Chin was born in Shanghai, China. Beginning at the age of nine, Chin attended the Childrens Music School at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music for three years to study piano. When she was thirteen, her education abruptly stopped due to the Cultural Revolution. After a little more than two years idling at school with chaos everywhere in China, Chin was sent to a farm in the very north of China near Siberia, three days away from Shanghai by train, as part of Mao Zedongs educated youth program. Many other children her age were sent there as well. More than forty children lived in one room. They each had a “living” space of two feet. She worked on that farm for nine years, until Chairman Mao's death, which ended the Cultural Revolution.
For nine years, a Chin and group of other children quietly studied math, physics and chemistry. Her parents and friend's mother in Shanghai sent them textbooks and they taught themselves. At the farm, they had no phones. Electricity had to be turned off no later than 9 p.m., so they studied in the evenings with candlelight. In 1977, the National College Entrance Examination that were stopped during the Cultural Revolution, resumed. Chin had to take two college entrance exams, a preliminary and a final. Because of her studies at night, she passed the preliminary exam. After the preliminary test results came back, Chin was given two hours to choose a college and a major from the hand-written list posted on the walls inside a classroom in a local elementary school. She chose one college that was near her home in Shanghai as well as others in different places.
Chin received a B.S. degree in chemistry from East China Normal University in 1982, a M.A. degree in chemistry from Ball State University in 1986, and a Ph.D. degree in Atmospheric Sciences from Georgia Tech in 1992. During her graduate study in Georgia Tech, Chin was involved in field experiments measuring atmospheric constituents, laboratory study determining atmospheric photochemical reaction rates and product yields, and one-dimensional photochemical model estimating stratospheric sulfur budget. Her dissertation was titled An atmospheric study of carbonyl sulfide and carbon disulfide and their relationship to stratospheric background sulfur aerosol. Chin's doctoral advisors were Paul Wine and Douglas Davis.
Between 1992 and 1995, Chin was a postdoctoral fellow in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences where she worked with 3-dimensional regional and global atmospheric chemistry and transport models for studying tropospheric ozone, aerosols, and trace gases.