Ten years ago, if you asked the average Hongkonger to describe Fala Chen, they would say she was a pretty face on Hong Kong television station TVB, one who joined the city’s entertainment industry after winning a beauty pageant.
Interestingly, a career in the limelight was never on the cards for her until she stumbled upon it at university.
Chen was born in 1982 and raised in the Chinese city of Chengdu. Her paternal grandfather Chen Xuan was an opera singer from a Shanghai merchant family, and she learned traditional Chinese dance from the age of four.
In a 2016 interview, she said that she was “the worst kid you could ask for” and “did the opposite of everything my parents asked me to do”. Luckily, she added, her parents allowed her, their only child, to “discover the world on my own”.
