The path to glory unintended
Liu's eventual career as a cartoonist had a lot to do with his going to the Taipei Teachers School. His father told him that if he flunked out and had to repeat a year he would have to come back home and get to work. To avoid that fate of hard labor, stooped in the fields under the scorching sun, Liu worked hard. Other students only turned in 20 sketches a semester, but he turned in 100.
Liu's classmate Hsu Chi-lin, who also ended up creating comics, explains that although he had the highest score on the entrance exam to the art program in the school, Liu ended up graduating first in the class. Back then schools required students to take midday naps, but Liu never slept, Hsu recalls. Instead he would go by himself to the art studio and sketch. Doing this day after day, Liu got better and better. At the end of the term, the teacher bought a present for Liu and said that in all his years of teaching he had never met a student who was as diligent as Liu. The teacher was truly fond of Liu. In Hsu's memories, Liu comes across as a determined hard worker, who goes all out once he decides to do something.
Liu never really never made a decision to pursue a career as a cartoonist. He created his first strip Records of the Search for Immortals in 1955. When he recalls his motivation for creating the strip, he can't help but laugh.
"Little comics" were all the rage back then. These palm-sized comic books were filled with stories about martial artists, fairies and demigods. A lot of kids fell completely under their spell, and it got to the point where they would even leave home and walk into the hills, hoping to find masters who would teach them kungfu or tell them how they could turn themselves into immortals.
Finally, the Ministry of Education issued an order for teachers to take care that their students weren't reading comic books. Liu, who was then teaching at the Yunglo Elementary School, sat up and took note. He discovered that children were ignoring their teachers' and parents' injunctions and using their allowance money to buy these comic books. So when the principal of the school asked Liu to come up with some sort of plan to prevent the kids from reading these despicable "little books," Liu decided to fight fire with fire. He created Record of the Search for Immortals, a comic book whose message was that kids shouldn't be reading comic books filled with fantastic beasts and demigods.
Little did he expect his comic book to become a best seller. In 1955 his monthly salary was NT$380, and the publishers paid him NT$2,000 for Record. There weren't that many books being published back then, but once his books started selling well and he started to gain some name recognition, numerous publishers sought him out. Overnight, Liu went from being an unknown elementary school teacher to being the hottest comic book creator around. As soon as Liu realized that writing comic books would raise his income appreciably, he started writing them in earnest. All these experiences ended up as material for The Story of Ah-Chin.
Later another cartoonist told him that when he got stuck in a rut and wasn't producing any good work, the best medicine was to go to a coffee shop, bar or dance hall and go a little crazy. Liu, the clean-living country bumpkin that he was, said that he had never gone into one of those "dark" places and that he had no inclination to go.
Liu thought to himself that a comic strip must have its own unique character to attract people's notice. "What was my special quality?" Liu asked himself. He suddenly realized that he could take his most oafish side as the basis for Ah-San. Then he used his mother's personality to create another character for the comic strip: Big Auntie.
Liu says that his mother was born loud and strong. At the age of 93 she would walk up stairs faster than teenagers. When she sang at a Hakka folk song competition at the age of 95, her voice was as sonorous as a church bell and she ended up taking first prize. She had a straightforward no-nonsense personality that couldn't abide idlers or gluttons. When she came across gangsters or others who lacked a sense of righteousness, she wasn't shy about giving them a piece of her mind. She never feigned civility.
When these two funny and clearly defined characters of real substance appeared, it was hardly surprising that they attracted readers' attention. You could find posters promoting their comic books on streets all over Taiwan. With his publishers constantly at him to produce more, Liu could only wish that he could grow another two hands.
Liu's comics were so uniquely his because Liu was drawing from his own experiences and basing his characters on the people that he had known and the funny things that he had witnessed at every stage of his life. It was only in his earliest comic book Records of the Search for Immortals and the later Robot that he tinged the happenings of every day life with a bit of the magical. Who would have thought that Robot, this little helper whom children adored, would cause Liu to become an inventor?