Dear H,
Ariel Xinyu Peng
Ariel Xinyu Peng (they/she) is a writer and teacher of translanguaging from Shanghai. They are the editor-in-chief of Mother Tongue Journal, a multimedia magazine. They hold a BA in English literature from New York University and an MFA in creative nonfiction from Columbia University. Ariel’s work sheds light on urban life, neurodiversity, and queerness. They always have a meme.
When I was translating your script the other day, I thought about the state of being a young artist. However, I was hesitant to even think about this matter because I don’t like calling myself an artist. It sounds too pretentious, plus I haven’t made anything as an artist yet. According to a writer friend of mine, it’s probably because, in Chinese, artist is 艺术家, writer is 作家, and painter is 画家. There is a 家 in every word, which grants these words a grandiose tone: 家 not only means house/home but also carries a sense of entitlement, belonging. And I’ve never felt I truly belonged anywhere.
Since you came to New York in the summer of 2022, we’ve been roommates and friends in the MFA program. I’ve been your actor and translator, and you’ve been my reader and editor. We always exchanged ideas about our projects, sitting at the brown wooden dining table from Ikea, which we placed by the window. We always sat there, smoking, talking, and drinking, and sometimes we did our nails when the lighting was good. I was always writing at that dining table too—though I probably drove you crazy by using it so versatilely, a neat freak like you never nudged me to clean up.
One of those times was in October, halfway into your first semester, and you had a new film to work on. It would only have one scene, three to five minutes, you said, where two people stood outside a building, smoking, about to say goodbye.
“Can I ask you for a favor?” you said to me. You’d paused and made a face. It meant that you wanted me to be your actor. You didn’t want to impose. You are always so polite. We’d been living together for two months by then, and you still felt compelled to, in a slightly higher pitch, “ask for a favor.” That’s the type of person you are, H, always afraid to ask from people, always feeling indebted, and always giving back extra.
Always. So poised, so tall, so pretty.
You said the crew would have no more than three people and poured yourself more wine—a typical behavior at our dining table. “I wanted to make this film a little more fun. Like you’d be chatting, you look at this other person, and then you look into the camera. I’ll shoot the scenes first, and have the two of you come back and sit down, chat. And I would record the conversation as a voice-over for the scenes. It’ll just be like a normal conversation.”
“I don’t want a huge crew this time,” you reiterated. “I don’t have the time or energy for it, and I just wanna make this film in my own way.”
I knew exactly what you meant.
⎯
Do you remember one night at our dining table when LL, my then partner, said I could get mad at anything? You’d been living with me for almost four months, and he’d started to see me and my temper more regularly. With a light scorn, I said to him, “I would never get mad at H.” You awwwwwwed, and LL turned away with a smirk.
But the truth was, I was looking forward to getting mad at you. Although we’d seen each other at parties and in bars since we’d first met in our hometown of Shanghai in 2020, I didn’t really know you. You were always a beautiful image to me: a glimmering picture on Instagram, glamorous and surrounded by friends, always in your best outfit, accompanied by an equally pretty drink in your hand. You’re an actual model.
I’ve never told you this, but the first time I thought I caught a glimpse of the “real” you was when I visited you in LA in January 2022. It was the first time we met in America, and you had just gone back to college. As I waited for you outside a shop on Melrose Avenue, I saw your long legs walking toward me in a pair of camel-colored shorts, and you had a green top to go with that new neon-green baguette bag. You hugged me and said you were so happy we could meet in LA. I looked up at you, because you are taller, and I could see the subtle highlights in your short, dirty blonde hair.
I also saw a little mascara stuck to your eyelid. I mean, your makeup that day was exquisite as ever: silver sparkles sat sparsely atop the mocha base shade of your eye shadow, paired with a nude lip shade, elevating your look for a casual shopping date with a friend. But that tiny bit of mascara played its own role—while I had expected to meet with the flawless model in those party photos, I got you instead: the H who didn’t bother to wipe off a tiny bit of mascara. Meticulous about looks as you were, I was sure you’d noticed it, but because you were going to see me that day, it was okay with you if you weren’t “perfect.” You knew I wouldn’t mind. It made me so happy to see you “imperfect,” as if that tiny bit of mascara brought you closer to me, made you more real.
⎯
It is curious where one finds security because to me everything is shifting. Our two bedroom, two bathroom apartment was, essentially, a temporary home, not much different from all the other apartments I’d leased in the past. But you know, the first “real” thing I bought in our apartment was that speaker I got during the Black Friday sale the year you moved in. For the first time in my nine years in America and six years in New York, I bought a real speaker. It isn’t one of those portable shits that doubles as a lamp and fizzles when playing songs with really good bass lines (remember that thing I got from Urban Outfitters?)—but a real one with a CD player—heavy, box shaped, and made of wood.
Before you moved in, our living room contained:
1) that second hand sofa I bought from a neighbor for $50 when I moved in the year before.
2) that floor lamp from Crate & Barrel, which was my most expensive piece of furniture. I’d split the cost with my previous roommate, who’d left New York.
3) that glass-top coffee counter from Ikea, which was also left by my former roommate, and
4) that brown dining table and benches from Ikea which were also left by that last roommate.
I don’t own a bed frame because it takes forever to disassemble and reassemble when moving and would take up too much space in a moving truck. I’ve never bought dressers, but I have stackable, plastic drawers because the real ones also take up too much space in a moving truck. Until two years ago, my six suitcases, out of which I’d been living for the past six years, contained all of my belongings. Life had always been calculated around moving. It was a voice that reminded me to never own anything fragile or large, because it wouldn’t be good when the time came to move again. Even our apartment was not a real home; we couldn’t own it, and we certainly couldn’t put nails in the walls, or else we wouldn’t get our security deposit back. Wall-safe tape was sufficient to hold up most of my home decor: posters and postcards—flat objects. I am always on a lease, buying secondhand furniture and cheap drinkware because eventually I won’t carry them with me when I leave.
But leave for where? Goodbye is a common theme in your films, because as international students we both know it too well. It always seems like we are leaving for somewhere, being drifters and nomads, foreigners who only half belong both abroad and at home. A “nonresident alien,” they call us, as if we came from another terrain.
Nonetheless, I bought that speaker. Because somehow I felt strongly that this was a home we could make.
⎯
One night at our dining table we talked about how we both weren’t going to school. For my newest essay, I made a list of reasons for absences that one might give on my behalf:
She didn’t go to school because she sprained her ankle on the way to school.
She didn’t go to school because there was an accident on the road and no one could pass through.
She didn’t go to school because there was a fire in her building. Don’t worry, it was a false alarm!
She didn’t go to school because she had to take her roommate to the ER. She had a stomach virus.
She didn’t go to school because she died.
You liked it because winter 2022 was when we both weren’t going to class. It would be 2:15 p.m. when you came out of your room in a sweatshirt and shorts and uttered “Good morning.” You’d drink your espresso and ask me if I had classes that day. I’d turn from the dining table and say, “I should be in school in … fifteen minutes ago.” We’d both laugh in panic.
It was also the winter that you were sexually assaulted on the subway. One winter after I had been.
When you told me about it, I was ready to give you everything I had to help you. I know what it was like: I know it took me a month to get back on the subway, though I still do not feel safe walking out the door. I know I locked myself in the apartment and drank day and night for a month. I know I become furious when I think about anti-Asian crimes. I know that the person on the other end of the helpline would sincerely tell you that it was “not your fault” and even though you would believe them, you wouldn’t be able to shake off the thought: “Why did it happen to me?” At least I couldn’t, not for a few months. The outside was no longer available to me, and I retreated indoors, changing in ways I hated to admit.
Until you came along. Although you were a lot braver than me as you took the subway only a few days after your incident, when you started going to school less, I knew something was wrong. Your absences from school, your drinking, your oversleeping—I quickly understood why you didn’t want to have a huge crew for that short film: you were avoiding crowds, withdrawing from gazes (while the film industry is built heavily on gazes). You became confined and vulnerable. You lost your luster. Like I had, and I knew exactly how to help you along in your healing process because I’d gone through the same thing.
During that winter, when I woke up during the day, I felt the sun less daunting. I’m not alone! I thought, because I wasn’t the only one who faced missed deadlines, neglected emails, hangovers. Those loosely promised todays and tomorrows. This apartment had never felt more like a home until the moment there were two people in it, similarly miserable, and in the most twisted way, you started to be real to me: you walked out of those glamorous party photos, trembling, and I was ready to catch you, keep you company, and heal with you in our home, ignoring the rest of this god-awful world. I wanted to be with you, be the one who understood you.
But the company changed when you brought Yao, your new partner, to our home.
⎯
I have to admit, in the first few months after you moved in, I had weird feelings churning inside me whenever I watched you walk out our apartment door. I liked looking at you walk through the foyer with your long legs, further accentuated when you wore your platform shoes. Sometimes you trod in low kitten heels and black silk stockings with letter prints on them, and other times you drifted in a short skirt and sneakers with knee socks. In a pristine outfit and makeup, you went outside to meet a friend or a date. You would open the door, your ring-decorated hand lightly clacking on the handle, and say goodbye to me, then in a slightly higher pitch, “If I come back early let’s drink!” I hated watching you walk away.
Although it sounded like a promise, I knew it wasn’t. Sometimes you would text me at almost 5 a.m. when you were on your way home to ask me if I was still awake, and I would be—my body had probably been stuck at the dining table for hours, writing useless paragraphs. When you came back, you’d come to our dining table, join me for a drink and a cigarette, and recount what’d happened outside. Sometimes the friends said stupid things, and sometimes your date was tolerable. (You once said that the less important the date was the more you dressed up, but I didn’t notice that. You looked great in everything you wore.) Although half an hour later you’d go to your room and sleep, leaving me with the same unfinished paragraphs to complete, those talks alleviated, ever so slightly, my anxiety-filled blue mornings.
However, you came home less when you started seeing Yao. After receiving more “I’m at Yao’s!” texts from you, I started looking for your slippers when I woke up to a silent apartment. Maybe you were sleeping, I thought. You’d probably come home late, so I might see you later in the afternoon when you woke up. But most of the time, the silence indicated nothing else, and I would soon find your slippers tucked away under our shoe rack. You really weren’t in our apartment.
When you spent more time away, LL came over more often. However, when I knew you were coming back, I’d tell LL to go away, because I wanted you to feel that this home was still ours, ours only, no matter how long you’d been away. But most of the time you only came home to take more things to Yao’s place. After many brief encounters, I stopped telling LL to leave. In the months that followed, when you came home, you’d hardly find me alone. I’d be chatting, eating Popeyes, or watching a movie with LL, his belongings scattered on the sofa. You’d say hi to the both of us, maybe sit down for a cigarette, but soon enough leave. Near May, I hardly saw you at home anymore.
To me, Yao was the villain who took you away. He was the one who robbed me of the time I would’ve spent with you, because I couldn’t blame you for going away.
⎯
In my petty way, I found a punishment for you.
When I went back to Shanghai that summer, I sublet my room. Although you didn’t oppose and expressed in your typical politeness that you hoped we might look for more sublet candidates, I took advantage of your politeness and drafted a sublease agreement. You signed the agreement, packed up some of your things, and spent most of your summer in LA. I reassured you that I’d have LL check the apartment every now and then, but you said it wasn’t necessary. You trusted me, and we texted each other casually throughout the summer.
The sublease agreement was, in the most rigid, standard language, my detestation for your going away. Plus I was only remotely worried about the sublet, because I’d already moved out most of my stuff. I’d already decided to move into a one bed, one bath with LL. Although we’d talked of finding a place for you, me, and LL, I stopped looking for two bed, two baths in June. Those were just talks; I didn’t want to make plans with you anymore.
⎯
When i sent the subletter videos of our apartment, I realized how imbued with you our living room was. The wall facing the sofa was full of Polaroids you’d taken: some of them you’d brought with you from your life before New York, pictures with friends and exes. The rest you took here, some in the city, some in this apartment: when we had parties; when you dyed my hair pink and I looked like an alien with tin foils on my head; when you cooked in the kitchen; or when we drank at the dining table. You stuck the Polaroids with me lower on the wall to cater to my height and those with people I didn’t like higher up. You took so many photos that we began on another wall.
When I looked at the videos I took, I realized that my living room didn’t only consist of secondhand or stackable furniture anymore. We’d added a four-tier bookshelf full of my books, your film guides, your cameras, and that speaker. There were several mugs and glasses on the coffee counter. On the floor near the window stood about a hundred empty bottles—we thought it might be funny to see how many bottles we could finish in a year. Amid the myriad bottles stuck a tag that said “H’s first bottle.” It was the first bottle we finished together in this apartment and I had wanted to commemorate it: I felt safe, holding our first bottle, because I knew only more would come. It seemed to me, in those videos, that this apartment was not a mere rental unit anymore but a home that someone had clearly made. Apartments like these didn’t seem appropriate for sublets, because people who lived in them wouldn’t need to sublet; they would always be their home.
I realized that my plan to see you lose your temper fell through because our lifestyles were too similar. About thrice a week, you would come into the kitchen at 4 a.m. to cook konjac ramen. You would have been working on a script in your room, drinking red wine or whiskey. You would find me already inhabiting the dining table, writing and drinking gin. You’d bring your drink to the dining table, where we’d clink glasses, smoke a cigarette, and talk until the sky turned blue outside.
You like red wine and whiskey, and I like white wine and gin. We deduced that dark-colored liquors are good at room temperature, but light-colored ones are better chilled. The coldness calms my anxiety. Next to your good posture, I’m always hot, always jittery, never sitting still. You’ve described me as an angry chipmunk—a small person who bares their front teeth when saying “fuck,” as I’m always mad at something.
I sent the videos to the sublet applicant anyway. This apartment was clearly nothing but a storage unit to you now, so I stopped holding onto it as our home. You didn’t need me anymore. You had Yao, with whom you could build your life in New York; you didn’t need to be cramped up in this apartment with me.
That summer probably made you hate me a little, but it was what I needed. If you hated me, I wouldn’t need to miss you.
⎯
A new fall began in September. It’d been a year since you moved to New York. I came back from Shanghai, and we resumed our friendship and drank together like before, only we met outside. Feelings about the sublet ebbed, since I decided that I’d punished you enough in my petty way, while you’d forgiven me long before.
A few months ago, on a late October night, we met for Japanese food in Midtown East to talk about the new film you made during the summer. The temperature had started to drop that week. You came straight from school in a long black blazer, and you had makeup on, an actorly eyeliner that hugged the shape of your eyes, based with muted sapphire blue eyeshadow. You’d made small, delicate curls with the fringes of your hair.
Made in our former apartment, the film was about two roommates who came to understand their feelings for each other while facing goodbyes. You told me the story was based on us, but you’d added a little fiction to it: in the film, you, H, playing yourself, had feelings for your roommate, who was in a relationship with a partner of the opposite sex.
I hadn’t watched it yet. In the thumbnail, the sky was in its blue hours from our balcony, the gray cement matching the hues, and there were two small figures. One was you and the other was a girl. She was your actor. You’d told me over the summer about how cute she was. I’d seen her in your Instagram stories, and she really was cute, but I didn’t click open the film. I wasn’t sure I was ready to watch someone else play your roommate in our apartment, even if it was fiction.
We finished two more shochus when the Japanese businessmen two tables away left. I watched you walk to the bathroom and caught myself grasping at you again, like when I used to watch you walk out our apartment door. You were wearing those platform shoes that accentuated your legs. I remembered how I used to stealthily suggest that you could always ditch the parties and dates you dreaded and stay home and have drinks with me, or when I’d deviantly nudged you to have another glass of wine when you hesitated, only because I didn’t want to leave the dining table yet. So I suggested that we order more drinks, since it was beginning to rain outside.
“I don’t think Yao and I could last till the end of year. I don’t think we will live together till the end of the lease term,” you said, halfway into a second can of sake.
So you weren’t happy after all. So you really were in trouble. “What do you think you’ll do? You need to find a new place? You need a new roommate? Oh right, or you can probably live alone…” My brain went into search mode only to realize that you didn’t need it. “I’ll probably just kick him out,” you said, almost a joke. But weren’t you guys good together? Didn’t you decide to live a life with him?
“I could live with anyone; living with anyone is just a way of living—the other person doesn’t need to matter. I don’t know, I can just cope with it,” you said.
We finished the sakes when you bought takeout for Yao, and the night was over. We got into the same cab but added two stops and didn’t walk into the same door together.
⎯
There’s a moment that stays in my mind. Once, in our old apartment, I saw Yao emerge from your room, when you seemed to have a really bad stomachache. Before I could offer to take you to the hospital, Yao said, “I’ll take H to the hospital, don’t worry. I’m her partner and emergency contact.” It infuriated me, as if he’d announced ownership, and you were cornered, with no place to retreat to if he hurt you. When had you changed your emergency contact from me to him? Had you already chosen him as the person you were closest to in NYC? Now he would be the one to witness and take care of you in distress; now there was less space for me in your life. This moment confirmed that I’d abandoned you and made a mistake.
The natural assumption is that couples move in together as a next step in their relationships, and I let that be the excuse to let you go.
Living together brought us so close to each other that I started to panic, to retreat. Perhaps deep down I was scared that one day you’d have enough of me and leave. The petty endeavors to “see you angry” were my attempts to push you away, to test you, because I was only used to leaving, to goodbyes. I didn’t know how to preserve a good relationship because I’d never had any that lasted longer than my stackable furniture. I trusted that you and Yao were happy with each other. I had to.
I used to think that to know “the real you” was to see you unravel in vulnerability—the only way to be close to someone—and by that I mean seeing the dejected, withdrawn H. Yet, while I wanted to linger in our shared misery, you made a connection elsewhere. When I was finding solace in our apartment, hiding from the outside world, you ventured out, made your film. I couldn’t bring myself to write one word, which only incited more insecurity. When you went away with him, spent all those hours away from our home, I thought you’d chosen him over me. I wondered, why couldn’t you have relied on me? Weren’t our problems similar? What could he have given you that I couldn’t have?
Perhaps the dates you went on were to fill the loneliness too—the loneliness of not knowing what to do about life as a young adult, a loneliness neither of us thought we could alleviate for each other. We were so clueless, had so much anxiety about leading a lonely life despite being so young. Maybe you also let yourself believe I’d chosen to spend my life with LL. So the dates and the lovers were distractions, space and distance we put between us to protect us from becoming too close and eventually sick of each other, like the couples who move in together only to end up split up.
But what if I’d plucked up the courage to ask you, “Do you want to abandon your partner and live with me? LL doesn’t need to live with me. I really like living with you. We can make it work.” Would anything have changed? Maybe the time we spent apart reminded us of each other’s significance, but did we need to lose that time? Was the distance necessary for us to see that?
In reality, you didn’t need to choose me or Yao. We didn’t ruin our friendship by being roommates either. There was nothing else I could have done but be there with you, fill as much of your loneliness as I could, and love you in my very twisted, angry chipmunk way. You understood it all along and forgave me for my petty crimes. The real you is someone who lets themself forgive the ones they love.
⎯
I’m remembering the night I drank too many Roku gin shots and started reading to you. I was drinking neat shots because I’d run out of the ingredients to make cocktails. We were sitting at our dining table, and I started to read aloud a book—my typical drunken behavior.
In one chapter of their memoir Dear Senthuran, Akwaeke Emezi talks about gore as a form of love language, a morbid affection for someone so strong that you want to carve out a piece of their flesh just to get closer. I always think that morbidity is the deepest form of love, because what you have is too much, so deep that healthier expressions of love become meager. My reading turned into drunken stutters, and I fell asleep at our dining table.
The next day you told me you’d watched me sleep a little. “When you fell asleep at that table, I suddenly felt so calm. Because you are always very fidgety, but seeing you go into slumber mode, all that restlessness just went away, at least for a little while. Like you were a fuzzy, messy ball of yarn, but suddenly smoothed now.”
I know now that you’ve put this scene into your film.
You’ve been looking after me in ways I didn’t know.
In the end, we’ve kept each other close, and each made a work about the other in our most familiar genres.