Inspirational Story of Zhu Deyong: From Autistic Patient to Famous Cartoonist

Zhu Deyong’s inspirational story: From an autistic patient to a famous cartoonist

Zhu Deyong’s introduction:

Zhu Deyong, 1960 Born in 2011, he is a famous cartoonist in Taiwan. His comic columns have been serialized in Taiwan for more than ten years. Among them, the column "Vinegar Clan" has been serialized for ten years, setting a record for the longest comic serialization period in Taiwan. His comic works such as "Double Bang Cannon", "Serious Girl" and "Vinegar Clan" have great influence on young men and women in mainland China and have a large number of loyal readers. On November 21, 2011, the 2011 Sixth China Rich Writers List - Cartoon Writers Rich List - was released. Zhu Deyong topped the list of richest comic book writers with a total ten-year royalty income of 61.9 million yuan. attracted widespread attention.

How an autistic person starts his life

It was not until the age of knowing his destiny that the most famous cartoonist in Taiwan finally found the answer to the riddle of his life: He has Asperger's Syndrome, an autism spectrum disorder. Painting became an outlet for all his depression, and his cold-looking conclusion was that "everyone is sick."

There is a legend in Japan that if a person can call out the true name of a monster, he will become its master and no longer have to be afraid of it.

At the age of 53, Zhu Deyong finally called out the name of the monster in his life: "Asperger's Syndrome".

This is an autistic spectrum disorder that causes patients to have difficulty socializing, difficulty understanding other people's emotions, narrow interests, extreme discomfort with change, and frequent repetition of specific behaviors.

After seeing this name, Zhu Deyong breathed a sigh of relief and felt that many mysteries in his life had been solved. In the first half of his life, this disease made him a person living in a glass ball, watching silently as time and people passed by. Painting became an outlet for all his depression. If he didn't vent his anger, he would be there for 30 years if he wasn't careful.

?I finally know that I am not mentally retarded. ?He laughed and leaned back on the sofa easily.

Always ready to escape at the press conference

In early January, Zhu Deyong was sitting in a restaurant near Jianguomen in Beijing, and his assistants sent away the media reporters one after another. His wife, Feng Manlun, brought him a pot of sugar water and asked him if he wanted to moisten his throat. He smiled and waved his hand, and Mrs. Zhu got up and went upstairs to comfort another group of reporters who had already set up cameras and lights.

Zhu Deyong doesn’t like to be watched or talk to strangers. He will be resistant and nervous. When he was a child, he helped his classmates go to the post office to buy stamps. He held the money, his mind went blank, and he just wanted to run away. He stood silently at the post office for a moment, then grabbed his classmate, put all the money he had into his hand, and said: "Don't ask me to ask, go yourself." ?

He has always remembered this incident deeply. Even after he became an adult, he was still reminded of how afraid he was of the outside world, and he struggled with it repeatedly: "When you think about this, you feel very uncomfortable. You will think, God, what kind of person are you, why can't you even ask?

This impulse to run away from strangers gradually became more and more popular as he became famous. Barely restrained, but never gone. His new book "Falling in Love with Idiots" was published in mainland China at the beginning of the year, and the publisher invited him to the mainland for a promotional tour. In Nanjing, they invited two celebrities to sit on the same stage with Zhu Deyong. One was Meng Fei, who was famous for talking about the relationship between men and women; the other was Zhang Jiajia, a writer who became popular for his heart-stirring and tear-jerking love stories.

The atmosphere was good that day, with constant laughter, but Zhu Deyong was still extremely nervous, his hands were sweating constantly, and he felt his muscles trembling under his clothes.

?If I didn’t have a little bit of sense left, I might just throw the microphone away and run away. ?he said. The mainland publisher did not dare to tell him that there were thousands of people present that day, otherwise he might have run away.

He smiled and said that this was already settled. He remembered the last time he came to the mainland for an activity very clearly. It was a week before departure on June 26, 2011. He was already so depressed that he stayed awake all day long. Lying in bed all night without eating or drinking, if there was a button in life that could end at the push of a button, I think I would push it. ?The wife and son kept talking with him, and asked the mainland agent to call and persuade him before he could go out.

?Why can other people enjoy it so much? Why do others like to be in public and make friends with a lot of people, but I can’t help it? In the past 30 years, he often asked himself this, ?I often feel that I Being sick and stupid, there is really nothing I can do. ?

Sick

During the break in the interview, he walked under the glass dome outside the restaurant with a glass of water. There was no rain for a long time in the winter in Beijing, and the glass was covered with dust, but the sunlight could still penetrate, so he seemed to be enveloped in a gray mist, turning into a black shadow. He stood there in trance.

For many years, he has not been able to figure out what is wrong with him and why he is different from others.

For example, he has not been able to write with the correct strokes since he was a child. When calculating single-digit multiplication, he must start from one to one to one and one to two to two, and memorize the entire multiplication table. I always misunderstand words. When I look at a restaurant sign, what I see is one name, but when I remember it, it becomes another name in my mind. Then he excitedly went to tell others where there was a good restaurant. Others looked for it with great expectations, but of course, they could never find it.

Even though he later became the most famous cartoonist in Taiwan, he never got rid of these troubles and torture, and often fell into depression and self-doubt.

It wasn’t until he was in his 30s that he began to have answers to the things that troubled him. Mrs. Zhu read a lot of books and told him that he probably had autism and dyslexia.

Last year I became clearer. During that time, Zhu Deyong and his wife often went to see a rehabilitation doctor. The doctor concluded that Zhu Deyong had Asperger's syndrome, a disease that is different from ordinary autism.

Because of dyslexia, Zhu Deyong learned his understanding of Asperger syndrome from his wife. People with this disease are prone to depression and lose their temper. Zhu Deyong said that one of the "fun" things about this disease is that the patient only lives in his own world. When he talks to you, he thinks he is explaining it clearly, but others may sound completely confused; When talking to him, when he thought he understood, he probably didn't understand what the other person meant.

Coincidentally, his rehabilitation physician is also a patient with Asperger's syndrome. Mrs. Zhu accompanied him for rehabilitation and listened to the two of them chatting. Zhu Deyong said one thing and the doctor said another. Zhu Deyong took over and started talking. In short, it was completely wrong. Mrs. Zhu was going crazy while listening, and they The two had a great conversation.

There is no effective treatment for this disease yet, but Zhu Deyong seemed to have a stone falling in his heart, and he knew what his fate was.

The Zhu family almost became famous, almost

After that, Zhu Deyong remembered why he always felt alienated from his father when he was a child.

His father was a student of Chiang Ching-kuo. He attended a cadre training school in mainland China and was the first in the class. He was highly appreciated by Chiang Ching-kuo. After arriving in Taiwan, Chiang Ching-kuo came to him and asked: What do you want to do, what do you want to do?

When Zhu Deyong listened to his mother, his father could not say a word at that time. Jiang Jingguo had no choice but to leave a message and said: "Think about it carefully and I will ask you again next time." ?

Everyone knew about Chiang Ching-kuo’s visit soon, and many people came to ask for their father’s favor, hoping that he would recommend him in front of Chiang Ching-kuo.

Afterwards, Jiang Ching-kuo came again. His father still shook his head silently, not knowing what he wanted to do. The visitor had no choice but to sigh and walk away. Since then, Zhu Deyong's father has been working as an ordinary civil servant. There have been many turmoils in Taiwan for decades, but the Zhu family has never been in trouble.

When Zhu Deyong's mother talked about these things, she would inevitably lament the missed opportunities in life. Zhu Deyong also complained about why his father was so incompetent and why he was satisfied with being a small civil servant.

He can even understand why when he was a child, his father was not like other parents, who would talk to him a lot about life principles and rarely encourage or reprimand him.

Later, when Zhu Deyong got married and started a business, he once went home to accompany his old father. The two of them sat across from each other at a round table, and after exchanging pleasantries, they had nothing to say.

?The two of us just kept looking at each other like this. While he was sitting, he kept smiling and didn't speak. I also kept looking at him, and I didn't speak either. I just sat like this for two hours. ?Zhu Deyong later recalled, ?So, I used to say that I felt very close to my father, but yet so alienated. Later, after my father passed away, I felt that during the years I was with my father, he did not teach me anything, but he could always convey love to me. I just can feel the love he conveys to me, in the simplest way. ?

Zhu Deyong’s father lived to be 94 years old and had a peaceful life. Zhu Deyong thought, it is hard to say whether it was unfortunate or lucky that his father missed a great career when he was young. If he had been promoted, his father might have been exhausted. ?

die. This can be considered a blessing in disguise, or fate's compensation for illness.

? Life is really a strange thing. ?He thought for a while and said.

Observing the world in a glass ball

For Zhu Deyong, the compensation of fate happened elsewhere. The disease closed him in his own world, but also allowed him to withdraw and become a spectator of the world.

When he became famous, he was 26 years old. The dramatic changes in Taiwan had just begun, and the economic boom was unstoppable. At that time, he painted "Double Cannon", which talked about the Chinese people's tangled view on marriage. One day when I went to buy soy milk and fried dough sticks, I saw a young man on the street who was dressed very strangely. I felt that a new generation in Taiwan that was very different from tradition had emerged, so I painted "The Vinegar Tribe", which is about Taiwan's new people.

In the mid-1990s, Zhu Deyong began to paint "Astringent Girl", which reflected the women of the new era in Taiwan, a heartthrob who wanted love but not marriage, and a heartthrob who wanted work but not love. "Strong Woman", one is what all men want to marry, "Marriage Madness", and the other is "Innocent Girl", whom no man can figure out, each represents a completely different outlook on love and life for urban women.

By the end of the 20th century, Taiwan's economy had stagnated. The noisy, chaotic but hopeful era had passed, and urbanites were trapped in trivial and cramped jobs, unable to extricate themselves. Zhu Deyong painted "About Going to Work" to question the lifestyle of commercial society. Next is "Absolute Child", which depicts the world of children and resists the values ??of the adult world.

He has a natural resistance to the business era, even though he has been very successful in this era, and he has used methods to constantly pour cold water on people of this era.

These various observations and satires later reached their climax in "Everyone Is Sick", in which he tried his best to depict the morbidity of people in the consumer society. He drew a woman showing off to a man how much her clothes were worth. The man quickly took out his calculator and divided the price of the woman's clothes by her age, and concluded that the cost of the outfit was only 3,200 yuan.

Later, he painted "Falling in Love with Idiots" as the second part of "Everyone Is Sick". Many people regard it as a comic about love, but Zhu Deyong shook his head: "I just regard love as a shadow." What I really want to draw is that this group of crazy people in a crazy world are all exposed under love, and love is just a peeking point. ?

He had reason to look on coldly. He and his wife are the same type of people. They don't know much about how to make money, and they don't work hard for it. Someone introduced them to buy a golf certificate, which could increase in value. They both forgot about it until the other party came and told them that the price of the golf certificate had risen to 1.3 million, so they had to share their hands with each other.

When Zhu Deyong was working hardest to make money, Mrs. Zhu threatened divorce and warned him not to become a "money printing machine".

Zhu Deyong told Mrs. Zhu: When I was young, my dream was to buy an island when I got rich, and I would be the king on it and cultivate my imperial guards. Then that dream began to shrink slowly, to the point that when I have money, I will buy a plane so that I can fly by myself.

Then the dream slowly shrank to the point where I wanted to buy a boat, go fishing on the boat and drink champagne? Finally it shrank to something very ordinary, just staying at home and feeling very comfortable. ?

Being abandoned by the times is nothing more than that

Onlookers will inevitably be constantly left behind by the rapid world. In the glass ball, Zhu Deyong often felt that the world was rushing toward absurdity, so he could not calm down his anger.

In 1999, he came to Beijing for the first time and wandered in the alleys of Nanluogu Lane. He saw steamers being opened in shops selling steamed buns and steam billowing out, and he saw residents carrying steamed buns out of their homes. A chopping board, squatting at the door to chop meat.

?You may say they are rough, but to me, it is a kind of life, a living life. ?

More than ten years later, he went to that alley again and found that it had completely changed. There are coffee shops, teahouses, and clothing stores everywhere, and the air is filled with smog.

?I feel angry almost every time I leave. Why is it like this? I am not saying that we should not make progress, but can we not use this method? He asked.

The same goes for Taipei. In his opinion, all places in Asia give him the same kind of anger: tearing down everything in exchange for wealth, with only money in his head.

?There is no way, no way at all. ?he muttered. He recalled the Japanese-style house he lived in in Taipei when he was a child. All the residents were forced to move out seven years ago, and then the house was sold to a development company and has been abandoned ever since.

Every once in a while, he would find a way to go there to see his old house. The entire neighborhood was boarded up and entry was prohibited. As he looked outside, he felt that the trees were growing thicker, and the roof was collapsing piece by piece, watching it become increasingly desolate and crumbling.

He will also accompany his wife to visit her hometown in Kaohsiung. It was a military dependents' village. His wife took him to the dilapidated old house and told him that when he was a child, the bed was placed here and the table was placed there.

Zhu Deyong said: "That feeling is, Although I have not experienced my wife's childhood, following her to see it is equivalent to experiencing it again with her.

He gave an analogy for his attachment: "I have a chair. I can tell my grandson that your grandpa often sat here. Look, the paint on the handle is all worn off." When your grandson touches that chair, he is connected to the first half of his grandpa's life. Memory should look like this. If a city has no memory, the city has no life. If there is no life in this city, the people who live in this city are bound to get sick. Because he has nothing to rely on. ?

Therefore, he never worried about being abandoned by the times. To this day, he still does everything himself and insists on drawing four-frame comics one by one.

In order to publish "Everyone Is Sick", he drew more than 1,900 drawings, but only 300 were finally selected. ?If I want to cheat money, I can publish six or seven books in a row. ?He did the math, and then told a joke about a friend's child: The child wanted to learn to draw from him, but his mother stopped him because the mother said: ?That's very poor.?

There was a sentence in a movie Zhu Deyong watched that moved him very much. The person in the film said that when he encountered a fork in his life, he always knew which one to choose, but he always chose the other one because he knew that the right path was too painful for him.

?This sentence is very inspiring to me and fits my state of mind. ?Zhu Deyong said, ?Life is like this. ?

Interview Q&A:

Yidu: The new work is the second in the "Everyone Is Sick" series. Why did you choose the angle of love?

Zhu Deyong : I think people’s madness is most easily manifested in two things: love and money. Why are you crazy? Because everyone has been misled by this era. This is an era where everything is calculated, even love is calculated. So no one can encounter love.

Yidu: So now many emotional experts are very popular, such as Zhang Jiajia and Meng Fei?

Zhu Deyong: I think this is a very ridiculous thing. Love is the purest thing in human nature. You don’t need anything if you see the right person.

When you fall in love with someone, before you meet him, your previous ten years of life are completely irrelevant, just like aliens living in separate universes. But at that moment you met unexpectedly, and from then on all the big and small things, joy, anger, sorrow, life and death were all together. But why is it like this? Let me calculate how much money you have, do you have a house and a car?

First Reading: In "Falling in Love with an Idiot", you and your wife are actually there?

Zhu Deyong: Yes, because I have the same reaction as others on some things.

Yidu: Can you give me an example?

Zhu Deyong: (laughing): This is my privilege, I won’t tell you. What I am very happy about is that I often call myself "the person who lays landmines in comics" in private, because I will reflect many people of this era in my comics, so when everyone reads my comics, When he comes to a certain one, he will be startled, "Are you talking about me?" That means you have stepped on a landmine.

? Being eliminated by the times? It’s a conspiracy

Yidu: You have been drawing four-frame comics for 30 years, aren’t you worried about being eliminated?

Zhu Deyong : I think that is all a kind of conspiracy. It is to force people to keep pushing themselves to avoid being eliminated by the times. But why can't everyone stop? It's a collective intimidation, and no one dares to stop.

First reading: Afraid of being different from others.

Zhu Deyong: Yes. Nothing in the world moves forward forever. Sooner or later, we have to stop, but when we stop, what are we left with? When I painted "Everyone Is Sick", people asked me what the disease was, and I said Taiwan and Mainland China suffers from "greed disease", but Taiwan and Mainland China are different.

Taiwan's "greed disease" is to lose again after gaining. They did not become pious because of the loss. Instead, they still missed (everything) at that time and continued to be greedy. Some entrepreneurs are selling fake oil and investors are speculating on real estate. Mainland China is suffering from "greed" after getting it. Although it has got it, it still wants more. But I think it will stop, and the economy will shift. No place will be bad for more than 50 years, and no place will be good for more than 50 years.

Yidu: The way you draw is stupid.

Zhu Deyong: In fact, as long as I start hiring a team, doing assembly lines, and authorizing authorization, I will be able to do it soon?

Yidu: But the price is to give up this kind of life.

Zhu Deyong: Yes, but we are not that kind of people, and there is no way we can even become that kind of people.

If you have to give me a solution, I can only say to become simple.

Yidu: You will depict exaggerated and pathological realities in comics, but you rarely seem to find the reasons.

Zhu Deyong: There are many reasons. Chinese education never teaches us that life is the most important. Instead, it teaches us that success and wealth are the most important. So every child is studying hard, getting into a good school, finding a good job, and making a lot of money. Our education does not teach us any aesthetics of life. Without spiritual life, we can only use material things to replace it.

Yidu: But you rarely talk about what to do.

Zhu Deyong: Actually, I am just the one asking questions, because I am not able to give the answers. If you have to give, you can only solve it from the source, that is, you have to become simple. The first point is to slow down; the second point is to let yourself be a simple person.

Zhu Deyong’s inspirational story: From an autistic patient to a famous cartoonist

Let me give you an example of my own. In my day, no one encouraged you to draw comics. If you drew comics, you were dead (laughs). They will say, if you draw comics, how will you live in the future? You won’t make any money, and no one will marry you. But I have always maintained a very simple mentality. Maybe, I, an Asperger's sufferer, just like to draw, why can't I do what I like? Because I have dyslexia, I can't be a good student. I have no other way to go but Keep painting. This is how my road came slowly, little by little. ;