Working is against human nature
Around 1986 Chu Te-yung got out of the army, joined the world of journalism and started working at the China Times. All he had to do was to come to the office each day in the evening and work for about an hour and a half drawing cartoons on the main topic of the day. Together with additional cartoons for other stories, his work could amount to NT$100,000 a month, a sum that made many people really envious.
Most young people of that era had their heads filled with the idea of battling it out for a position in a large, secure company, spending their working life there and finally getting their pension and enjoying retirement. Even though to the outsider the China Times publishing group seems a stable "golden rice bowl," Chu Te-yung was deeply unhappy. Whenever he could push things off, he would. He was supposed to get to the office in the evening but he always dragged it out to the last second before he would catch a taxi and make his way to the job.
Chu worked like this for four years and then one day he suddenly realized with alarm that although he appeared calm and collected on the outside, in fact he felt as if he were bound with an iron chain. It was exactly the same feeling he had had as a child when he had been taken off to school, so he made the courageous and resolute decision to quit his job.
His girlfriend at the time (now his wife) was the editor of the variety pages at the United Daily News. She, too, was fed up with the system and wanted to get into something creative, so she left her job as well.
The two unemployed young people now used their savings to get married and buy a place to live. After they started to feel the pinch they got in touch with a publisher to discuss doing a book, while Chu Te-yung proceeded to became the earliest home office worker in Taipei.
"I did Double-Sound Crackers then and had a first printing of 200,000." Originally, Chu was hoping to get a good price by printing a few extra copies and so latched on to this rough figure. He never expected the enthusiastic reception readers gave his book and kept increasing the print run until the number of copies reached 400,000.
Aside from publishing books during this period, in a frenzy he took on commercial advertisements and public interest anti-smoking jobs, considerably fattening up his wallet.
Chu thinks back to his most productive period, roughly 1997-98, when he published a total of 12 books of cartoons. Workdays often exceeded eight hours, and he worked far harder than when he used to be at the office. His wife, who had longed to get involved in creative work, had no choice but to devote herself to being his assistant, handling outside contacts and relations with publishers; but loving books more than anything else, she could go through two to three a day, and became a fantastic database which Chu Te-yung drew on for creative material.
But, although he loathed all things having to do with the system, after Chu Te-yung actually joined the ranks of the home office workers his days were strictly ordered and regulated. He would religiously rise each morning a little after eight, have a light breakfast and then bury his head and begin feverishly drawing without a break, except for lunch, right on until the stars came out before he would rest.
Before Chu Te-yung's cartoons successfully entered the mainland market they were pirated like crazy. Mainland readers were quite familiar with his work early on. On his bookshelves in Taipei lie a number of pirated editions dating back to those days.