It’s Different to Be Different

About two thousand years ago, Suma Chien(司馬遷) in his famous book, The Historical Records(史記), described Tao Ju Gong(陶朱公),the richest man in ancient China, as follows. “Sell the expensive in a way as if it were dirt, buy the cheep in a way as if it were pearls.” One would consider that is a matter of price. But price is just a phenomenon and every person has his own view, therefore, it might not be the real point. I think it is about “being different”.

If everyone, including your mother in law, thinks that something is of no value, then you just buy it as if it were invaluable. If everyone thinks that something is very valuable, then you just sell it as if it were of no value. All you have to do is being different to all the others. Some may say that this is a kind of contrarians. But it is not that simple. Being different is never that simple.

Consider a teenager who wants to be different. He does not want to be similar to his parents, brothers, sisters, and even classmates. He wants to be different in clothing, hairstyle, talking, and even foods to the extent that he manages to be as different as he can and finally turns to the fads for help. As a result, in one way or another, those teenagers that turn to fads all become similar. They are so similar that they may even look like their parents twenty years ago. Their difference is just of no difference.

If you want to be really different, you just can’t make it by being against everything mechanically. The difference has to be originated from the bottom of your heart.

I remember that thirty years ago, when I was in high school, there was a naïve painter, Hong Tung(洪通, 1920-1987). To everyone’s surprise, he suddenly became famous. Hong had never learned painting. Actually, he had never gone to any schools. He was an illiterate, and lived in a very poor and remote village in southern Taiwan. He made a living by temporary jobs.

One day, when he was about fifty years old, he suddenly found that he had a passion in painting and started painting. The villagers looked down on him and took him as a lunatic, for he made no money and could not make a living except relying on his wife. He was considered as garbage, but he’d never mind.

Amazingly, it only took several years for him to become a hot shot in Taiwan. How he succeeded will be skipped here. You only have to know that somehow he became the headlines. A lot of tourists went to that remote village just to see him. I confess here, I did, too. Taipei elites had organized an art exhibition for Hong in the U.S. Information Agency(美新處) in 1976. Everybody in Taiwan was crazy for him, even the President Chiang Ching-kuo.

But he never sold his paintings. Some had offered a price so high that the villagers can never imagine. He just refused to sell any of his work. Recall the phrase quoted from The Historical Records: ” Sell the expensive in a way as if it were dirt.” Quite a lot of people would advise him to sell at least some. Please also note that he was still very poor at that time. I think, in this case, it is a conventional wisdom to sell.

But Hong was different, again. He insisted. None was sold.

Years after, he had passed away. But people still consider him a great painter. Nowadays, a lot of so called naïve painters imitate his style of painting. Every year, children in his hometown would paint a lot of Hong’s style painting to memorize him.

One may say aftermath that had he sold his painting then, he would already be out of our consciousness, because we might take him as an ordinary painter.

He was so different to be different.