"I feel like there's more urgency," Chang said in an interview, adding: "You feel like you're part of this global community."
It's not what he expected. Not while working as a reporter for Fujian Television in China, nor while studying mass communication as a doctoral student at Purdue University.
Chang may be the most famous professor that people have never heard of - producer, researcher, writer, and director of groundbreaking movies that have been screened across the United States and in countries from Canada to China.
On Nov. 20, he will speak at a screening of Long Wait for Home and Daughters' Return at the Lawrenceville Library in Lawrenceville, N.J. All 35 seats have been claimed.
His films revolve around the repercussions of China's one-child policy, which has resulted in the wide abandonment of baby girls - and transformed the way many Americans build their families.
The Chinese government has made it illegal to have "extra" children, but also to place children for adoption. Because sons are prized culturally, newborn girls are often secretly left on street corners and in bus stations, then swept into orphanages.
Chang has not only found people who were deemed unfindable - including birth parents, who could face prosecution - but persuaded them to talk on camera.
"Amazing stories. We learn a lot from them," said Kay Ann Johnson, a scholar at Hampshire College and perhaps the nation's foremost authority on China's orphanages and birth policies. "He does a good job of unpeeling the onion, and doing it responsibly, and leaving lots of questions open."
Last month, Millersville screened Chang's latest film, Sofia's Journey, as part of a discussion of ethnicity during the One Campus, One Book program.
