We were lucky to catch up with April Peng recently and have shared our conversation below.

April, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Are you happy as a creative professional? Do you sometimes wonder what it would be like to work for someone else?

What I didn’t realise until pursing this career is that: doing that you love can sometimes mean you love what you love less. Or at least, what once was your escape from stress, has now become the source of your stress. Still, I’d rather pursue this than anything else in the world, but it’s important to find other outlets. At the end of the day, a job is just a job, you still have to live life.

April, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

Did you know I have two names? My English name is April – quirky, fun, easily to spell, easy to remember. My Chinese name is Yi Xiao, the opposite of all those things. Growing up, I hid away my Chinese name like a dirty secret, refusing to tell people when they asked. One time, when I was 11, a classmate paid me 50 pence to know my name. That was almost the only time I relented (50p was a lot back then!). As expected though, she immediately forgot. But you see, I was born as Yi Xiao. Each character was hand selected by my mother and father respectively, intertwined with their hopes for my future. Yi means ‘one’, wholeness, my mother’s reminder to be the best of what I can be. Xiao translates to ‘natural and unrestrained; elegant and unconventional’, my father’s wish for me to be untethered by burdens, free to pursue my dreams. They did not gift me this name to be mispronounced, mocked and shamefully hidden away.
I always felt as though my identity was shattered by my immigration from China to the UK at age 8. All I had were fragments of who I thought I should be. I would project these fragments onto the world like film, performing what others wanted, swapping them out when necessary. I’d become whoever I was with, like a shapeshifter. As a result, I had no sense of my own identity. All my life, I’ve been trying to piece together the jagged edges of my broken shards and this is the closest I’ve ever come. I am a mosaic of my fragments, a collector of perspectives. And most importantly, I am a storyteller. When I finally realized this, it was as if all the broken pieces fell into place, and I became whole again. My life’s purpose is to climb into the minds of others, think as them and breathe as them, so that I can tell the world their story.
Nowadays, I write comedies about spunky Asian women fighting for their place in the world.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

Pursing an MFA at the American Film Institute was the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life, down to my skin and bones. Sleepless nights, skipped meals to save time, and cigarettes. So. Many. Cigarettes. My cohort was geared up and ready to jump into the battlefield of the industry when we were met with the writers strike. I was faced with nothing but the barren abyss of unemployment and powerlessness. Back then we didn’t know if we would win, or if there would ever be an end. The writers were striking because of corporate greed, but also the rapid advancement of AI. It was painful to grapple with the fact that I’d finally honed the skill that I was to make a living off of, just for it to be entirely replaceable by a computer. After a summer of burnout and despair, I got really really really sick. So sick that I was in the ICU the day of my AFI graduation. Irony is cruel. My hard work wasn’t celebrated. If anything, I was punished by my own body for not treating it right. Don’t work too hard. Yeah. It’s the opposite of everything our society values and what this industry requires but it would have saved me a lot of unnecessary stress. Life is long and there are so many versions of how to live. Success and failure are meaningless terms when you are on your deathbed. The glitz and glam of a hollywood career is not enough to satiate your soul.

Is there mission driving your creative journey?

I grew up surrounded by faces that looked more than Hollywood than my own, as a result I saw all the Asian aspects of myself as an anomaly. I moved to the UK not speaking a word of English and within 3 days I had written my first (terrible) story. Within a year my writing had been read out loud in class for praise. But it took me 20 years to notice that I had whitewashed every character I’d ever written, characters that were supposed to represent me. My greatest shame will forever be a short story titled ‘My Father’, which I had written during my time as a school laureate, as a tribute to the passing of my Chinese grandfather who battled dementia. Instead of describing his very real struggles in post-revolutionary communist China, I whitewashed him into a British solider recovering from the Second World War. The story was then published onto the laureate website, memorialized with a photo of a white man. I wrote this piece as an ode to my grandfather, but it is now forever a reminder of my internalized racism. Since I broke the dam that constrained my voice, poignant, tender and important stories have burst through. Stories about my struggle accepting my race, the cultural conflicts between my parents, my mother’s courageous immigration. Stories that told the world I am different, but just a real are you are. While executives sit around discussing how many more ways are there to tell the same story about a white soldier at war, minority voices are choking.
My own personal mission is to prove to the world that minority stories deserve a place in cinema. For all those children who still see themselves as an extra in their own lives, an immigrant to be deported. To remind them that their names mean more than the humiliation they feel when its mocked and butchered. I want to change the world, for those individuals, one film at a time.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aprily_peng/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/april-peng-74a544195/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@aprilxiao9129

Image Credits
On set for ‘Deep Into the Forest’ AFI thesis