She has two sisters and two half-

siblings from her mother's previous marriage in Vietnam. The family moved to Hawaii and settled in Mililani. She dreamed of becoming a veterinarian, but after graduating from Mililani High School she traveled to Japan and Hong Kong to earn money as a fashion model and burst onto the Hong Kong movie scene. In 1998 she got her first role in a Chinese TV series, and she has been acting ever since.  
She changed her name to the easily pronounceable "Maggie Q" (for the Chinese audience) and eventually became a full-fledged superstar in Asia.  

While still relatively unfamiliar to audiences in the United States, she has achieved celebrity status in Hong Kong and elsewhere in East Asia. Because of her non-Chinese heritage, many of her Asian film appearances are in English or dubbed in Chinese.  

Her big breakthroughs into the film world came when she bagged the lead roles in the Hong Kong action thrillers Gen-Y Cops and Naked Weapon, in which she played the sexy but vulnerable martial artist assassin Charlene Ching.  

She pursued modeling careers first in Japan, then Taiwan and Hong Kong. Her transition into acting was almost coincidental and since then she has become both a top model and actress in Hong Kong, along with garnering a certain amount of fame across Asia. She is a successful model and rising actress, featuring in magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Elle, FHM and Marie Claire amongst many others. Her film credits include Gen-Y Cops, Manhattan Midnight, Rush Hour 2 and Naked Weapon.  

She was dancing pretty dirtily in Naked Weapon and she looks gorgeous in her role as a Chinese lady-killer from the Black Scorpion gang in "Around the world in 80 days".