Alysa Liu was born on August 8, 2005, in Clovis, California, the oldest child of Arthur Liu, an attorney who immigrated to the U.S. from a small mountain village in Sichuan, China, in the 1990s at the age of 25.[1][2] Liu is the oldest of five children; like her siblings, she was conceived through an anonymous egg donor and a surrogate mother.[3] At the time of Liu's birth, her father was still married to Yan "Mary" Qingxin, whom Liu and her siblings refer to as their mother and who acts as their legal guardian, even after her divorce from Arthur.