It was a world far removed from the one Chang knew at home. The daughter of Chinese immigrants who worked multiple jobs, she grew up understanding that their sacrifices had created opportunities for her, and that she was expected to make the most of them. Distractions were not part of the plan.

“The way my parents raised me shaped who I am,” Chang said from her sunny home office in Oakland, California, where one of her three dogs, an Australian shepherd named Potato, made a handful of on-camera cameos. “It gave me the internal motivation to succeed. It was also hard. I felt an obligation to make sure that they didn’t suffer for nothing, that they were proud of their daughter.”

But Chang was also growing up in the Bay Area at the dawn of the mainstream internet, where classmates and online message boards opened doors to new music, ideas and counterculture. Her tastes soon ranged from punk standard-bearers like the Ramones and riot grrrl bands like Bikini Kill to independent Bay Area hip-hop like E-40. Online, she wandered through GeoCities, Angelfire and LiveJournal, then Napster and LimeWire, where downloading a new song sometimes meant getting, as Chang puts it, “Trojans as well as the MP3s.”

Yet she resists describing these influences as rebellion against her upbringing. Instead, Chang talks about the creative tension of growing up in a highly individualistic society while being raised by parents whose own experiences had instilled a different sense of opportunity and obligation. For her, it was never a binary choice between the dutiful student and the middle-school kid at Warped Tour. Her answer was, and still is, D: All of the above.