Loud mouth who's never heard

Huang Yung-nan (黃永楠) does not fit the mold of the loudmouth that he is. With his no-name polo shirt and slacks and self-effacing manner he's completely unremarkable in appearance, which is fine by him. He doesn't want the public to know that he's the one who makes fools of Taiwan's political elite on a daily basis with his editorial cartoons drawn under the name Coco.

"Almost no one knows me. I haven't even met most of the editors of the papers I draw for," he said in a rare interview in Taipei last week. "It's better that no one recognizes me. That way I can walk around the city in busted sandals and a dirty T-shirt if I want -- which I sometimes do." The low profile Coco prefers to keep seems symptomatic of his split personality, the public Coco who has over 20 books to his name and states his opinions before millions in the pages of publications around the world and Huang, whose closest friends describe as an amicable yet slightly reclusive intellectual. He's the man who's out there, but never to be seen.

"It's important to stay out of the fray if you're going to be an editorial cartoonist. If you get too close to the people you're satirizing or too involved in what's going on you run the risk of losing your objectivity," he said.

Coco stays outside of Taipei's inner political circle partly out of a rigid journalistic work ethic. But remaining on the periphery as an observer is also facilitated in his case by the fact that he works from the comfort of his home in San Diego, where he ended up precisely because of his big mouth.

Forced out

Coco has been drawing editorial cartoons since the late 1970s, starting out when Taiwan was beginning to make the transition from an authoritarian state into the free-wheeling democracy that it is today.

He became friends with several leading opponents of the government, including Kang Ning-hsiang (康寧祥) Shih Ming-teh (施明德) and Antonio Chiang (江春男) and felt compelled to add his weight to the swelling anti-government movement. "I'm a restless, active person and if I feel like I should do something, I'll just do it. I first got into drawing cartoons because I felt like I should do something."

Originally an architect by trade, he started out moonlighting for major underground opposition publications, like The 80s (八十年代) and Formosa (美麗島), pioneering in Taiwan a form of political commentary that threw KMT authorities a curve ball.

Before Coco, hundreds of dissidents had written reams of scathing commentary on the Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) regimes in blunt terms that frequently landed the authors in jail or worse. The government was accustomed to this kind of criticism and had its tried-and-true manner of handling it, but it had never experienced dissidents making light of their rule.

"My drawings were humorous as well as subversive, which confused the government. They had no clue what to make of it.

"Authoritarian governments have no sense of humor because they're preoccupied with trying to make people think a certain way. Humor is simply not a part of the official culture under these kinds of regimes." When Coco speaks of iron-fisted governments' reactions toward humor he does so with the weight of traumatic personal experience.

Almost immediately after his cartoons began publication, the authorities came knocking at his door seeking explanations.