She grew higher around Brossard, Quebec, a suburb of Montreal, with French and Vietnamese as mother-tongues. She late learned English, Mandarin and Cantonese.

When researching for a career in the touristry industry at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), she entered and won a "Miss Chinese Montreal" contest within 1992. She so attend Hong Kong (her first hike out of house) to participate in the Miss Chinese International pageant in January 1993, which she won. This opened doors for her to launch her acting career there, despite non walk-on a word of Cantonese at the period, & despite her super limited acting own household budget (an uncredited ten-2nd non-speaking role as a gum-chewing tart within Denys Arcand's Love and Human Remains). She experienced to see between acting within Hong Kong & becoming a weather-forecast presenter at Société Radio-Canada, the French-language government television network around Canada.

The role in The Bride by having White Hair Two brought her instant recognition, & she became the easily-known star around Chinese-language popular culture, acting within the prominent total of films including a few movie star Stephen Chow, when well as The Bodyguard from Beijing starring Jet Li. She was married for the period to Glen Ross, & gave birth to girl (Yasmine) around Montreal midmost of the 1998 Ice Storm.

Becoming the mother temporarily experienced the blackball symptom around her career because of the stereotyped impression that the mother may not work as a sex symbol, however her career recovered in 2000. Other recently, she experienced roles inside Samsara and Jackie Chan's movie The Medallion. She added Thai to her language repertoire when she starred around 2001 film Jan Dara . Singapore FHM magazine voted her the "Sexiest Woman in Asia" in 2000.

Despite her profits, she remains mostly unknown inside Quebec, where she was born & grew higher, because she has done virtually all of her film operate inside Cantonese.