Nguyen was born in Singapore, where her family had emigrated from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. When Nguyen was a year old, she and her family moved to Alief, a suburb of Houston, where they lived, until they were admitted to a gated community run by a strict Buddhist temple. The family left the community when Nguyen was eight.

While in middle school, Nguyen became a tomboy and was eventually sent to a boarding school for six months for her combative behavior before transferring to another school. While in high school, she used her sister's identification card to enter nightclubs, where she began recreational drug use and joined a gang. In an interview with Import Tuner, Nguyen said she had been searching for a sense of identity: "I was really confused then, [because] at first I thought I was black, then I thought I was Hispanic and joined a cholo gang". Later, friends outside the gang briefly helped turn her life around. However her past caught up with her, and she fled to