She came to hockey the way most girls of her generation did: through a door that wasn't built for them. She tried figure skating, she tried soccer, and then she found ice hockey and couldn't leave it. She deferred her Harvard admission to make the 2002 Salt Lake City team at eighteen, left mid-career to play in Turin, then returned to captain the Crimson and become the NCAA's all-time leading scorer with 284 points, a record that stood until 2011. She majored in psychology and women's studies. She played in four Olympics, never winning gold, and kept showing up anyway, which is its own kind of answer to the question of what a competitor is made of. Since 2016 she has been head coach at Concordia University, building the next generation of players the same way she built herself.

She and Caroline Ouellette, her partner and one of the most decorated players in Canadian hockey history, live in Montreal with their two daughters, Liv and Tessa. The two had spent years on opposite sides of the most consequential rivalry in women's hockey, with Ouellette winning gold for Canada in the very finals where Chu came up short. Through every gold medal game, every overtime loss, she and Ouellette were on opposite sides of the ice and nobody knew. She carved the whole thing out quietly, on her own terms, start to finish.