Tse grew up in San Francisco and attended Emerson College in Boston.
Alex Tse, a Chinese American, was born in 1976 to a banker father and a teacher mother. He grew up in the Richmond District in San Francisco. He went to Alamo Elementary School, Presidio Middle School, and Lowell High School in the area. When Tse was growing up, his parents were movie fans, and he was incidentally exposed to movies not appropriate for his age like Heavy Metal, Prom Night, and Altered States. His father's favorite film was The Godfather, and the family would watch two films every Christmas, such as To Live and Die in L.A..
Tse attended Emerson College in Boston. When Tse was a first-year student at Emerson, he explored journalism as a career by having a radio show and realized that it was not his aspiration. He saw Pulp Fiction and was inspired by the film to pursue a screenwriting career. He described Pulp Fiction's influence on him:

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