Early Years
Li Jiawei, the only daughter of a government official and a housewife, was born on 9 August 1981 in Beijing, People's Republic of China. In 1990, Li was a student at the Beijing Shichahai Sports School. She then entered the Beijing provincial team in 1994. Her skill in table tennis was recognized by Singaporean talent scouts and she was invited to train in Singapore under the Foreign Sports Talent Scheme in 1996, returning to China once a year to visit her parents. She began representing Singapore internationally in competitive table tennis the following year. At 18, she became a Singapore citizen.
Read more about this topic: Li Jiawei
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or years:
“Some men have a necessity to be mean, as if they were exercising a faculty which they had to partially neglect since early childhood.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“We need not have the loftiest mind to understand that here is no lasting and real satisfaction, that our pleasures are only vanity, that our evils are infinite, and, lastly, that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years under the dreadful necessity of being forever either annihilated or unhappy.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)