“I was playing in the Asian Olympic Games in Chicago, and my friend, she’s a plastic surgeon, she and I were showering together,” Minka recalled about her start as an adult model.
“She said to me, ‘Why don’t you get into the men’s magazines? Don’t teach tennis. How much money can you make teaching tennis?
“I had natural boobs. Thirty-six double-D. Very small body and a cute face, but I said to my friend, ‘How can I do this kind of modeling, showing my pussy and everything? I cannot do that.’ And she said. ‘You have the look. Do it.’ So I gave up trying to teach tennis and jumped into the magazines.
“I didn’t even know about the magazines. I had never seen them. So she brought SCORE magazine the next day, and she said she’d never seen any cover of SCORE with an Asian girl. She said, ‘You have a photogenic face. You’re going to make it.’ I thought I had a cute face. Not because I love myself, but I thought I was soft to look at, even without looking at my boobs. My boobs were a perfect size, 36 double-D. When I had those boobs, I could fly everywhere without getting attention. I like my boobs now, but those were perfect for my body.
“When my friend showed me the magazine, I saw the telephone number and that’s what I called. I sent three Polaroid pictures. Next, John Graham got the pictures, then he called my house. He said, ‘An airplane ticket is going to be at your house in one or two days. I want you to come to England.’ That’s it. So I went to England. And he took a test picture and said I would be on the cover, and then he said that I would be a feature dancer. I followed what Lisa Lipps and Casey James were doing. I didn’t know how to dance that way. I didn’t know how to sing. I didn’t know how to take off the clothes. But I knew how to smile, and I learned what to do.”
This pictorial was shot in October 1995 by John Graham’s British team. They would shoot nearly all of Minka’s magazine pictorials during the 1990s.