Though she was born in Hohhot, the capital of Inner Mongolia, pop star Wei Wei grew up in the southwestern Chinese province of Guangxi. At an early age she began singing and dancing, and in 1986 she was able to perform on the China Central Television Spring Festival Show. The next year she won the Sopot International Song Festival as the first representative ever for her country. Throughout the next few years Wei Wei continued to release more songs and become a familiar presence in China, thanks in part to her starring role in the 1991 film Diva's Story. Three years later, her first English-language record, The Twilight, was released, followed by Wei Wei's Devotion, a compilation album, in 1999 (the same year she moved to Sweden to escape the fame and paparazzi she faced in her homeland), and Myths of China and The New Wei, My New Way, sung in both English and Mandarin, followed shortly after. ~ Marisa Brown