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The Cheese Guide 7 moving around so much and make a stable home for her children, she made that home in Taiwan, while her father moved to Korea to make a home base there. Her younger brother and sister stayed with their mother on Taiwan, coming to Korea to visit their father, but Chang won an international student fellowship to attend school in Korea. She was 18 in 1982 when her father applied to immigrate, with his family, to the United States through a program that awards residence in the U.S. to entrepreneurs who are prepared to invest in American business enterprises. "My father invested money. At that time, it was the only way to immigrate," Chang said. "He wanted a better life for his kids, but we weren't poor." Chang's father used his investment stake to open restaurants in Atlanta, Georgia and Boulder, Colorado, and she started college in Georgia, eventually entering the University of Georgia's medical school. In 1989, though, her brother, who was living in Boulder, was diagnosed with a brain tumor and Chang was called to Colorado to help care for her parents. She went to work for the family there until she burned out and told her family that they'd have to get along without her at the restaurant. "I told my dad I was going to walk out from the restaurant business," she said. "I felt like I was standing at a red, yellow, green light." While she was figuring out what she wanted to do next, she accompanied her daughter's Brownie troop on a field trip to Niwot Farm that sealed her fate. "I saw the baby goats, and I said, 'This is what I want," she said. "When I went to Niwot Farm, all I wanted was to take care of the baby goats." Once she had a direction, her path took her to Haystack's Longmont creamery, which was just opening up and needed people. They offered her a chance to work in the cheese room. "All I did was prepare the frozen curd," she said. She asked the cheesmaker if there was something more she could do, and that's when she started training to become a cheesemaker. In those early days, she faced some skepticism about whether someone with her ethnic background, and with the lactose intolerance that frequently goes with it, was suited to be a cheesemaker. That skepticism had its roots in racism, Chang is sure, but she let that motivate rather than discourage her. "There's a lot of American people who don't eat cheese," she'd point out. "I just ignored it. I told myself, 'Okay, I'll prove myself.... I'm not trying to compete with other people. I'm trying to do my best.... It's not that I try to win. I try to do my best." She moved to Haystack Mountain Creamery 14 years ago and became Head Cheesemaker in 2006. Today, she says that most of what she's learned about making cheese came off the Internet. "She's worked her butt off, and people are recognizing that," said Chuck Hellmer, President of Haystack Mountain Creamery since 2009. "A lot of people love Jackie. She's a very humble person. She's like a superstar in the cheese industry – and she doesn't get it.... People were very willing to teach her, but she's learned more from her own discipline and will than from any of the other cheesemakers that Haystack had before her.... She's self-made – that's for sure." At Haystack Creamery, her winter work week is only about 45 hours a week. In the summertime, though, her days start at 7 a.m. and end at 6:00 or 6:30, depending on when the day's milk arrives, but it's not unusual for it to be 8:30 or 9:00 p.m. before she goes home at night. Her 3,500-pound vat – cut down from a larger vat so that she can stir her curd by hand rather than using the automated agitator that's common in other creameries – makes 350 pounds of Gold Hill twice a week. Twice a week, Chang makes Queso de Mano, a raw goat milk cheese similar to Gold Hill, although made with a different culture. Twice a week, she makes another cheese, often a Chile Jack. She works five days a week, but sometimes it's six days, and that doesn't count the two or three hours she spends at the creamery on her days off when she stops by to take the cheese out of the brine or just to make sure that everything's going well. "If you have kids, do you have an off day? No, you don't have an off day," she said. "They are all my babies. Somebody has to do it." Washed-rind cheeses are very finicky, and while they can be just fine one day, they can be headed for disaster the next, she said. The only way to know for sure what's happening in the creamery is to be there with eyes and nose open. Some days, the aging room

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