When I try to cultivate flowers, they will not bloom. When I casually insert willow branches into the earth, they grow into forests.
This traditional Chinese saying seems written especially to describe Liu Hsing-chin. As a poor country boy during the war-time years of the Japanese occupation, Liu never dreamed of being internationally known as an inventor nor of becoming a widely popular cartoonist. Today he is both.
During the 1970s, his most active period as an inventor, he turned out hundreds of innovative products; the ROC granted patents to 138 of them, and another 43 won patents in the U.S., Japan, West Germany, and England. This record remains unsurpassed in Taiwan. Although his inventions have won many awards in national and international exhibitions, he is better known as the "King of Cartoons" at home where his cartoon characters are familiar to almost everyone under 40.
The two roles of inventor and cartoonist are not as contradictory as they may first appear. Liu's work in both fields serve educational ends. He invents educational toys that employ ingeniously designed cartoon cards, while in many of his cartoon serials, the main characters help people quickly solve problems through creative thinking.
Liu was born south of Taipei in a remote Hsinchu county village. Because the Japanese occupying forces were struggling to support a losing war effort, they forced all male Taiwanese to perform corvee and demanded food contributions from the poor villagers. Women had to perform all the farming themselves, while children took care of family chores. Liu was only nine when he had to share many adult responsibilities. His strict parents usually gave him jobs to perform without any instructions. If he failed to accomplish them, no excuse would spare him from a whipping. This severity encouraged him to think of every possible way to solve problems on his own.
Among other chores, Liu took care of the family cow. When it was not needed to help with plowing in their own paddy fields, the cow was often rented to fellow villagers as a means of subsidizing the family income. It was his job to deliver the cow to renters who often lived miles away. The country fields were crisscrossed by irrigation canals and ditches, usually bridged by simple wooden planks. Since cows refused to walk across these, he often had to make long detours. This delayed delivery and displeased his parents. Liu reasoned: "Cows always walk on soil, perhaps it's the unfamiliar planks that intimidate them." As an experiment, he covered a planked bridge with dirt and took the cow to it. It walked across without hesitation. Liu was pleased with the result, but the problem was still not solved. Because it was impossible for him to cover every bridge in the area with dirt, he decided the next best solution was to train the cow to walk on the planks instead. Thereafter, every time he took the cow to the disguised bridge, he removed some of the soil. By the time the planks were brushed clean, Liu was the proud caretaker of the only cow in the village that walked across wooden bridges. What amazed the villagers even more was that some bridges in the area had rotted away to a single board, yet Liu's cow walked contentedly across. He concludes the story with a chuckle, saying "I guess they train beasts in the circus exactly the same way. It's a pity my old cow passed away, otherwise it might be trained as the only cow on earth to walk on a tight rope."
During planting seasons, his parents wanted him to guard the family paddy fields from the birds that tried to eat the freshly sown seeds. His many other chores did not allow much time in the fields, so he designed an animated scarecrow, using rope, bamboo tubes, a gasoline drum, and water power. It proved extraordinarily effective. He later introduced the device to his neighbors, which eventually led to widespread recognition of his cleverness. Soon villagers were coming to him for help whenever they encountered problems. Drawing upon his keen observation of nature and skills developed from practical experimentation, he rarely disappointed them.
But Liu never thought of himself as a child prodigy. He says, "Under the circumstances, I had to wrack my brains when working things out by myself. Nowadays, children are over-protected. Because parents arrange everything for them, they have no idea how to face problems, let alone solve them."
Due to the wartime poverty, his formal childhood schooling was limited. When he asked his parents if he could attend primary school, they answered, "All right, but only if you take good care of your little sister and the cow." So Liu attended classes with his baby sister bundled on his back and with the cow tied nearby. To prevent the cow from becoming entangled while grazing, he suspended a rope between two trees, then attached the halter rope to it with a special slipknot.
After Japan returned Taiwan to the ROC government, Liu was able to finish primary school in less dire conditions. Although he did not like studying very much, he still asked to attend junior high school—for a wrist watch. The family was too poor to own even a single watch, but by taking part in the entrance examination, he had a perfect reason to borrow one from relatives. And besides, he could wear it for a whole day. This line of reasoning led to his sitting for the examination, which he passed without much difficulty.
The junior high school was over eight hours away from home, so he boarded in the house of a family friend. His new landlord was a butcher, and Liu had to rise before sunrise each day to work in the shop in exchange for his free lodging. At the end of his junior high school years, he pondered an uncertain future: "If I quit school now, the only skill I have for making a living the rest of my life is that of a butcher...and I hate the work." An alternative was to continue his schooling.
Taipei Municipal Normal College, with its free tuition and boarding, seemed to be his only way out. He went to Taipei for advanced study and eventually majored in art. The frequent cultural activities in Taipei were far different from his rural background. Fascinated, he was determined to stay on. After he learned that only the top students would be assigned to teach in big cities following graduation, he became intensely diligent in his studies. When Liu graduated in 1953, he was class valedictorian.
At the time he made his debut as a teacher, every primary school in the city faced a common problem: children were infatuated with comic books that told preposterous tales of supernatural feats. Many children cut classes in order to hide out in side-street rental libraries that carried the various cartoon booklets and magazines. A few students even ran away from home and went to the nearby mountains in search of the great masters of supernatural powers who supposedly dwelt there. Often they could not find their way back home. Some were found, exhausted by hunger and cold; less fortunate ones lost their lives. These incidents brought about a strict ban on comic books, but children still sneaked away to the rental libraries.
Liu gave serious thought to the phenomenon. "If children would take such great risks and spend their limited allowance money for the comics, the booklets must have tremendous magic." He decided to attack fire with fire by creating a competing cartoon story.
His first cartoon, called the Fairy Tales, tells of a little boy so convinced by cartoon stories about masters with supernatural powers that he decides to go to the mountains to find them. The boy becomes lost, suffers great hardships, then is finally found by his family. After returning home, he throws away all his comics and advises his friends never to be bewitched by their extravagant tales.
Although a cartoon, the Fairy Tales was widely welcomed. Teachers encouraged their students to read it and parents bought it for their children. Practically overnight, Liu found himself to be a famous cartoonist. Newspaper editors approached him for more of his works, and he obliged them by creating one cartoon figure after another—Hsiao Ching, Our Teacher Miss Ting, and Wong Lao Liu. These characters all illustrated moral tales, teaching children about manners, fidelity, filial piety, and human compassion using the once forbidden art form. Two of the most famous figures created by him, Ah San Ke, a country bumpkin, and Ta Shen Po, a clumsy, naive spinster, were both inspired by his beloved fellow villagers back home. His short-term military training experience was also caricatured in the cartoon serial Happy In The Army, beginning with the day of enlistment and the first GI haircut.
In the late 1960s, when Taiwan was transforming rapidly from an agricultural society into an industrial one, the ROC government began a nation-wide campaign to promote scientific education. A newspaper editor asked Liu to help support the project. Liu hesitated because he had never studied science. Just as he was about to turn down the offer, a recent incident came to his mind. At home, two glasses had been stacked together in his kitchen and he could not separate them. He had tried many ways to solve the problem before he recalled the law that "materials would expand when hot and shrink when cold." Accordingly, he poured cold water in the upper glass and dipped the lower one in hot water. The two easily came apart. He asked the editor, "Can this be called science?" The editor was delighted: "Wonderful! It's just what we need—simple solutions to everyday problems."
In response, Liu created the "Bright Kid," who acted as an advisor to his classmates and neighbors, just as Liu himself had done during his childhood. The cartoon serial was so popular that it was extended for years. Liu soon ran out of subjects from his own experience and knowledge, so he had to scramble around in search of relevant books on scientific topics. The Bright Kid developed a near encyclopedic knowledge of nature and basic science.
Computers and robots were unknown at this time, but Liu's extraordinary imagination soon created a robot that took orders from a kind little boy and helped police fight crime. The robot, which was capable of talking, flying, and diving, soon became another favorite among children. One day, a boy phoned Liu and said, "Your robot is fantastic. Please show us a real one. You can do it, for you are as clever as the Bright Kid—unless you have been kidding us all along."
To make his cartoon figures more convincing, Liu worked day and night to produce a toy robot. But instead of being a super crime-buster, the toy took the role of a tutor. Liu devised various cartoon cards with words and pictures. When they were properly matched in the stand beneath the robot, it would nod and clap its hands. The product was patented both in the ROC and the United States. It became as popular as its cartoon version and also marked the beginning of a new career.
Invention became Liu's newest enthusiasm. Within a few years, he invented more than 300 products, the smallest in scale an automatic, self-sharpening pencil, and the largest a wave-powered generator designed to harness the power of ocean wave movement. He is particularly proud of the generator. "Waves are an inexhaustible source of energy and free of charge. According to my concept, the construction can be multifunctional, with harbor and fish-breeding ponds alongside the wave-powered plant. Some day in the future when the world exhausts other forms of energy, this invention of mine will be valued. But I guess I'll not live to see the day."
During the early years of the ROC's industrial growth, there was less respect for originality than today. Liu's inventions were often rejected by manufacturers because they thought the future market prospects were unpredictable. Liu tried to market his inventive ideas himself, but the complicated details involving production and promotion soon exhausted him both physically and financially. He decided to limit his efforts by concentrating only on inventions with educational applications. This eventually won him great public acclaim.
Liu's year of harvest came in 1981. Early in the year he was presented with the Sun Yat-sen Technical Invention Award, the nation's highest honor in the field. Soon thereafter, he learned that he was going to be presented with a gold medal in a New York invention exhibition. In May, he was awarded an honorary doctorate in the U.S. and then in November, two of Liu's educational toys—the Young Driver and the Wisdom Beads—were selected for gold medals from among 270 entries representing 13 different countries in a German invention exhibition.
The Young Driver combines training in manual dexterity with cartoon warnings about dangerous objects in a child's environment, such as hot irons, knives, and medicine bottles. The Wisdom Beads toy requires even more eye-hand coordination, and also is more intellectually complex. It introduces children to basic knowledge in an assortment of fields using more than 240 cartoon illustrations.
Liu's recent cartoon serials, although fewer in number, are no less popular. The Small Village Stories is an autobiographical cartoon version of his own childhood years, while the Little Genius is the Bright Kid of the 1980s, equipped with up-to-date knowledge to help solve modern problems. Liu has extended his cartoon creations into other fields as well, including various creative textbooks for teaching art.
His widely acclaimed book Hand Outline Pictures, for example, illustrates creative methods of drawing pictures based on children's own hand outlines. The book has set a new record for the greatest sales volume among all Chinese publications. The initial printing of 150,000 copies sold out in Taiwan within six months. English and Malaysian versions have also become best sellers. Total sales volume of the book around the world is already well over one million copies. Hongkong sales boomed after he appeared on one of the city's live television shows. Members of the audience were invited to trace various hand outlines on portable black boards. Liu amazed everyone by immediately elaborating the outlines into complete drawings, completing fifty pictures within minutes.
Entrepreneurs now seek out Liu's creative talents and many companies invite him to hold seminars or give lectures on how to overcome obstacles by creative thinking. Once a week, he teaches applied arts in Fu-jen Catholic University, and every Saturday he conducts a fun and laughter-filled art class for children.
Given the extensive range of Liu's creative activities, it might be supposed that he is a thorough workaholic. Surprisingly, he has never kept a tight schedule. Each week he saves three days as unscheduled free time. A fun-loving person, he engages in all sorts of sports, including mountain climbing, camping, skiing, skating, and hunting. But when he learned of scuba diving ten years ago, he gave up most other sports for the undersea world. No work whatsoever could prevent him from almost weekly trips to the sea. "It's such an unbelievably peaceful world under the surface," he says with a contented smile. "The constant bustle and struggle we see around us no longer exists. Instead I am surrounded by blue, clear water and friendly, curious fish. They swarm to get a closer look at this human being who is so strange to their world. And if I do not startle or harm them, they follow me around and actually play with me. The sea actually washes my mind clear of any troubles."
Somehow there does seem to be a comfortable, creative link between Liu energetically frolicking with fish during a dive, and thousands of delighted children playing with his toys.