Early Life
Lucy Liu was born in Jackson Heights, Queens, New York. In high school, she adopted her middle name "Alexis". She is the youngest of three children born to Cecilia, who worked as a biochemist, and Tom Liu, who was trained as a civil engineer but sold digital clock pens. Her parents worked many jobs when Lucy and her siblings were growing up. Both of Liu's parents were immigrants from Taiwan of Chinese descent. She has an older brother, John, and an older sister, Jenny. Liu has stated that she grew up in a "diverse" neighborhood. She learned to speak Mandarin Chinese at home and began studying English when she was five years old.
Liu attended Joseph Pulitzer Middle School (I.S.145). She graduated from Stuyvesant High School in 1986. She enrolled at New York University and transferred to the University of Michigan, where she was a member of the Chi Omega sorority. Liu earned a bachelor's degree in Asian languages and cultures. In Michigan, Liu worked as a waitress.
Read more about this topic: Lucy Liu
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went or you didn’t, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.”
—Linda Grant (b. 1949)
“School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.”
—Ivan Illich (b. 1926)