Never to stand again
To promote balloon twisting for his fellow wheelchair users, Chang opened a clown class at the Development Center for Spinal Cord Injury. A student once confessed to him, “Mr. Chang, it’s hard enough being in a wheelchair. I look even more ridiculous as a clown. I don’t want to do it!” Faced with this resistance, Chang knew the student had not yet overcome her feeling of inferiority. “Since I’ll be stuck in this wheelchair for the rest of my life, I may as well accept it. When a person is forced into a hopeless situation, they will find a way to survive. Turning myself into a clown helps me realize that I can be myself and don’t need to be afraid of other people’s discriminatory gaze. I’m fine with being gazed at because I know people are looking at me in appreciation and acceptance. They aren’t looking down on me.” Chang says that dressing as a clown while sitting in a wheelchair is an act of bravery.
As someone who used to be able to walk, yet whose paraplegia forced him to rely on a wheelchair to navigate a world riddled with obstacles, Chang did not always look on the bright side.
The only one in a family of four children to go to college, Chang studied architecture at Tamkang University. He was his parents’ pride and joy. While undergoing military training at Chenggongling during his first year as an undergraduate, Chang noticed something wrong with the reflexes in his left leg. He could not keep up when goose-stepping.
The weakness in his left leg did not get any better. In the first two years of college, Chang went to consult numerous doctors, including practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, but they never discovered the cause.
In the summer after his junior year, Chang was admitted to a large hospital. The doctor there found a dark spot on a scan of his thoracic vertebrae and suggested he undergo surgery. The surgery failed and his lower body was left paralyzed.
Rebirth
Chang’s parents ran a clock and watch shop in front of Hsinchu City’s Chenghuang Temple. They were relatively well-to-do, and every year they would visit a photography studio for new family portraits. Chang could not reconcile himself to the fact that he had to rely on a wheelchair. His parents, doing their best to protect him, took care of him financially. Under their care, Chang cut himself off from society.
Dejected and downhearted, Chang developed an irregular routine that left him in and out of the hospital multiple times with stomach bleeding. It wasn’t until his eighth stomach bleed, when the doctors had to perform a five-hour emergency surgery and transfuse more than 50 bags of blood, that reality hit him. Having frittered away 16 years of his life, he was determined not to let his remaining time go to waste.
Improvements in accessible environments in Taiwan over the past few years have helped individuals with disabilities to participate in society.