Alysa Liu was born on August 8, 2005, in Clovis, California, the oldest child of Arthur Liu and Yan Qingxin (Mary). Her father, Arthur Liu, went into exile at age 25 in the 1990s from Guangzhou, China, to the United States due to the persecution of participants in the 1989 Democracy Movement. He later became a lawyer.[1][2][3] Liu is the oldest of five children. Like her siblings, she was conceived through an anonymous egg donor and a gestational surrogate.[4] After Liu's parents divorced, she remained close to her father, who continued to guide her skating career, but Yan was named as the siblings' legal guardian.[5]
Liu was considered the frontrunner female recruitment prospect for China as a part of its "naturalization project" to recruit overseas athletes in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics. Her father, however, would not be persuaded.[6] In March 2022, it was reported that Liu and her father had been targeted in November 2021 by spies allegedly under direction of the Chinese government, in an operation to collect private information on Chinese political dissidents living in the United States. One spy posed as a U.S. Olympic Committee official and requested copies of their passports. Her father stated that the scheme was likely designed to "intimidate" him and to "silence" him from "say[ing] anything political or related to human rights violations in China"; he added that he was concerned for his daughter's safety while she was in Beijing but he agreed to let her compete after receiving assurances that the U.S. State Department would take additional precautions to protect her.[7][8]
