Of all things most yielding

  PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHN CHANG McCURDY
   SELECTIONS FROM ORIENTAL LITERATURE BY MARC LAPPE 

 Edited, with a foreword by  David R. Brower- - from the foreword:

     The nation shattered, hills and streams remain.
    A city in spring, grass and trees deep:
    feeling the times, flowers draw tears . . .

                                                                                    TU FU   713-770 A.D.

HILLS AND STREAMS indeed remained in 1950, but it was rubble that was deep in a city in North Korean spring when American bombs buried a ten- year -old boy they had just made an orphan. Expecting never to be found and dreading a lingering death, Chang tried to kill himself the only way he could think of that the rubble would let him -- by reaching his fingers into his brain through his eyes -- and he tried hard enough to make bruises that still show faintly. Then he heard his grandfather calling him, responded, and was rescued. For a while he supported himself by shining G.I. shoes, and earned enough extra after some ten thousand boots to buy "a box camera that worked sometimes." In 1958 he found himself in Berkeley, with his first name translated to John and a new last name, that of Mr. and Mrs. Richard McCurdy, who had adopted him.
     He worked for his Bachelor of Arts degree in Design and Arts, with emphasis in photographs, film, and creative writing at San Francisco State College. Early in the 'sixties, he brought a selection of his photographs to the Sierra Club office in San Francisco,, where Robert Golden was deeply impressed and persuaded him to leave them for a while. It became quickly clear that the eyes that had been miraculously spared had a most extraordinary way of seeing . . .

David R. Brower 

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