Cartoonist Chu Teh-yung: A Creator Needs a Simple Life — and People Should Learn to Take Charge of Themselves

"I just think a creator has to keep his life simple. Everyone's mental energy and attention are limited, the same way a life is limited — all you can do is spend that energy where you mean to spend it."

Chu Teh-yung, Taiwanese cartoonist.

On the mainland, most people came to him through a television series called Pink Ladies, often called the high point of mainland idol drama. It was adapted from Astringent Girl (《涩女郎》), the four-panel strip Chu began serializing in 1993, and viewers can probably still picture its four women, each with her own look and temperament: the Marriage Maniac, the Man-Magnet, the Tomboy and the Trend-Chaser.

Chu first made his name in Taiwan in 1985. He had just finished college when the China Times, one of the island's largest newspapers, asked him for work. He handed in a set of Double Firecrackers (《双响炮》) and left for compulsory military service on a small, sealed-off island. Six months later his four-panel strips were a sensation across Taiwan, and the film-directing graduate who came back from the army was no longer a graduate but a cartoonist. The Vinegar Tribe (《醋溜族》) and Astringent Girl followed, and he became the second most popular cartoonist in Taiwan after Hayao Miyazaki.

In 1999 Chu came to the mainland and Sanlian Lifeweek began running his comics. Double Firecrackers and Astringent Girl soon passed 10 million copies sold there. The next three or four years were the peak of the Chu Teh-yung column: Sanlian Lifeweek, Girlfriend, Chutian Metropolis Daily, Shanghai Weekly, New Weekly and more than ten other papers and magazines competed to print him. On the cartoonists' sub-list of the sixth China Writers Rich List, in 2011, he came out on top with 61.9 million yuan in royalties over ten years.

Chu's four panels — his humor, his own brand of philosophy — shape how people see the world, and they do it lightly. Double Firecrackers is about marriage, Astringent Girl about men and women, About This Thing Called Work (《关于上班这件事》) about office life, Everything Is Happening (《什么事都在发生》) about the problems of being alive, Absolute Kid (《绝对小孩》) a return to childhood, Everyone's Sick (《大家都有病》) an attack on consumer society. The strips are always drawing society, or mocking it.

Fame does not seem to have changed him much. He has kept to roughly one volume every two years. In a 2011 interview with Huaxi Metropolis Daily, Chu said he had already taken adult humor comics as far as he wanted to; from then on he would draw less and try instead to turn comics into art. "In a lot of European countries comics have already become art. I hope to go down that road."

Then came 2013 and Everyone's Sick 2: Falling in Love with an Idiot (《大家都有病2：跟笨蛋一起谈恋爱》), still his most recent book. In the years since he has published no new serialized comics and has rarely appeared in the press. He faded from public view.

Through those years of "disappearing" he mounted the occasional exhibition, but mostly he stayed home with his wife and his cats, drawing a few hours a day, living the simple life he wants. As print declined, his work simply moved from newspaper columns to Facebook and Weibo, one strip a day.

This year Japan's Silent Manga Audition came to China, a big event for Chinese comics. The judges are all heavyweights — Nobuhiko Horie, Tsukasa Hojo, Tetsuo Hara — and Chu Teh-yung's name was on the list too. He came to push young Chinese cartoonists to enter.

At the opening ceremony he said: "In all my years in comics, there is one question people keep asking me: do Chinese people have creativity, and do Chinese people have a sense of humor? I think this competition gives us a chance to find out."

In this interview with QDaily, Chu talked about what he has been turning over lately, about what the decline of print and the arrival of the internet have done to him, about his fear that heavy commercialization eats creators alive, and about what he plans to do next.

He may be back in Shanghai in May, he says. That time it will be for Absolute Kid 3.

Q = QDaily

Z = Chu Teh-yung

Not Vanished, Not Out of Ideas — Just Off Living

Q: What has been puzzling you, or occupying you, lately?

Z: Lately I have been thinking about where the rest of my life goes — deciding what kind of life I actually want.

Life is easily thrown off course by all sorts of things. I spend a fair amount of time now working out how much of it to give to work and how much to give to living, and what makes a life worth something. By worth I don't mean money or possessions. I mean what I should choose.

Q: Have you reached an answer?

Z: Still thinking. But I doubt it will change much.

All these years I have not, in fact, put that much time into the career. I could have published twice the books I have. I could have adapted my own work — IP adaptations have been the fashion these past few years and plenty of people came to me, hoping I would take part myself, as a screenwriter or whatever else. I trained in film directing, so I could have directed my own films, and the money would probably have been very good. I never did any of it. My time only stretches so far; if I had to do other things on top of the comics and my life, I don't think I could manage. And even if all of it worked, I would call that a failed life. Even with the newspaper strips I have always drawn very little. I want to hold on to the way I live.

I hardly go out. I hadn't been to Shanghai in ten years. Most of the time I don't move — I stay home and live the life I want, with my wife and my cats. That is my world, and it is enough.

Q: So why agree to come out and judge this competition?

Z: What I really want is for more Chinese people to enter contests like it.

When I was young, breaking through was very hard. There was only print, and getting a newspaper or magazine to run your work was extremely difficult. If it wasn't good enough and you had no name, the papers wouldn't use you. So in those days I went to the bookstore every month to leaf through magazines, and read the papers every day, looking for any comics competition. If there was one, I entered it fast.

Now, with the internet, there seem to be endless platforms. Everyone seems to own a medium — anyone can run WeChat, anyone can run Weibo — so it looks as though the problem is gone, the problem of having nowhere to publish. But the situation is exactly what it was. There are so many that you are one grain of sand and nobody sees you. So a competition really is a good chance.

Q: You raised the question of creativity at the opening ceremony.

Z: Yes. And the more important part is that a competition like this might pull more Chinese people in, prod them into making work because they want to enter. Creativity matters enormously. A culture needs a lot of people willing to become creators, because only when there are more creators do you get a lot of work, and once the market has sifted through all that work, a few genuinely good people may come out of it. When those people come out, that is what China's cultural strength will be.

Any other comics competition — I think everyone should enter as many as they can and go grab these chances themselves. It's a bit like looking for a job. If you really are good at it, you will rise inside that company on your own.

Commerce Is Burning Creators Out; A Cartoonist Needs a Simple Life

Q: How do you think comics are doing in China now?

Z: This is a slightly absurd thing to admit: I work in comics and I rarely read them. So I don't know how comics are developing on the mainland, and I don't really know which new cartoonists have come up. What I do feel is the commercial machinery. A lot of creators are easily sacrificed to a platform or to a so-called backer.

Q: Sacrificed how?

Z: Say a backer decides today that you have potential, or you have just picked up a little fame. He will never tell you to slow down and settle, to draw only what you want to draw, that a book every two or three years, even three or four, is fine as long as it's good. Nobody does that. Most of them say: hurry up and publish, several books a year if you can. And then: let me turn this into a video game, let me license it for every kind of adaptation. That is killing a creator by commercial means.

Give some creators enough time and they get better and better. They need someone to grant them that time to grow, to give them room to breathe. An over-commercialized society won't grant it. What it does in the end is extract the most it can from you, and it doesn't mind sacrificing you as long as it gets enough out of you first. That is the biggest problem with an over-commercialized society: it wears a person out fast, and too early.

How to bring people out is an important question. The commercial process may bring some out, but it destroys many others at the same time. I find that a real waste. Commercialization is unavoidable, but the people running these operations — does it ever occur to them that some things can wait?

Q: Why is it so hard to make interesting comics?

Z: That one is hard for me to answer, because drawing interesting comics isn't difficult for me. I spend a lot of ordinary time watching this era, watching the society I live in, watching everyone I meet and how they make me feel, and in the work I draw everything I have observed, through humor. So creating isn't hard at all. In fact I have spent a long time holding my creative drive back; otherwise I would draw from morning to night. There is far too much I want to draw. The subjects I could draw have piled up in my head — at least five or six books' worth by now. If I drew them all I would have no time left to live.

Other people's situations I can't speak to. I just think a creator has to keep his life simple. When you have no name, keep your life simple and put as much energy as you can into the work. Once you have a name, keep it even simpler — don't spend your time enjoying fame and money and start living in a way that scrambles your rhythm.

Everyone's mental energy and attention are limited, the same way a life is limited. All you can do is spend that energy where you mean to spend it.

Print and the Internet Are the Same; What Matters Is Not Letting the Form Control You

Q: Print is in decline and your comics have moved to Facebook and Weibo. What has that done to you?

Z: It is only a change of platform. Different eras throw up different tools, and it is hard to call them good or bad. None of them should replace the others. They should all exist.

Print is where it is right now, but the future is hard to call. What I use is Facebook and Weibo. People say Weibo is finished, that WeChat replaced it; others say Facebook is finished, that Twitter and Instagram replaced it. Honestly, that is a commercial operation, endlessly prodding you, telling you the thing you have is out of date and you need this other thing. About three years ago people told me to set up a WeChat account. I couldn't be bothered. I don't need to spend that much time on it — time spent there is time taken from drawing.

Back in the print days I drew very little too. I only ever had one column; other papers just reprinted it. Now I post to Facebook and Weibo, and for me that is still one thing. I don't want any kind of form to control me. The form isn't something I care much about.

And if I do Weibo well, the people who like my Weibo are enough. I don't need to pull in more. It's like food: if you like it spicy, eat spicy; if you like it sweet, eat sweet. I don't need to attract every palate. Caring that much about the form runs against a creator's mind. A creator should keep himself as simple as he can.

Q: How have young readers changed?

Z: Maybe young people today aren't used to newspapers or magazines. But a lot of things are hard to call. After e-books arrived, physical bookstores began closing one after another — and now, in many countries abroad, physical bookstores are slowly coming back, because they offer an occasion, a space that is nothing like the other thing. People are like that. When something is pushed to its extreme, they turn back and look for what was simplest and purest at the start.

Reading a newspaper or a magazine has a calm to it that is different. Reading on a phone or a computer is itself a visual jolt. And when a thing leans on visual stimulation, its other layers weaken. As I often tell people, looking at a painting or a passage of text is nothing like watching a film or television. Watching television or a film, you hold no control; your pace follows the pace it hands you. Looking at a painting, a paper, a magazine, a book, the pace is mine. Each has its good and bad side. Neither should be wiped out by the other.

Q: So it's about taking back control.

Z: People today badly need to control themselves, to not be controlled by other things. Look around: everyone's thumb is moving on a phone, nonstop. I use mine when I need it. I started on Weibo around 2010, and even then I would post what I had to post and look up what I had to look up inside ten minutes, and switch it off. That saves me an enormous amount of my own time — time nobody else controls.

People should have some control over themselves, some grip on themselves. I want to decide what quality of life I have.

After Love, Life and Childhood, the Next Subject Is Imagination

Q: Your earlier work took on a lot of social subjects — the new generation, women, children, consumer society. Is there a new one you want to take on?

Z: Yes. In 2011 I drew Everyone's Sick, about how modern people live, and part of it mocked fashion. Nobody seems to have ever asked what fashion actually is. The whole industry turns out to be controlled by a handful of fashion houses, and those houses are controlled by a handful of designers. Think about it: across Asia there may be hundreds of millions of people who wear fashion brands, and they are controlled by those few — who, in some meeting nobody knows anything about, decide what everyone will wear next year. And Asians put it on, blankly. Wearing fashion is wearing a uniform. You have no say over fashion, because your whole sense of beauty is Western.

Back in 2011 I was already chewing on this: we Chinese have started to have money, and beyond what that brings us, has the money also brought harm worth maybe double the good? Asians were wrecked once by poverty, then wrecked again by wealth. I did a lot of mocking — fashion, mobile phones, that sort of thing. It is 2018 now and I don't think much has improved.

What I want my comics to do is this: my view may not be the right one, but I look at this era through it — especially at Asians, or, narrowing it down, at Chinese people — at what they have actually been through in this era, and at whether the happiness you can see or the happiness you can't is the better one. Everyone needs to think about that.

Q: What will Absolute Kid 3 be about when it comes out this year? The last volume was ten years ago.

Z: Besides the clash between the adult world and the child's world, what I want to talk about is imagination.

Economies around the world have come apart. The mainland's is still very good for now, but abroad every country is doing badly. So I think many of the ideas we have will start to change, many occupations will disappear, and the whole environment, the whole business model, is bound to go through a huge change. That makes imagination extremely important. With imagination, I think you can actually cope with the era that's coming. So that is what I want Absolute Kid 3 to be about.

Cover image: a panel from Chu Teh-yung's Everyone's Sick; the long cover image is an interior illustration from Absolute Kid 2 (《绝对小孩2》); the banner is the soundtrack album cover for the television series Pink Ladies.