C
While many young celebrities, especially pretty women, are unwilling to talk about their humble origins, Lu Yan is never too shy to talk about her hometown a small village in northern Jiangxi Province. Surrounded by high mountains, silver stone mining is the major source of wealth in the town where she was born in 1981. When she goes home to visit, she has to take a train from the provincial capital Nanchang for more than an hour, then change to a bus for another hour and a half.
Lu is the eldest of three siblings. "We broke the family planning policy, because village people always want a son," she said smiling. Lu wears clothes from big-name designers now, but when she was a child she often went several years without new clothes. "I grew tall so fast that my mother thought buying new clothes was wasteful," she said. She had no choice but to wear hand-me-downs from relatives.
Lu still remembers clearly her first "made to order" clothing. She picked cotton for a whole summer vacation and earned 90 yuan (US$11). She spent 6 yuan (US$0.70) to take a bus to the county where she asked a tailor to make a coat according to a design in a magazine. "At that time, I thought it was a very modern design," she said. It meant more to her than all the haute couture（高级时装设计）she owned later.
