Adam Merkin

It's like two in the morning right now so I might be a bit incoherent, cw for discussions of racism, homophobia, biphobia, sinophobia and classism

I've really wanted to write Chang as someone who's made to be a perpetual outsider. As a Chinese person born in the UK I've always been made to feel like a foreigner no matter where I go - obviously I am a foreigner abroad but I'm also treated as such in the very country I was born and raised in. I think a lot of east Asian people can relate to being treated as a strange exotic foreigner first and a person second.

As a working class orphan he would probably have been treated as disposable by society at large too. As soon as he's rescued by Tintin in the Blue Lotus he immediately asks why Tintin bothered saving him, and in his letter to Tintin in Tintin in Tibet he writes that he's unworthy of his uncle's hopsitality. We don't get much from Chang as he doesn't make many appearances but it seems he's internalised strong feelings of a lack of self worth. Tintin may have been the first person to recognise his humanity since Chang's birth family passed.

Being queer is also very isolating at first. You're not born into a culture you can reference or make sense of your experiences initially, it's something you have to seek out. I wanted to explore learning to love yourself through others. We're all weird to some degree, we're all in this together!