Chen was born in Changchun, China in 1976, the daughter of an ice hockey coach and a table tennis player.

She often out-jumped many of her contemporaries and the world's top figure skaters, including Kristi Yamaguchi, Midori Ito, Tonya Harding, Surya Bonaly, and Nancy Kerrigan.

This generated excitement about her prospects at a time when triple jumps were beginning to dominate women's figure skating, while Chen's artistic talents were praised by such American commentators as Scott Hamilton and Sandra Bezic.

In the fall of 1991, she became the first Chinese figure skater to compete in the United States when she finished 4th at the Skate America competition held in Oakland, California.

Although she landed the difficult combination, she had problems executing other required elements, such as falling out of a double flip and having off-centered spins.

These successes were somewhat overshadowed by the Kerrigan/Harding controversy surrounding the Olympics and by the meteoric rise of another young skater, Oksana Baiul.

Sandra Bezic, a choreographer and television commentator, said that "With this program [Chen] says she wants to combine her Asian heritage with a sport that has been originated in the West."

This program actually had a higher technical difficulty at the 1994 NHK Trophy as she doubled out the second triple Lutz at the World Championships.

[citation needed] Her free skating program was choreographed by Toller Cranston, combined Chinese and Western movement and music styles, and produced striking visual imagery.

As figure skating writer and historian Ellyn Kestnbaum put it, Chen combined Eastern and Western images, freely moving between elegance and earthiness.

It remains a widely discussed result, but an explanation for Kwan's higher technical scores is that she landed 7 triple jumps to Chen's 6 and featured harder and more varied spins.

She withdrew from competitions in the fall of 1996, citing injury and was ill-prepared for the 1997 World Championships (she was pressured to go by the Chinese government to qualify a spot for the Winter Olympics).

In the summer of 1997, Chen, working with a new coach named Liu Hongyun, qualified for the Olympics by winning the 1997 Karl Schäfer Memorial and also finished 4th and 3rd at events in France and Japan, respectively.

[citation needed] Figure skating writer and historian Ellyn Kestnbaum called Chen's free skate "a musically sensitive, floaty, feminine long program interpreting the traditional Chinese story of lovers transformed into butterflies".

[5] Afterwards, her performance was regarded as one of the great comebacks of the Olympic games and is memorable for the emotion she displayed during and after her free skate.

Chen bowed to her coaches following her free skating performance, as she was leaving competition ice for the last time, in gratitude for their training.

The Chinese Federation asked Chen to skate at the 9th National Games of China in 2001, so she could help younger skaters improve their elegance.

In the book, Chen mentions how Li started spreading rumors to the Chinese government that she was planning to defect to America, which were untrue.

[6] Note: At the 1994 World Championships, Chen finished second in her qualifying group behind Josee Chouinard, but was then forced to withdraw from the competition before the short program due to injury.