Not long ago, my closest friend in Hong Kong, Steve, and I decided to take our friendship to the next level. A few of our close friends had their doubts about whether or not it was the best of ideas, but thankfully, the general consensus was that we had made the right decision.
Steve and I have decided to become roommates.
Prior to my move to Hong Kong, I hadn’t shared an apartment with anyone else for longer than a two-month period since I was 22. To be honest, I’m not all too comfortable sharing a living space with a person who cannot handle how exceptionally weird I can be. For starters, I like to dance around in a wife beater and men’s tighty whiteys while I blast gay club classics (Madonna, Kylie and Britney) or pre-teen tunes (Taylor Swift, Katy Perry and the Biebs) during my free time. It also makes doing chores more fun. No matter how often I clean my room, at some point it always tends to look like my closet and nightstand have vomited all over the floor space surrounding my bed. I also go through bouts of antisocial behavior, during which I completely forego human interaction to catch up on my American TV shows. It happens a lot these days, which I spend job hunting and thinking that my world would be a much better place if lived with a vampire Viking beauty like Alexander Skarsgard. If only life were so awesome.
Instead, I live with a Filipina woman I met on AsiaExpat.com. Three months ago, I realized I could no longer afford to live in a shoebox-sized serviced flat. I wanted to continue living on my own, but rent in this city is so ridiculous it puts both Manhattan and San Francisco to shame. The best thing to do, my local friends told me, was to share a flat with someone else. I wasn’t too keen on the idea at first, but living on the cheap was a much greater priority than maxing out my credit cards on a kitchenless apartment, where my shower was three inches away from my toilet bowl.
This is how I came to live with Marina, my current flatmate. She’s a lovely woman nearly 20 years my senior who works at an employment agency for Filipinos in Hong Kong. We share a two-bedroom flat in Kowloon. The first thing I noticed when I came to see the apartment was the hologram picture of Jesus on a shrine in her living room. I have nothing against religious people, but if I hadn’t been so desperate to move out of my studio I would’ve taken that as a big sign that sharing a flat with Marina, albeit lighter on my pocketbook, would not be the most comfortable situation. Other than a love for fried food and the same language, she and I really don’t have a whole hell of a lot in common. She loves watching cricket and Showtime. I like boxing and Jersey Shore. She goes to bed at around 2 a.m. and sleeps with her bedroom door open. Unfortunately, this is also around the same time I stumble in from a night out. Her boyfriend of 14 years, Robbie, lives downstairs from us and has a key to her place. He comes upstairs whenever he needs to use the Internet, which has made it very difficult for me to have my underwear-clad, one-woman dance parties, as I’ve learned the hard way.
I don’t want to sound like an ungrateful bitch. I do like Marina and could honestly hang out with her for hours telling jokes and eating fried food. The fact that we are so different, though, makes the living situation a little uncomfortable. It’s like living with a weird aunt who never gives me shit for living life the way I want, but I totally feel guilty all the time because I know she prays for me in church every Sunday. The last time I felt like ODing on shame every time I came home was when I was in high school. I remember sneaking in my mom’s house wasted off my ass on weeknights, then trying to run to the toilet and barf so I could sober up and do my homework, but not before taking off the Manolo Blahnik heels I’d stolen from her shoe closet earlier that night. It’s been a decade since all that malarkey and I no longer throw up, have homework to do nor steal other women’s shoes, but I still feel like a Jezebel condemned to the 6th layer of Hell when I come home at night. Maybe it’s that creepy-ass hologram picture of Jesus that invokes all that Catholic guilt? I don’t know. All I know is that I no longer want it to be a factor in my living situation.
My lease with Marina is up this month. Two weeks ago, I decided it would be best to look for another place to live. Enter Steve, my HK BFF/attached-at-the-hip bro for life. After over half a year of living in a hostel, he has finally decided that he no longer wants to bunk with a rotating group of backpackers in a building with no kitchen and an office (where he gets his quiet time to work and surf the Net) that at times serves as an improvised bedroom for drunk guests who want to check their Facebook at 3 a.m.
I realize that I’m really rolling the dice moving in with a close friend, but in all honesty, the foundation of my friendship with Steve is that we’re both really strange people who groove on the same random interests. Steve lived down the street from me in Causeway Bay, when I first moved here. Our nights out would often culminate in late night 7-Eleven beer runs so we could have two-person YouTube parties (which mainly involve watching random videos on… guess where) at my studio till the wee hours of the morning. We love Weezer and Vertigo’s Sandman comics, and hate douchey clubs and hipster fashion. I cook. He bakes. We’re both writers, although I actually aspire to be paid for my writing and am unemployed, while Steve writes for an entertainment magazine, but doesn’t necessarily want to make a career out of it. The only thing I can think of that we violently disagree on is the cool factor associated with certain beard lengths.
I guess at the end of the day, I’m lucky to have found someone whose quirks complement mine, which is a more realistic aspiration than finding someone who shares the exact same interests. I’m not expecting Steve to jump around in his boxer briefs with me while I mop the floor to Baby by Bieber. I also wouldn’t expect him to hang around the house in black leather pants and smear fake blood on himself to appease my obsession with watching reruns of True Blood. Both would be extremely creepy and probably destroy our quite perfect friendship. I’d rather take cupcakes and debates on who we’d cast in The Sandman movie, any day.
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Email the author at Francesca.ayala@gmail.com. Especially if you are moving out of Hong Kong and have cheap furniture to sell/give away.