We meet up with Chu in the vibrant East District of Taipei City. Holding a white cane in one hand, she listens to the traffic attentively, crossing the roads and navigating her way through the capital’s metro system with confid­ence and assurance—all on her own. One cannot but admire her courage, wondering how many difficult challenges she must have overcome.

A twist of fate

Julia Chu was always a high-achieving student. ­Adept at sport, art, and music, she even won first prize at a national school science fair. She dreamed of becoming a medical doctor, a scientist, or Taiwan’s president. Her ­future was full of exciting possibilities. No one imagined that she would suffer a cruel twist of fate at a tender age.

When she was 15, Chu experienced a sudden loss of hearing in her right ear. She began to walk unsteadily, and then to lose control of her limbs. She also started to have severe headaches and bouts of nausea. Her doctors eventually discovered a tumor in her brainstem. Measuring eight centimeters long, the tumor was inter­twined with many nerves and was pressing against them. Her condition was life-threatening. Chu had to drop out of school for two years. She traveled abroad twice for medical treatments and underwent four opera­tions. Although she has survived, her right eye is now completely blind, her left eye perceives light and shadow only very vaguely, her right ear is deaf, and she cannot coordinate movements on the right side of her body.

These devastating changes left Chu feeling suicidal. On countless occasions her mother burst into tears and said to her imploringly: “If you die, I won’t want to live anymore.” These words sounded tedious to Chu at first. One day, after staving off yet another of Chu’s suicide attempts, her mother gave her a hug and repeated the same words. This time, however, Chu felt a surge of compunction: whereas her parents had been giving her their unconditional love and toleration, she was wallow­ing in self-pity. At that moment Chu decided to give herself a chance to live.

Behind Julia Chu’s confident steps are innumerable trials and tribulations. Each new step serves to strengthen her courage.

A father’s love

In order for Chu to pick up her education again, her father sent her to a special school for the visually impaired, where she learned braille and undertook orientation and mobil­ity training. Impressed with her abilities to learn and to cope with frustrations, Chu’s teachers recommended she transfer to a mainstream senior high school.

After enrolling at Taipei Municipal Songshan Senior High, Chu realized that she was the only student there with sight loss. A sensitive soul, she was consumed with a sense of inferiority.

To help Chu reconcile herself to her blindness, Chu’s father trained her to travel by metro alone. At first he would hold her hand. Then he simply walked alongside her. Next, he gradually increased the distance between them, before finally asking her to rely entirely on herself. Whenever Chu fell over, he would only look on, heartbroken. At the time Chu thought her father cruel, but she eventually realized that learning to use her white cane symbolized her first step toward self-acceptance. Underlying the harsh training was her father’s love. “A person who suffers failure is not defeated by external circumstances, but by her inner self.” This is the greatest lesson Chu learned after going blind.

Chu has undergone several brain tumor operations. She is now completely blind in her right eye, deaf in her right ear, and unable to coordinate movements on the right side of her body. At one point she even wanted to take her own life. (courtesy of Julia Chu)

Refocusing on herself

As she gradually learned to accept her own disabilities, Chu found herself smiling more often. No longer reluctant to ask people for help, she managed to make many good friends. Once she went with her friends to see the Japanese horror film Ring 2. At first she thought she would have to sit it out in boredom because she didn’t understand Japan­ese, and she was often startled by her friends’ sudden screams. But much to her surprise, she fell under the spell of the ­cinema’s powerful surround sound, of the sudden silence of the audience as they held their breath in moments of suspense, and of her own imagination. She began to join her friends in screaming, and the film turned into an enjoyable experience.

Chu concentrated on achieving little things every day, such as learning to solve new mathematical problems and reading braille faster. She was no longer comparing herself with others. Although she still faced many setbacks, she didn’t dwell on her misfortunes, but rather congratulated herself on the progress she had made. By the time she gradu­ated from Songshan Senior High, she had won a ­Mayor’s Award, had come first in a swimming competition, and had been elected a “model student” by her schoolmates. Subsequently she even embarked on a round-island bicycle tour and tried her hand at kayaking. “Having re­focused attention on myself, I not only gained real confidence but also began to treasure each new day, because it gave me an opportunity to try and surpass myself,” Chu says.

Chu continues to give talks for schools and businesses, using her expertise to help people cope with depression. (courtesy of Julia Chu)

Aspiring to be like the sun

Chu’s experience of the difference that her mental resource­ful­ness has made in her life, together with her sensitive perception of her friends’ unspoken woes, has led her to discover a congenial vocation. While studying in the Department of Special Education at National Taiwan Normal University, she minored in educational psychology and counseling, overcoming the limitations imposed by her visual impairment. Chu jokes that she was a lazy student who wanted to save time and energy. For example, she would work on one project for both departments, rather than submitting two entirely different sets of coursework; she would also organize study groups, where members worked together to prepare for exams. She knew her own strengths and endeavored to conquer her weaknesses. Ranking first in her department upon gradu­ation, she went on to study for a postgraduate degree in educational psychology and counseling. She even passed an accredita­tion exam to become Taiwan’s first severely visually impaired counseling psychologist.

Being accredited didn’t guarantee a dream job for Chu. No one was willing to employ a blind counseling psycho­logist. However, Chu’s academic background in special edu­ca­tion and her experience of vision loss were actually her unique advantages. These personal experiences helped her determine the clientele she would serve. Chu contacted the social welfare institutions and schools she had worked with, and started a telemarketing campaign. No matter how far it was, whenever given a chance to serve she would travel there, white cane in hand.

To compensate for not being able to read visual signs, Chu has worked hard to train her other senses. Changes in tone of voice and in breathing rates, and other sensory cues, help Chu observe her clients’ emotional state. Chu’s visual impairment enables her to focus more attentively on listening, inquiring, and responding. When clients shed tears in silence, she is able to empathize with them.

Alluding to Aesop’s famous fable, Chu says that as a counselor she does not wish to follow the example of the North Wind by forcefully penetrating her clients’ disguise. Rather, she aspires to be like the Sun: not to judge or criticize her clients, but to make them feel warm and reassured before they gradually unburden themselves.

Julia Chu has delivered a series of accessible podcasts on psychology, hoping to help listeners harness their inner strength. (location courtesy of Seeing Counseling Center)

Cupping your heart

Plying her trade for over ten years, Chu has provided more than 1800 individual counseling sessions and nearly 600 group sessions. She has also given talks, published a book, and served as a radio host. Chu continues to help pull people out of depression. In 2018 she was named by Junior Chamber International Taiwan as one of the year’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons.

For Chu, counseling is a lifelong vocation. In order to help more people live better lives by engaging with their own mental conditions, Chu insists on making YouTube videos and podcasts even though this demands more time and energy from her than it would from most of us. She wants to help us enhance our mental resilience, so as to overcome the obstacles in our lives. For example, she has been promoting a method called “Cupping Your Heart,” inviting us to put our right hands over our hearts, recall happy memories shared with our loved ones, fix these scenes in our minds, and let the joy permeate our bodies. Spending a few minutes a day practicing this method will help restore the balance of the autonomic nervous system, enabling the mind to regain its com­posure. Chu’s genial voice itself confers positive energies.

Chu has also been experimenting with inter­disciplin­ary approaches. She collaborated with blind pianist Wang Jun Jie on a music therapy workshop, encouraging the particip­ants to turn their thoughts and feelings into personal theme songs. One young participant was perplexed about his future. When encouraged by Chu to express himself, he could only come up with these words: “I don’t know.” With Wang accompanying him on the piano, the youngster kept intoning “I don’t know” while the other participants provided backing vocals. But towards the end of the song, what should he sing but “I know it now!” Through mutual understanding and acceptance in a group setting, he experienced healing.

Someone once asked Chu whether she wouldn’t have had a better life had she not been blind. For Chu, it was thanks to her visual impairment that she became a counsel­ing psycho­logist, a role that gives her much happi­ness. As Chu often says in her podcasts, “See things in a new light, and it’ll be alright.” She herself puts these words into practice every day.

Overcoming her physical limitations, Chu gives full rein to her talents. In 2018 she was elected one of Junior Chamber International Taiwan’s Ten Outstanding Young Persons and won the Golden Eagle Award for outstanding disabled people. (courtesy of Julia Chu)

Chu joined Dark Sailor Kayaking. Kayaking symbolizes how Chu lives her life: however inclement external circumstances may be, she braves the challenges and launches herself into the future. (courtesy of Julia Chu)