I’m Chrislyn
welcome ~
storyweaver • artist • facilitator
foodie • gamer • scribe • lore lover
The first “living heirloom” she ever made was for the dead.
When my grandparents passed away in 2013, I felt a strange ache — not the grief of losing someone close, but the grief of not even knowing them well enough to grieve them.
This longing for missed connection birthed my first act of remembrance: creating a memorial video as a surprise gift for my parents.
Going in, even my grandparents’ real names were a mystery to me. Asking my relatives for help, I stitched our scattered fragments of memory — photos, obituaries, email anecdotes — into a homespun portrait of the elders I wished I’d known.
This gift brought my family closer. Tears flowed, and stories surfaced. In the creation process, the video opened my senses to feel the enduring warmth of my ancestors’ presence.
I didn’t know it then, but this earnest offering would become the first seam of my storyliving praxis — weaving inheritance into belonging, day by day.
Deep gratitude to videographer Jim Quattrocki for offering the encouragement I needed in the most unlikely place — right outside an operating room, live-streaming an open-heart surgery for high school students to chat with the surgeon. In hindsight, it was a perfect stage for the muse to upend my medical career plans and open my heart to the life-changing medicine of intergenerational relationship.
“The world is a story lab!” she proclaimed. In truth, she simply longed to understand her own.
Curious why our brains cling to stories (even untrue ones), I wove my neuroscience and film studies at Duke University with local and global change movements. I was hungry to understand how the stories we tell shape the lives we live, and how that could deepen my craft as a visual storyteller.
From interfaith arts-activism in Durham, North Carolina, to cross-border peace-building in Medellín, Colombia, my documentary work began to surface deeper questions about power and responsibility:
How do I steward a story well?
If our liberation is intertwined, how are our histories connected? Whose wins am I benefiting from? Whose wounds am I unknowingly perpetuating?
I resist certain narratives being put upon me, but do I truly know my own?
Whose stories and decisions made my presence – and privilege – possible?
What if my hyphenated identity is actually a strength, instead of a burden?
I couldn’t answer these questions from an intellectual distance. When I turned 25, this “quarter-life identity crisis” compelled me to move to China to explore my roots. Instead of relying on hearsay, I wanted to turn the lens on my lineage and let my homelands speak directly to me.
In search of home, she crossed oceans & borders ~ not the first, nor the last to carry this dream.
Growing up, I always felt in-between cultures: Confused in the U.S., more Malaysian outside Malaysia, and never quite Chinese enough.
When I returned with the intention to put down roots (not just visit), I felt welcomed home to a village I’d never known, yet belonged to all along.
Living in Beijing, diasporic friends gifted me the language to express my multitudes, while the international community invited me to channel my lifelong instinct for code-switching into building bridges as an artist and facilitator.
When I returned to my ancestral villages in Fujian and Guangzhou, I reconnected with long-lost relatives and finally learned the stories that shaped us: why artisanship runs in our lineage, how Christianity entered our family, and what happened to the grand-uncles who fought on opposite sides of the civil war.
And then two sets of heirlooms came along and changed me.
[1] Ancestral Portraits
Paintings of my maternal great-grandparents, seen in their hometown Zhao An, Fujian. Commissioned in Malaysia by my grandfather and mailed back when he could not return during the Cultural Revolution.
Before leaving home, my grandfather planted a tree in the courtyard and promised his mother:
“As long as this tree grows, it will mark the time until I return home to you.”
But he never made it back before she passed.
By the time I returned in his place, only a tree stump remained.
Standing there decades later, it dawned on me:
These portraits were his version of the video tribute I’d made for him — heirlooms crafted from longing, attempting to bridge time.
In that moment, our souls made contact. I felt our shared yearning resonating across the ages. And with it came an indescribable sense of ease and release:
I had come home in his place. Completing the circle he began, I finally felt free to carry our inheritance forward in my own way.
[2] The (Un)Finished Quilts
Woven from matrilineal love. Gifted from one generation of women to the next.
While cleaning our maternal grandparents’ home in Malaysia, my relatives and I uncovered an unfinished quilt — hand-stitched by our grandmother from the outgrown clothes of her nine children.
Gorgeously textured, the quilt offered a rare glimpse into the vivid imagination and rich inner world of a woman whose gentle presence had long been overshadowed by her domineering husband.
The final row of unstitched pieces felt like a quiet elegy: What dreams did she leave unfinished? What stories did she never get to live or tell?
Later, I learned this quilt was one of many in our family, passed down from mother to daughter. When I eventually moved in with my aunt, she gifted me the quilt she herself had inherited — a lush mosaic she remembers helping her grandmother cut fabric for as a child.
To me, each quilt holds a bittersweet paradox at the heart of my work:
To preserve the gift, we shouldn’t touch it.
To enjoy the gift, we must.
These questions continue to guide me as I explore this tension between archive and embodiment, between safeguarding the past and letting it change through us…
How do we keep our stories alive without freezing them in time?
How do we protect what’s precious without losing the warmth of its touch?
How do we inherit not only objects, but also the courage and creativity that brought them to life?
“Goodbye… and hello, again,” she whispered.
Perhaps, this is what it means to come home ~ to behold and be held, again and again.
When the pandemic cut short my life in China, I lost a version of Chrislyn that had finally felt whole.
That rupture invited me into an apprenticeship with grief. In the stillness, grief taught me to close the open loops — to shed inherited patterns that no longer served, and to choose rhythms that resonated with who I was becoming.
In lockdown with my parents, I started re-parenting my inner child, learning to hold my parts with tenderness and unburden their sorrow through compassionate self-witnessing.
To stay connected with friends scattered to the winds, I began playing games together on Discord — eventually planting a global village for ancestral detectives to trace their roots together.
When the bittersweet lore and magical music of Genshin Impact made me feel all my feels, the piano called me back. Playing again helped me metabolize pain into pleasure, softening years of performance anxiety.
Each ending birthed a new beginning — and by 2021, I had moved to Oakland, California to root my creative practice in the storied lineages of artists, healers, and organizers practicing regeneration in community.
Through seasons of holding and being held, I’ve learned to embody the meaning of my Chinese name 朱琦恩, precious grace, as a posture of sweet surrender with open hands — welcoming life to move through me, again and again.
✶ lineages + guides ✶
Oceans of love & gratitude to my village ~ I am who I am because of you.
Thank you for shaping my being and becoming for the better.
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YES! Jams (Asian Diaspora Jam + Arts Jam)
Asian American Documentary Network
Hoyoverse fandom creators
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Miurel Price ~ ancestral communion
Norman Tran ~ poetics of relationshipping
Eunice Kimian ~ vocal healing & liberation
Denise Kwan ~ object stories & zine-making
Tiffany Wong ~ inner child healing & creativity
Tian Tian Li & Xuel Sun ~ ancestral homecoming
Christena Cleveland ~ resilient racial justice leadership
Lynda Roberts & Nan Henson ~ Enneagram certification
Francis Weller ~ metabolizing grief
Norman Wirzba ~ theology of creation
John Bucher ~ embodied mythology
Adam Hollowell ~ resonance writing
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Ancestral Remembrance
Grief Tending & Ritual
Internal Family Systems (IFS) parts work
Conscious Uncoupling
Conflict Transformation
Narrative Therapy Principles
Qigong Foundations
Enneagram (certified)
✶ artisan kudos ✶
Chrysalis & butterfly motifs by Jess X. Snow
Portrait photography by Mar Mizunaka
Calligraphy by my grandfather 許偉乾
CHRISLYN CHOO 朱琦恩 (she/her) guides descendants from storytelling to storyliving — transforming inherited narratives into embodied practices of belonging.
An Emmy-winning storyweaver, facilitator, and multimedia artist, she creates ritual-informed spaces that honor our multitudes and metabolize grief and joy into collective resilience – so we can become better ancestors today.
From living heirlooms to villaging practices, she supports families and faith communities in tending their lineages with reverence and reciprocity. She co-created Grief Is Human, a resource for navigating loss with grace, and founded the My China Roots community, a global village on Discord where ancestral detectives help each other trace their family history.
Rooted in the U.S., China, and Malaysia, Chrislyn feels most alive in the tender work of crystallizing 只可意会, 不可言传: what can be deeply felt, yet eludes words.
