, whose room had jangling jewelry, glossy photos of celebrities and the kind of clutter that made it feel impossibly grown-up.

As a little girl, Pham would sneak into that room with her camera and film a “morning routine.” On screen, for a few stolen minutes, she was older, cooler, already living the version of girlhood she craved.

The podcast set is a kind of wish fulfillment. She finally gets to be the girl in the cool room. “I really wanted to recreate that for myself,” she says. “And I also put up a lot of my old vision boards and old concert tickets so, like, I can see how far I’ve come as well. And I’ve also, like, re-bought a lot of the toys that I always wanted.”

For people who watch her now, Pham’s story begins on the internet. A teenage girl vlogging her days, folding laundry while singing along to her playlist, narrating the push and pull of high school and early adulthood. But the story behind why she took her life online starts much earlier, in a tiny town in Alberta, Canada.

“I grew up in a really small town. … It was all white people, aside from maybe like my cousin or something. I think at the time, I didn’t know any different, so it felt normal. But I think that maybe it’s affected the way that I have relationships now, because when I was younger, I was never really chosen too often.”

“Chosen.” It’s a simple word, but for Pham, it carries the weight of childhood longing — not just among peers, but within her family, where closeness never fully took root.

Growing up, independence felt like a distant dream. Raised in a sheltered household, Pham watched her parents, immigrants from Vietnam, work tirelessly to run their business. Her father, one of only two sons in a family of eight, was treated as the “golden child,” his comfort and success prioritized above all else, while her mother, whom she speaks of fondly, tried to nurture her within the narrow confines of family duty and a collectivist mentality that prized sacrifice over individuality.

Her grandmother stepped in to raise Pham and her siblings so her parents could focus on work, an arrangement that left her feeling more isolated than connected. “I never really had a family dynamic, and I felt very individualistic,” she says. “I wasn’t even allowed to have friends or hang out with them. That’s why I got on the internet.”

By the time Pham was 15, the timing felt right to leave home. Her older brother had moved out first, and with him gone, her grandmother, who had raised the children, felt she’d completed her responsibility. One morning, after her father yelled at her to clean her room, she saw it as a sign to leave. “I got my friend to pick me up, and I literally just never went back home. I slept in her basement, and I figured it out from there.”

Online, Pham came of age in front of an audience that watched her move out, travel and navigate love and heartbreak. Offline, the work of processing her family story, the parts that still hurt, took much longer. Then, four years ago, a simple photo strip on her wall of just her and her mom shifted everything.

As she tells me this, her voice starts to waver. “I realized … one day she’s gonna pass away, and I would hate to regret not having a relationship with her because of a hate for my dad,” she says. “If I love my mom so much, I need to get over this … love is stronger than hate, and I need to let that go.”

To understand her parents, she had to reckon with the forces that shaped them. They were always working. Her father’s mother had pushed her son toward an “easy” life by taking over the child-rearing, and her mom was urged to prioritize her husband and the household over her children. In that context, Pham’s mom never truly got to mother in the way she might have wanted, and the distance she felt growing up was less about a lack of love than about everyone fulfilling roles that left little room for closeness.

Alone in that New York apartment, she took stock of everything she had built: the independence, the career, the dreams that had come true. “I was like, I’m at a pretty good place in my life, and I’ve achieved a lot of my dreams,” she says. “What’s the point of doing all of this if I have no one to share it with?”

For all the hurt, she could not ignore the ways her family had shown up: her brother flying in to help her when she needed it, her sister splitting an apartment with her when she had nowhere else to go. “Every time I needed help, they were always there for me,” Pham says. So she picked up the phone, sobbing, and told them, “We need to do Christmas together.”

She bought plane tickets for everyone, and about three years ago, they celebrated their first real family Christmas since she moved out at 15.

The re-created childhood bedroom resonates in a new way now. After rebuilding her relationship with her family, recording the podcast there feels both intentional and deeply meaningful.

Surrounded by the evidence of dreams once pinned to vision boards, Pham also practices a different kind of remembering. The room that once felt like a trap is now a place where her imagination and creativity flourish. “It’s really important for me to look back at the things that I’ve accomplished, but also be surrounded by younger me … Instead of seeing my childhood bedroom as a dark place that I literally felt trapped in, I can see it as what a beautiful place that so much creation happened.”

Read the original on HuffPost