Hong Kong-born, UK-based singer-songwriter and actress Qymira has been called an honorary Filipina, and she wears the title with visible emotion.
“This is something that is very, very special and dear to my heart,” she said, tracing the connection back to close Filipino friends who first opened her eyes to the culture, the family bonds, the warmth she now calls a second home. But it’s her work with the country’s children that she describes as something else entirely.
Qymira, whose real name is Leslie Loh, runs the One Gaia Foundation, which supports young people through music, arts, and sports programs across several countries, including the Philippines. Central to that work is her ongoing involvement with Lasting Hope Children with Cancer, where she spends time with young patients ranging from three to nineteen years old. She speaks about them with a kind of reverence. “The children of the Philippines are like models of the world, because it’s like sunshine,” she said. “They may be barefoot, they may have illness—but you will never see them cry, unless they are in pain.”
That resilience, she says, is what pulls her back again and again. “All they know is chemo, they only know about the pain, and they see their friends pass away next to them,” she said. “That’s why they ask, ‘is it my turn?'” And yet, she added, when these children find a moment of joy—drawing, playing, simply being kids—it can be heartbreaking in its simplicity. “Sometimes they just want to have hair again.”
It’s a helplessness she feels acutely, especially when her career pulls her elsewhere. “I feel helpless because I’m only one person, and if I am in Brazil working, I also cannot be there,” she said. But she believes the solution doesn’t require grand gestures—just attention. “If we all just think a little bit, to maybe not have a wine or lunch or something, you can already be there for more people.”
Qymira pushes back gently on the idea that she’s the one doing a kindness. “People say they are blessed because you help them. I know it’s the other way around,” she said, “because they touch me in ways that make me feel grateful every day.”
That same spirit of showing up for the Philippines has also shaped her work as an artist. Qymira is currently reuniting with Filipino filmmaker Pedring Lopez—who has said she’s “more Filipino than a lot of us”—for “Lotus,” an international action thriller also starring Cuba Gooding Jr., in which she plays lead actress and executive producer. Music, too, threads through the project; she recently recorded songs in Brazil that will appear in the film, alongside months of intensive training for her role.
But for Qymira, those milestones sit alongside a deeper throughline that has defined her time in the Philippines for years: the kids who, she says, have given her far more than she could ever give them. “If I can give more,” she said, “I will.”