"The parents taught the kids, 'When you grow up you want to be an officer of the air force.' So I never thought about going to the University.
"I was pretty quiet," Chu says of his grade school days. "Actually not too much to do. I was good at wrestling. I always stayed home and I was shy--anyway, not too special." He was an indifferent student, with few friends. "In junior high school I was probably 35th out of 50 students." From an early age Chu rejected the life he was expected to live.
"The whole set pattern was boring--going to the military, going to officer school. My life was pretty ordinary, I thought. I was very ordinary." The school work was difficult for him and he was given little encouragement to apply himself. By high school Chu had decided he would die of boredom. In the 11th grade he left for Taipei.
"I told them before I went," Chu recalls, "but everybody didn't agree. I said 'I must go to Taipei. I need a separation from this enviroment. This enviroment will kill me. There is no future here.'"
"I'm not outstanding the way some people are," Chu says of his dilemma. "I didn't know what I could do. I thought that in the worse case, I could change somewhere else, but [if I] stayed there, I [would] get into trouble. I was thinking, 'My brain is in pain.' So I moved to Taipei, changed my enviroment. If people asked me what my goals were, I didn't have one."
He packed some bags and took the train with a classmate suffering from a similar need to escape.
The school Chu had attended in Pintong was a government funded school which, in Taiwan, was considered more prestigious than private schools. Despite his lackluster performance, Chu was accepted by a private school recommended by his Pintong classmate's sister.
Chu too had a sister in Taipei, his married oldest sister Chu Ti Ng, then 24, the second of the Chu children. She helped Chu, then 16, with living expenses. Chu lived with his Pintong classmate in a rented house with the help of the money his sister could spare. He managed to finish high school.
The only way Chu could avoided compulsory military service was to get himself into a top university. "I failed [the exam]. I felt pretty upset about not getting into the university." Facing the prospect of being drafted, in December 1977, at the age of 20, Chu joined the army paratroopers and found himself stationed in his hometown of Pintung. Army life offered little diversion. He had no girlfriend. The dozen jumps he was required to make lost their excitement after the first one. Once or twice a month he visited his family.
"In a family with six kids," he muses of his parents' attitude toward him, "it's quite difficult to get special attention."
He began and ended his two-year stint as a private. Deciding to make another try at getting into a university, he returned to Taipei to devote himself to studying. Three or four months of studying was all he could take before deciding to look for a job. He scoured the newspapers. The only jobs available to people with his credentials were in door-to-door sales. Three or four months after leaving the army Chu was hired by Duplo Enterprises to sell mimeograph machines, the messy precursors to today's copiers.
"They needed people to do door-to-door sales," Chu says. "Going door to door, door to door, you get a lot of rejections.
"This sales manager was very outgoing," Chu recalls. "He was a very good salesperson. So he taught us how to [do sales that way]. But his idea of a salesperson didn't fit my character. I'm shy, I'm not good at talking to strangers. When I talk in public, I'm very, very nervous. None of those [qualities he expected] fit me. But that was the only job I could find. I can always change myself. I bought a book called The Salesperson. I learned a lot. If you are a car salesperson, you probably need 60 calls before you sell one car. If you sell business machines, you need 45. My future looked like [I had] no chance, [unless] I changed myself.
"When I went into the office, the first thing I would say is,"Hi", to anybody, "Hi, how are you?". I boasted [about] myself even if I didn't want to talk. It was like I put on a mask. When I started work, [I wore] a happy face], always smiling, mouth big almost to the ears, always asking questions. It didn't matter if I was scared, I always talked anyway. The people in Taiwan are very shy. They teach the children to never answer. It's very different than here [where] everyboby wants to show off.
"I wanted to be an outgoing person. Any question the teacher asked, I was the first person to raise his hand. So after he called me, I had to stand up and think about what I needed to say. That forced me to become the most talkative person.
"That [company sales class] lasted one week. My classmates were suprised. They look at me as a very different person, a super salesperson. I got encouraged. They sent five people to meet customers. The manager saw some people are nervous and paired two people together. I was the first to volunteer, 'I don't need anybody.' If I went with another person, nothing [would be] done because we would share responsiblity. The second reason, in case I lost face, I didn't want another person to see me. It would be very embarrassing."
[CONTINUED BELOW]
He overcame his terror of knocking on doors, by forcing himself to knock first without thinking about the consequences. Once he had knocked, he found, he could respond to the situation. "Many times people kick me out."
Chu forced himself to call on as many prospects as he could based on the expectation that he needed 45 visits to make a sale. During that first month he screwed up his courage enough times to sell three machines. No other salesperson sold even one.
"It was the first time I found out I could be a good salesperson," Chu recalls proudly. He remained shy in his personal life, but found that putting on a tie and going into the office made him a super salesman. "The conflict in my mind was very big because I was a different type of person now." A month and a half later, he quit.
"The pressure grew so big," he recalls. "People were already expecting me to be a super salesperson. In one and half months, I sold a total of four machines. If I was that good, how about the second month, the third month? The expectation level was higher and higher, and for me it was quite difficult. I was so nervous."
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