The Early Years
Born 夏令震 Xià Lìng-Zhèn (Hsia Ling-Jun) in Hong Kong, he was the fifth child in a family of eight children. At the age of six he was enrolled at the Peking Opera School The China Drama Academy. He was given the stage name Yuen Biao (Little Tiger) and trained alongside schoolmates Jackie Chan, Sammo Hung, Corey Yuen, Yuen Wah and several others, under master Yu Jim-yuen, who would later become famous in Hong Kong cinema. He quickly showed a talent for acrobatics. According to Jackie Chan's autobiography when Yuen was first asked by his master, upon his first day with him, to do a backflip, Yuen did a proper backflip on his very first try. He remained at the school until the age of 16. When he left, Yuen followed his classmate Sammo Hung into a career in the Hong Kong film industry.
Read more about this topic: Yuen Biao
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“If we focus exclusively on teaching our children to read, write, spell, and count in their first years of life, we turn our homes into extensions of school and turn bringing up a child into an exercise in curriculum development. We should be parents first and teachers of academic skills second.”
—Neil Kurshan (20th century)