Growing up in Vancouver, the youngest kid of korean immigrants, Sophia Chang loved music.
By high school, she was into all sorts of different things, new wave, and then eventually punk.
But the moment she heard Grandmaster flash and the Furious five's the message, it was kind of like something inside of her.
Some primal urge came alive.
She was hooked by the beats, by the lyrics, and the artists who were tapping the power of music to speak with so much truth.
That resonated deeply with her.
Sophia headed to New York and soon after found herself immersed in the music scene, befriending punk legends like Joey Ramone, working with the legendary Paul Simon, and then quickly dropping into the hip hop scene in the late eighties and nineties, where she'd not only build a decades long career as what she calls the first asian woman in hip hop, but also become deeply entrenched in the work and the lives of iconic nine person hip hop phenome Wu Tang Clan, where she became kind of not only family, but over the years, also manage a number of their individual careers, as well as, over time, those of many others, like a tribe called Quest, Rafael, Sadiq, Deangelo, and so many others.
Now, in the middle of all of this, Sophia took some time and stepped out of the music business for about a dozen years to train kung fu and manage a 34th generation Shaolin monk who she'd helped build into a global name while also becoming partners in life and work and raising two kids together.
That relationship would eventually end, leaving Sophia in her early forties, as she describes it, broke and stepping into a new season where she would have to reclaim much of what made her come alive, rediscover music, and reimagine what this next season of life would look like.
A season where she'd stop telling the stories of others and, for the first time, start telling the story of her own remarkable life.
Much of this is detailed in her incredible audiobook, the baddest bitch in the room.
And we dive into so many powerful touch points, plus so many other really pivotal stories in this conversation.
So excited to share it with you.
I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is good life project.
So my mother, Tong Suk chang, was born in Kiang, North Korea, in 1932.
We share a birthday, which is kind of extraordinary.
Yes, I was my mother's birthday gift, and she fled North Korea when she was 14.
She was one of nine siblings, and her two brothers had the eldest children.
The two oldest brothers had preceded her.
Then she and her older sister were the next two aged down, and they followed them.