Alexander Yung (born May 10, 1947) was one of Michael Rosen's childhood friends. He was the first Asian child on Rosen's street.
Yung's father, Lawrence Yung, was a plumber who moved from Hong Kong to England at age nine in 1927. He met Alexander's mother, schoolteacher Anna Wong, in 1930. They were both exchange students attending a private school in Manhattan. They became engaged in 1935, broke off the engagement in 1937, but later reconciled and married in 1939. The day Alexander was born, there was a tornado that caused power outages in many houses, including the Yung house. He was delivered by candlelight.
Yung has two brothers: Paul (born July 12, 1942) and James (born April 28, 1951).
Yung's father died in 1967 from lung cancer (he had smoked a pack-and-a-half of cigarettes a day).
Since Yung's family was too poor for him to attend college, Yung moved in with his siblings and mother in 1968 to a house owned by his mother's second husband, a Chinese-American named Thomas Woo.