Kylie Kwong opens up to Anh Do about devastating baby loss: "We felt blessed he lived for six days"
Kylie Kwong has opened up about her experience of coming out as gay to her parents and losing her son.
The celebrity chef and her partner Nell lost their baby Lucky to a premature stillbirth in 2012.
The 49-year-old told Anh Do on Anh’s Brush With Fame that she “cried for 10 hours straight” after Nell’s waters broke five months early and the doctors delivered the devastating news that their son would be stillborn.
“In the end we felt blessed he lived for six days … inside Nell, alive, and then he let go. But the six days was profound,” said Kwong.
Kwong bid her goodbye to Lucky with the help of a Zen Buddhist teacher, who performed a spiritual ritual over Nell’s pregnant belly.
“It was so important because we got to be with him, we got to mother him, we got to say goodbye to him,” Kwong said.
When Do asked what Kwong said, she replied, “I said, I really love feeding you.
“I said I want you to know that your mother is the most amazing person in the world and that you are very, very loved.
“I said to him that I want you to know that we have always loved you, and I promised him that Nell and I would always look after each other.”
Kwong also shared how she came out as gay to her family at the age of 19. After telling her mother Pauline, Kwong waited another six months to break the news to her father Maurice. But he suspected that Kwong was seeing a woman and confronted her one evening.
“He came into my room and said, ‘So darling, are you seeing that woman?’” Kwong recalled.
“And I said, ‘Yes dad, I am. Dad, I’m gay.’
“I said, ‘Dad, I respect you. During our childhood, you and Mum always brought us up to be truthful and honest, and you’ve always said to us, we three kids, that you just want us to be happy.’
“I said, ‘Dad, this makes me really happy. This is just who I am. And I’m really sorry if I’ve disappointed you or let you down but I just need to be myself.’”
He thanked her for her honesty but asked her to move out of the house in four days.
“’From this moment, I disown you as my daughter’, he said that, he said that sentence,” Kwong recounted.
“’And when you call home, you can speak to your mum and your brothers, but I’m not going to speak to you’.”
However, after two “very quiet” nights, she woke up to her father’s “sobbing face on my pillow”. He took back his words and asked her to stay, Kwong said.
“His whole kind of energy and demeanour was of this vulnerable … a lot kind of smaller presence. A beautiful presence,” said Kwong.
“And he’s like, ‘Oh my darling, I can’t do it to you. You’re my baby. You’re my little girl, and I love you and I just can’t … Even though I don’t understand your way of life, I can’t throw you out and I love you and I want you to stay.’
“What he actually did in that moment was, he was 52, he dropped 52 years of ego, just like that.
“He had done this transformation in those two silent nights. He dropped ego and he became human.”
Since then, Kwong maintained a “wonderful relationship” with her father until his death from prostate cancer in 2006.
Two months later, Kwong started a relationship with Nell. She proposed to the artist in 2015 and tied the knot in March this year.