Issue 3 Introduction

Issue 3 - Be With Me  

第三号 - 生活的点点滴滴*

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December 2017, I made my last trip together with J to Taiwan. We visited Hualien along the east coast of Taiwan and saw the Pacific Ocean. It was altogether lovely. The waves roared. The blue skies calmed. The pebbled beach was an adventure for our soles. We agreed we would come back on our next trip and find a seaside inn to chill and hang out at.  

 

November 2018, we had booked a room in an inn facing the ocean off Hualien. The trip was, however, cancelled at the last minute because of my surgeries. In the weeks that followed, I was homebound and started to draw new pages for Furrie and Shortie just to keep myself from feeling too bored. Soon J fell into a depression. I was even more motivated to draw new Furrie and Shortie frames so that we could have something fun to talk about besides illness and recovery. 

 

February 2019, when J died, Furrie and Shortie were still debating their holiday destination!  But, of course, the destination would be Taiwan.

 

J and I visited Taipei every year, and sometimes we would venture to other parts of Taiwan. We always had the idea that Furrie and Shortie would be a series of 3 or 4 issues. And in Issue 3 Furrie and Shortie would go on an adventure to Taiwan. The characters DianDian and DiDi, as well as the ending were already developed when J was alive. 

 

Although travel is often characterized as an encounter with the exotic, isn’t it, in fact, the encounter between the familiar and the foreign instead. Familiarity gives us the knowledge, the ability to recognize and access what we love. Foreignness opens up time and space for us to do so, to question, wonder and discover. 

 

My annual trips with J to Taipei allowed us to experience what seems familiar in a foreign land. Our time in Taipei would be spent visiting bookstores, cafes, plant markets, live music houses, old neighbourhoods and nature trails. Not unlike how we would spend our weekends in Singapore. But as we did these familiar activities in a new context, we discovered anew what we love. In the same way, although Taipei is a foreign city to us, because we often sought out the same cafes or stayed in the hotel, we found found ways to make the foreign seem familiar. 

 

April 2019, a couple of friends and I took a trip to Taipei. We also visited the east coast of Taiwan, just slightly north of Hualien. The city and the ocean without J was familiar yet foreign. 

 

This is how and why people fall in love, no? We meet a person/place/story and we fall in love with what is infinitely interesting and exciting and new and – different from us and what we know. Yet when we fall in love, we are also finding that person/place/story speaking and appealing to something we already are – it is as if we have met before, in a dream or a past life.  They are, thankfully, not you, but seemed to have always been somewhere deep within you. They are a home, away from home. It is this dance between the familiar and foreign that keeps us in love, and keeps us feeling alive.  

 

April 2020, I returned to drawing Issue 3 of Furrie and Shortie amidst the pandemic. During the weeks of lockdown and even as restrictions on movement eased, there was still no international travel allowed. Stuck mostly in our homes and neighbourhoods, many people discovered anew the immediate space around them, and I think, the space within themselves. Besides satisfying a desire for travel, drawing Issue 3 was also my way of revisiting and discovering anew the memories of Taiwan and those intense feelings of being alive with J. 

 

I like to think that after learning to be their most wonderful furry and short selves in Issue 1, and struggling with the heartaches of growing up (some say growing old) in Issue 2, in Issue 3, Furrie and Shortie experience a kind of falling in love – falling in love with living and being alive. They fall in love with simply breathing as they trek up Mount Seven Stars. They fall in love with chance encounters and walking in the rain. They fall in love with waiting for and sitting in trains, watching the world go by. They fall in love with not knowing where is their next destination. 

 

This will be the last issue of Furrie and Shortie. I hope that you will also fall in love with being alive. 

 

Yvonne

*The Chinese title does not translate into "Be with me". It literally means "Life's droplets" or life's tiny bits and pieces. 点点滴滴 appear somewhere towards the middle of the comic!