Yang's mother is an obstetrician-gynaecologist. Ruilin's parents were illiterate, but he read books for hours by candlelight and eventually got into university-a rarity so soon after the Cultural Revolution (1966–1976), which effectively shut down universities. His father, Ruilin, was raised in a rural part of the Inner Mongolia region of mainland China, growing up in a straw and mud hut. Yang was born in Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, to a family that had emigrated from China in the 1980s.
