Zayn Malik on His Life With Khai and How He and Gigi Hadid Chose Where to Raise Her
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Zayn Malik lives his life largely out of the spotlight, but as he gears up to release his album Room Under the Stairs, the singer opened up to L’Officiel about his life in rural Pennsylvania. Malik has lived there for about seven years as he co-parents his daughter, Khai, with ex-girlfriend Gigi Hadid. Hadid herself spends time in both Pennsylvania, where her family has a farm, and New York City, where she has an apartment.
Malik revealed he made the decision to raise Khai in rural Pennsylvania “pretty quickly.”
He said of the area, “I’m quite an outdoorsy person—I did fall in love with the landscapes and serenity. You get a lot of time to really think about things.” Then he shared why he chose to make it his and Khai’s home: “When I found out that my partner at the time was pregnant, I pretty quickly made up my mind that this would be a great place to raise a child because there’s so much for her to do here. So, we do spend a lot of time outside. We do the gardening. She likes to camp with me. We cook outside. We fish a little bit. And she’s really into it, too, so it makes it fun. Hopefully, we can create some amazing memories here.”
He spoke about his passion for gardening too, saying, “I got into it when I moved out here, probably about seven years ago. And now I get to share that experience with her [Khai], because I’ve gotten a bit better at things. My crops are actually edible and usable. So it’s really fun to take her out to the garden and show her the vegetable patch and all the different things in the garden, you know, what she can eat and what she can’t. She’s really interested in it. She loves raw vegetables. I’ll just find her, like, munching on a piece of broccoli, which is a parent’s worst nightmare, you know?” He laughed. “Whatever way you can get veggies into your kids, right?”
He shared that Khai doesn’t spend time with him when he’s recording music, but reiterated that she does have a gift for music. “It’s past her bedtime,” he began of when his sessions happen. “She doesn’t come to the studio, but she’s starting to understand that Baba sings and Baba does music. She asks everybody, whenever there’s a song on the radio, ‘Is my Baba singing?’ But in front of me, she kind of gets shy about it. Khai has a lot of natural ability herself already. I know, it sounds ridiculous because she’s three, but her retention for language, especially when it’s formatted in a musical sense to her, has been amazing. She'll remember every lyric of every song that she likes. She remembers chord progressions and notes. She can do runs that have, like, three, four notes already. I look forward to seeing what she’s going to be capable of doing as she gets older.”
His approach to raising Khai is simple, he revealed: “I’m just trying to keep her grounded and enjoying the Earth, rather than all the noise that comes with it.”
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