When I was a sophomore in Taiwan, I met my best friend, Wayne, and we shared the same dream with each other.  He was shy, so he wasn’t really good at making friends. The first time I saw him was when he was drawing. I was interested about this stranger’s drawing skill, so I tried to say hi to him, and took a look at what he just did. I could tell from his face, that he was not good at communication with someone that was not familiar for him. He looked really nervous, and couldn’t even speak fluently Mandarin with me. When I looked at his drawing, I was shocked. His drawing skill was really high, and he was drawing the character that was from one of my favorite manga story, to love.

We became friends really fast, read manga together, and even played the same video game. We started to have a dream, to become a mangaka, the comic makers. We talked about our story every day, and tried to make it became to comic. It was really hard, but we really enjoyed it. We tried to send his drawing to the publish house, and when we saw it posted on the last page of the magazine, Formosa Young. We was so happy stunned about it. We became more persistent and confident about our dream.

In our junior year in Taiwan, we started to work on our new story, the story about a young boy trying to stop the war, bring peace back to people’s life. We joined a competition that was created by the most famous publish house in Taiwan, Formosa Taiwan. It took us five month to work on the story, and made it to comic. When the dead line of the competition was close, we worked so hard trying to finish the story, but the bad thing happened.

Junior year was very important for the high school student in Taiwan, just like the United State. Everyone study hard for the test that connected to the college. But because of the competition, we ignored all the study, just focus on being a mangaka. Unfortunately, our parents got mad, especially Wayne’s parent. When the dead line was in only 3 days, Wayne was working on the final ending. His mom knocked his door, saw him drawing. She walked to him, shouted at him, and flipped the table angrily. The ink went all over on our work and destroyed it. Wayne and I was so sad about it, because this happened, Wayne had a hard time communicated with his mom. His mom was really mad because she thought that to become a mangaka is not a true job, but we spend the most important time for us to doing it. We couldn’t accept this happened, because of it, we have a stronger desire of becoming a mangaka. We know that we have to do it, not only for ourselves, but showing others that we can do it too!  

My parent was the opposite with Wayne’s. We went through the communicated with them, they decided to support me and send me to the U.S. for studying art and animation. But even I came to America, we didn’t stop our dream. We expanded our dream to not only become a mangaka, also want to make our story become animation. We are making our own comic right now, and we will still send it to the publish house to try to becoming a mangaka in this summer.