What is the lesson of survival in The Other Side of Paradise?
Staceyann Chin: In a very kind of oversimplified way, it is that survival is about endurance. It isn’t about any particular magical moment; it isn’t about any particular path that one takes. It is the act of enduring, and enduring through a myriad of things—be it being left by your mother, or not being claimed by your father, or being lesbian in a country where it isn’t safe. Or it can be something as different as enduring homelessness, or navigating a parent who finds it hard to let you go, who lives in your life only to tell you how to live that life, or who remains as a kind of voice that will always be pushing you to do what they want and not giving you the room to do what you want. One thing I’ve learned about life is that it’s dynamic, it changes. And so change is always something to contend with. But I also know that on the other side of that kind of immediate jarring that can come with change is a kind of peace. And that moving from the before-change to the after-change is the
