The Story Behind The Influencers Before Us: Inheritance, Identity, and Jewellery
A childhood in Joo Chiat, a UNESCO Heritage neighbourhood
I grew up in Singapore, in Joo Chiat, a UNESCO Heritage neighbourhood where five generations of my family have lived. Its pastel colour-blocked shophouses, tiled walkways, and shuttered windows were never just architecture. They were inheritance — witnesses to a culture called Peranakan, and the heartbeat of much of Choo Yilin’s work.
Pastel Peranakan shophouses in Joo Chiat, Singapore.
For those who have never heard the word, Peranakan was never simply tradition. It was defiance. A refusal to stay in one world alone. It took fragments from everywhere — Chinese, Malay, Indian, European — and wove them into something entirely new. Audacious in its blending, it was a culture born not from purity, but from collision.
Today, in a world still drawing lines and hardening borders, this story carries a radical truth: the most extraordinary things happen when we dare to mix, to merge, to create from difference.
This is why we made The Influencers Before Us. Jewellery holds these truths in miniature — delicate objects carrying vast histories. From the hands of our grandmothers to our own, they remind us that beauty is not only inherited; it is re-imagined, again and again.
Jewellery as inheritance
The film traces this journey. A child opens her grandmother’s jewellery box — velvet and brocade giving way to treasures that are more than gemstones. Lace from Holland, embroidery from China, Malay soul stitched between them. A porcelain vase, neither fully European nor fully Chinese, yet somehow both. Every piece a reminder: we were blending long before there was a word for it.
As she grows, she learns to stitch herself together — jade bangles with vintage diamonds beside friendship bracelets. What once seemed “strange” reveals itself as a lineage of alchemy. She sees it everywhere now: in the women who inspire us, crossing borders of genre and expectation — Michelle Yeoh, Lisa, Laufey — and in the way we live our everyday lives, sipping coconut-milk lattes with matcha tiramisu. Culture is never a choice between one world or another. It is the bridge we create between them.
As an adult, she returns to that jewellery box. Slipping on heirlooms for weddings, for date nights, for ordinary Tuesdays, she hears her grandmother’s voice: These are not just ornaments. They are love letters — from me, and from every woman who came before me.
“What we inherit is never just the past. It is the courage to keep weaving, to keep becoming.”
Jewellery as memory
The Influencers Before Us is not nostalgia. It is an invitation — to feel the past in your hands, to sense the stories threaded through every piece. Jewellery is not just beauty; it is memory, it is voice, it is love made tangible. When we wear these pieces — jade or diamonds, heirloom or handmade — we are part of the same rhythm, the same quiet rebellion, the same act of creation that has been passing from hand to hand for generations.
Wherever you call home, I hope that when you watch this film, you see yourself. Your own in-betweens. Your own inheritances. And perhaps, the reminder that most unexpected beauty emerges when we bring together what seems so different and make it ours.