Nguyen was born in Singapore, where her family were Vietnamese boat people, who arrived from Vietnam after the Vietnam War. Nguyen has an older brother, Daniel, and older sister, Terri. When she was one year old, the family relocated to a neighborhood in Houston, Texas and were eventually admitted to a gated community run by a strict Buddhist temple. The family left the community when Nguyen was eight.

Nguyen's career began at the age of 19 when she was discovered at the Sharpstown Mall by a Playboy scout and was offered a chance to model nude for the magazine. She did a test shoot, then eventually moved to Southern California and was featured as Playboy's Cyber Girl of the week on April 22, 2002, and soon thereafter she became the first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month. A few more pictorials for the magazine followed.  At age 20, Nguyen acted on her interest in rock music and started looking for bands willing to let her join. She eventually assembled a band called Beyond Betty Jean, for which she was singer and songwriter. Beyond Betty Jean eventually broke up and Nguyen started working in recording studios to sharpen her vocal skills and wrote music. Later, she became the lead singer of a band called Jealousy, which released a few songs online before breaking up. In 2003, Nguyen was a contestant on VH1's Surviving Nugent, a reality TV show where participants performed compromising tasks and stunts for rock star Ted Nugent.  Nguyen gained further popularity through the import racing scene. She has been featured on the cover of Import Tuner magazine, at car shows such as Hot Import Nights, and in the video game Street Racing Syndicate. Nguyen joined Myspace in the fall of 2003 after getting booted off of Friendster multiple times. Time Magazine, in a 2006 profile of Nguyen noted her impact on the platform stating "Pre-Tila, your MySpace friends were mostly people you actually knew. Post-Tila, the biggest game on the site became Who Has the Most Friends, period, whoever they might be." also calling her, the "Queen" of the site.

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