Early Life and Education
Nguyen was born in Singapore, where her family emigrated from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. She is the youngest of three children born to a half French mother and full Vietnamese father. Nguyen has an older brother, Daniel and older sister, Terri. When she was one year old, the family relocated to a neighborhood in Houston, Texas and were eventually admitted to a gated community run by a strict Buddhist temple. The family left the community when Nguyen was eight.
While in middle school, Nguyen became a tomboy and was eventually sent to a boarding school for six months for her combative behavior before transferring to another school. While in high school, she used her sister's identification card to enter nightclubs, where she began taking drugs and joined a gang. She was given the nickname "Tila Tequila" by friends due to her apparent allergy to alcohol. In her memoir, she would later explain that she felt "confused" and "lost" from various personal family and environmental issues and lost her virginity at 15. She turned to writing poems in an attempt to release powerful emotions, and friends outside the gang briefly helped turn her life around. At age 16, Nguyen ran to Queens, New York for several months. While still 16, she experienced a drive-by shooting in Houston. She reports having become pregnant and suffering a miscarriage the following year.
Nguyen graduated from Alief Hastings High School in 2000. She has cited the violent adolescence she had in Texas as her reason for becoming a model and moving to California in 2001. In a March 2003 interview, she revealed that she has taken some college classes but does not have a degree, stating, "I didn't want to go to college for an actual degree because there's nothing out there I like besides doing something that involves the entertainment industry."
Read more about this topic: I Love U (Tila Tequila Song)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“Franklin said once in one of his inspired flights of malignity—
Early to bed and early to rise
Make a man healthy and wealth and wise.
As if it were any object to a boy to be healthy and wealthy and wise on such terms.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“On the farm I had learned how to meet realities without suffering either mentally or physically. My initiative had never been blunted. I had freedom to succeed—freedom to fail. Life on the farm produces a kind of toughness.”
—Bertha Van Hoosen (1863–1952)
“If the education and studies of children were suited to their inclinations and capacities, many would be made useful members of society that otherwise would make no figure in it.”
—Samuel Richardson (1689–1761)