"We don't get any rest over the Chinese New Year holidays because restaurants are still open and the chickens lay eggs every day. If we don't sell them fresh, what can we do?" Chen chuckles as he operates his electric wheelchair, taking guests on a tour of his henhouse.

In the nearly 2000-square-meter henhouse, double-layered cages are filled with energetic, clucking chickens. The vast space is permeated with cackling loud enough to shake the heavens, and with the intense odor of chicken manure. Chen grips a pushcart in one hand and with the other expertly gathers eggs, his wheelchair backing up the entire way as he quickly fills a crate.

"At first I couldn't even grasp an egg, but I took this act as a rehabilitation exercise and now I have no problem picking up over 10,000 eggs a day." Chen farms and sells his eggs by himself, and his entire stock is sold out almost daily.

"Our chickens eat organic feed and aren't given hormones," Chen explains with aplomb. When you crack these eggs into a bowl, they coalesce beautifully like round dewdrops, unlike ordinary eggs, which look flat. When hard-boiled, they're firm and tasty, and as such he has many die-hard customers who won't eat eggs unless they're his.

"I have confidence in my kids. They know how to do business," says Chen, his expression showing his gratitude for his three children.

Chicken farming rehab

Every morning before daybreak, Chen starts a busy day--feeding, gathering eggs, shipping, cleaning troughs and clearing chicken droppings. When dusk draws near, he goes to the lottery station to trade store-minding shifts with his eldest son so the latter can go to evening classes. By the time he picks his children up from their different schools and gets back home, it's often after 11 p.m.

The family of four, long accustomed to going to bed late and rising early, share the work of tending the chickens and minding the shop. "But it's hard for the children: their time off is work," Chen says with anguish.

Though he has some regrets, Chen is content busying himself on his farm, as well as often going out to give speeches and visit spine-injured patients in the hospital. He serves as a spiritual guide for them, but is also gradually fulfilling his long-term dream of helping more handicapped people become self-reliant by combining the talents of more than ten like-minded handicapped people in setting up a "sheltered" farm.

In contrast with his frenetic lifestyle nowadays, he says, "Honestly it's hard to imagine why at first I was so reluctant to see others." He recalls how, after leaving the hospital and returning home, he became hot-tempered, shutting himself up in his home all day, unwilling to face the sympathy of others. When family and friends came to visit, he would pretend he was sleeping and pay them no notice, even yelling at family members who opened the gate of the house.

This nearly 2,000-square-meter henhouse was designed by Chen himself, and built by him and his three children. His "Hope Farms" business has been a success in the last few years, and has gained considerable fame in the Hsinchu region.

Trying times

During this stretch of time his son, a fourth grader, and his daughter, in first grade, would come home after school to turn him over, change his urinary catheter tube and even give him a colonic irrigation to enable him to defecate fully.

Throughout these disconsolate and cloistered days, Chen still felt a responsibility toward his three children, but his savings had been eaten up by medical expenses. He resolved deep down that he had to find a way to support his family. But it was when a benefactor appeared on the scene that he finally saw the light at the end of the tunnel.

Time passed slowly as he lay on his bed. Chen once again picked up the CB radio set he used to play around with, and chatted with friends over the air. His mood gradually improved. One of these friends, a blind man going by the handle "Seltzer," readily stopped by to give him massages, which he vowed would make Chen better. Soon Chen's condition improved: he was now able to rock his way up into a sitting position. Seltzer took him to soak in the Matsao hot springs on Yangmingshan, and brought him shopping in the Hsinchu Flower Market. In the treacherous streets, with Chen's eyes and Seltzer's feet, they completed what Chen had considered a frightening "mission impossible."

When lying comfortably in the hot spring, Chen felt profoundly moved: "Seltzer, you can't see. How come you have the courage to go walking around everywhere?" he asked. Seltzer said that he was able to get back on his feet with someone else's help, and wanted to pass this kind of feeling on to others. Chen stowed Seltzer's words into his mind, hoping one day to help others in the same way.

So it was that Chen's sense of isolation began to melt away after a long separation from the sunlight and warmth of friendship.

Chen Chuan-hung picks up some feed as he tends his chicken farm with the aid of his electric wheelchair. Only well-fed chickens can lay eggs.

Return of the Condor Heroes

After Chen had thrown open his mental shutters, his vitality seemed to spring forth in unlimited abundance. First, against the objections of his friends and family, he bought a modified car, and actually sat once again in the driver's seat. Through driving, he trained the strength in his back and hands. A month later he went so far as to take his children on a trip around the island. The confidence he gained from his week-long trip made him more determined to raise chickens as a new career.

"To be honest, I started raising chickens to get away from people," says Chen, who had previously kept pigeons. Once when he was watching the TV serial The Return of the Condor Heroes, he saw that the character Xiao Longnu could never leave the Ancient Tomb, and Chen began to imagine a paradise in his mind. He considered the chicken farm to be like the isolated Ancient Tomb: as long as he didn't go outside he wouldn't have to deal with people and he wouldn't feel awkward. Moreover, when the chickens were hungry they would seek him, and he could force himself to improve his physical condition through labor. Together, Chen and the chickens would thrive.

The erstwhile building contractor used his past expertise and connections to start building the henhouse. First he filled in and leveled an old fish-farming pond on his property, then constructed a henhouse and an office with metal sheeting. During this time he drove an excavator by himself and welded the building's steel framework. He had his friends transport materials and operate a crane to lift the hundreds of metal panels onto the roof. Together they completed the shell of the henhouse.

Chen and his three children completed the next phase themselves. His son Yu-ming, now in fifth grade, helped move metal sheeting and climbed on the roof to secure roofing with screws. His daughter and younger son helped pull pipes and cables, and Chen did the welding. At first he would often faint because he couldn't perspire; his daughter was in charge of pouring water on his head to cool him down and his younger son would take a towel and wipe the water off his face so he could continue to work. From fainting after a mere ten minutes, he gradually trained himself to work for an hour, then two hours, and even half a day. The basic structure for the first henhouse was completed after working around the clock during the kids' summer vacation, and thereafter he and his children worked together every year during vacation time, constantly reinforcing the structure and making extensions.

Strange tales of the henhouse

Once the building was ready, he had to learn the major lessons of chicken farming. Chen started out awkwardly as a complete novice, spending 16 hours a day cooped up in the henhouse. But of his first batch of 1000 chicks, half died from disease. The same outcome resulted from his next two tries. He consulted books and fellow chicken farmers, and finally overcame numerous technical problems with feeding and immunization.

Besides overcoming technical issues, he endured many discomfitures in the daily feeding and care of the chickens that outsiders cannot imagine. "After the kids went to school, there was nobody at the farm," Chen recalls. When the ground was slick from heavy rain, he wouldn't sense that his wheelchair was picking up speed. Sometimes the wheelchair would shut off when rainwater got into it and he would "fly off it like a missile." Then he had to struggle on the ground for over an hour before he could climb back into his wheelchair to continue feeding the chickens. Also, when the wheels became gummed up with the grain husks that covered the ground or when the wheelchair couldn't move because the chickens knocked over a water trough, he had no choice but to climb off and push the wheelchair with great difficulty. The chickens, none the wiser, would sometimes block his path, and he couldn't make them get out of the way. If the ground was wet, then he had to crawl desperately over piles of muck, getting covered with chicken droppings.

Even these sundry indignities couldn't force him to give up his idea of chicken farming, "because this was the only way I could pick myself up and support my children," he says.

Then came the issue of selling his painstakingly raised chickens, a problem "because at that time I still didn't dare face people," Chen says. To boost his courage, he brought his children every week to a priority stall for the handicapped that he had been granted at the weekend flower market, where they would sell toys. Some days they didn't sell so much as NT$100 worth--not even enough for the cleaning fee--but after about six months he and his children had learned the art of salesmanship, and their courage grew.

Perhaps it's the case of the gods helping those who help themselves. The father of a member of the Association for the Spinal Cord Injured happened to sell chickens, and after learning about Chen's situation he took it upon himself to buy chickens from him, enabling him to sell the first and second batches of chickens he raised. Thereafter a journalist discovered Chen's story and published it in the paper, and suddenly chicken wholesalers came to his door in droves to buy chickens. Not long after, there was an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in hogs; the price of chickens shot up and his business thrived. In 1999, then-president Lee Teng-hui visited the farm and suggested that Chen switch to organic egg production to better weather the impact of Taiwan's joining the World Trade Organization. Chen followed this advice.

A disabled savior of the disabled

Once his chicken farming business was on track, Chen started going to hospitals to visit new spinal injury patients. During Chinese New Year he would bring a truckload of chickens and donated rice to give to the low-income members of the association. Thereafter his "public welfare" work grew, and he traveled all over Taiwan on campus speaking tours. After the 921 Earthquake of 1999, he often went to the stricken areas of Nantou to give inspiration to the victims, and he was then asked to hold a workshop at his farm to help people left handicapped by the disaster.

Indeed, those who receive inspiration from Chen's spiritedness are not limited to the handicapped. Professor Hsu Lang of National Chiao Tung University met Chen by happenstance when buying eggs in a market, and after visiting Chen's farm he was stunned by his story. "Throughout my life as a student and a teacher, my struggles have been paltry compared to Chen's. My greatest suffering was not doing well on an exam or my research not being successful," Hsu told us. He found that he and others in his school who had never endured the lessons of suffering, though possessing professional expertise, were in fact quite frail and might not be able to face any real challenges in life.

After this, Hsu incorporated Chen's spirit into his work and life. Five years ago he braved the challenge of switching fields from optoelectronics into nanobiotechnology. He also joined a yacht club with his daughter, confronting his fear of water, and in the last two years passed an exam to become a National Class C sailing instructor. Hsu took six socially isolated students he mentors to Chen's Hope Farms for a semester of volunteer work--building a fermentation tank, hoisting canvas canopies and vaccinating chicks. In this work, the students experienced time and again the sense of accomplishment from making the impossible possible. Moreover, Hsu learned from Chen how to be brave in the face of setbacks, a life lesson in never giving in to fate.

"Where there's life, there's hope," Chen said when receiving the Global Passion for Life Award from the Chou Ta-kuan Foundation. With persistence and courage he continues to write new chapters in the story of his life.