Yun-Jou Chang

Five things that shaped Yun-Jou Chang
Song: I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free, Nina Simone
Book: 24 Tales of Filial Piety + Shel Silverstein’s The Missing Piece and The Giving Tree. They are linked in dialogue in my psyche.
Film: Blue Butterfly Effect, Emmanuel Moonchil Park
Trip: China 2008, with my grandmother who was visiting her hometown for the first time since leaving nearly 60 years ago
Advice: It is in the nature of acting, of doing the right thing, that despair recedes at least for a moment, and its place is taken by something else: hopeless hope, for example. Those who work these furrows know that hope is not contingent. Sometimes the worse things get, the more hope there is, for hope is an act of the deeper self, or the freer part of a person. This is our most fundamental knowledge of ourselves … a movement that sees where we could go. It is hopeless, I say, but not in vain. - David Schulman in Freedom and Despair: Notes from the South Hebron Hill