Born with only the upper part of his right arm due to malpositioning in the womb, college student Fan Hung-hao (范弘昊) has taken on the world and made his own destiny, disability be damned.
So far, Fan has succeeded.
With a skill stemming from years of practice, Fan has been playing basketball since his junior-high school days, and has always been the captain of his school’s basketball teams.
Photo courtesy of Fan Hung-hao
Now studying creative design at Yunlin University of Science and Technology, Fan has won multiple silver medals in the International salon of Inventions and Innovation competitions in Ukraine and Poland.
He also won the gold medal in the Taiwan International Invention and Design Fair.
However, his most renowned design might be the shoes he created for now-retired Los Angeles Lakers star Kobe Bryant last summer.
Photo: Liao Shu-ling, Taipei Times
The design is branded by Nike as the Nike Zoom Kobe Venomenon 5 Dreams.
Fan said that he was given the chance to deliver the design to Bryant for his collection, adding that the experience was be one of the most treasured memories of his life.
Fan said that he was extremely proud that he had come up with the design, adding that a pair of the shoes are on display at the Nike flagship store in Taipei.
While Fan has spent many hours practicing his own skills in the sport, he said he wanted to thank his parents for their influence and guidance.
Fan said that his father had taught him basketball and told him to never hide his right arm, as he usually tried to when he was younger.
“Without [my father’s] advice, I might not have been able to set aside my inferiority complex,” Fan said.
LOUD AND PROUD Taiwan might have taken a drubbing against Australia and Japan, but you might not know it from the enthusiasm and numbers of the fans Taiwan might not be expected to win the World Baseball Classic (WBC) but their fans are making their presence felt in Tokyo, with tens of thousands decked out in the team’s blue, blowing horns and singing songs. Taiwanese fans have packed out the Tokyo Dome for all three of their games so far and even threatened to drown out home team supporters when their team played Japan on Friday. They blew trumpets, chanted for their favorite players and had their own cheerleading squad who dance on a stage during the game. The team struggled to match that exuberance on the field, with
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. A single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 800,000 to 400,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, sabre-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
Whether Japan would help defend Taiwan in case of a cross-strait conflict would depend on the US and the extent to which Japan would be allowed to act under the US-Japan Security Treaty, former Japanese minister of defense Satoshi Morimoto said. As China has not given up on the idea of invading Taiwan by force, to what extent Japan could support US military action would hinge on Washington’s intention and its negotiation with Tokyo, Morimoto said in an interview with the Liberty Times (sister paper of the Taipei Times) yesterday. There has to be sufficient mutual recognition of how Japan could provide
RSS