About The Author

Monika Tep is a Cambodian-born author, licensed esthetician, entrepreneur, and former owner of Monika Day Spa in Beverly Hills. After immigrating to Los Angeles in 2010, she learned English, became a U.S. citizen in 2014, earned an associate degree in general business from Santa Monica College, and built a skincare career grounded in dignity, healing, and self-worth.

Long before she arrived in California, Monika was drawn to makeup, modeling, performance, and the possibility of transformation. As a young woman in Cambodia, she came to understand beauty not merely as appearance, but as confidence, dignity, and the ache of wanting to be seen differently. Earlier interviews have traced how those early dreams led to photo shoots, magazine features, television appearances, and formal training in the beauty industry.

When she arrived in America, Monika carried an interrupted education: she had never finished second grade in Cambodia. She had to learn English while also learning how to build an adult life in a new country. Through persistence, she studied at Santa Monica College and earned an associate degree in general business, a milestone that represented far more than a diploma. It was proof that the girl whose education had been cut short could still become a woman who finished what she started.

As a licensed esthetician, Monika built a professional path rooted in technique, emotional presence, and genuine attention to each client. That work grew into Monika Day Spa in Beverly Hills, where clients came not only for skincare, but for the warmth and personal care associated with her treatments.

Her story has been featured in VoyageLA, Cambodge Mag, Khmer Times, and other interviews highlighting her path from Cambodia to California, her work in beauty and wellness, and her desire to tell the truth about her life. After recently closing the spa, she is turning toward writing, storytelling, and the deeper work of sharing the memoir she once needed but could not find.

Her memoir, Life Between Two Worlds: From Cambodia to Los Angeles: A Memoir of Silence, Survival, and Renewal, is an intimate account of family, trauma, faith, migration, shame, and healing. Written with compassion rather than revenge, the book asks what happens when pain travels through families and cultures without language, and what becomes possible when one woman finally chooses to speak.

Monika writes for readers who have carried silence, questioned their worth, loved complicated families, crossed borders within themselves, and wondered whether a wounded life can still become whole.

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An intimate memoir of family, migration, beauty, silence, and renewal. Monika Tep traces the love, wounds, and courage that carried her from Cambodia to Los Angeles, and from shame toward a life she could finally claim as her own.