Meet April Peng | Screenwriter/Filmmaker

We had the good fortune of connecting with April Peng and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi April, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?
I didn’t always plan to. I was a woman in stem until 21. But during my study abroad at UCLA, I joined an Asian American theater company where everything clicked into place: who I was, what I believed in, what to fight for. I wrote a short play about my wound from my immigration from China to the UK at 8 years old, leaving my dad behind. When I sent it to my dad, he had to read it copied and pasted into a web translator as he doesn’t speak English. Even so, he cried. I decided to pursue screenwriting.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
When my mum was abroad and I didn’t see her for years at a time, she would send cassette tapes of her reading stories to me. Before the age of 1, my grandma had taught me to recite over 100 ancient Chinese poems. When I moved to the UK, I learnt English with the urgency of someone who was hungry to write. My stories were read out in class for praise within a year. Writing has been a vital part of my childhood. I love that the sentences I craft can create worlds in people’s minds and inspire emotions they didn’t know existed. With screenwriting, I can watch the words I wrote come to life in an actor’s mouth. Aside from that, there aren’t many things that feel like magic.

I’ve experienced my fair share of racism, I’ve had teachers scream at me to “speak English not Korean”, I’ve been catcalled a “sexy chink”, had people pull their eyes at me, but none of it hurt like the feeling of being invisible. It took me 20 years to notice that I had whitewashed every character I’d ever written. My greatest shame will forever be a short story titled ‘My Father’ – a tribute to the passing of my Chinese grandfather who battled dementia. Instead of describing his struggles in post-revolutionary communist China, I white washed him into a British soldier recovering from the Second World War. The story was then published onto the school website, memorialized with a photo of a white man. The piece was an ode to my grandfather, but it is now forever a reminder of my internalised racism.

Nowadays, I like to write comedies starring spunky Asian women fighting for their belonging. My goal is to work in an all-Asian half hour comedy room. I have written half hour comedy pilot called ‘Yes, And?’ about an Asian American improv group fighting to make it.

Writing was “play” in my childhood. I’d delve deep into fantasy worlds with my stuffed animals to escape the homesickness of leaving my country behind. Writing became “comfort” in my adolescence. Pages and pages of journals and poetry documenting every love and every heartbreak as I experience the sweetness and bitterness of life. Now, writing is my craft, it is my mastery, my superpower. It will feed me, bathe me and clothe me. It is inseparable from who I am. It is the weapon I wield to fight for justice in this world of ignorance and hate. Through representation we can make this world better. We can’t love what we don’t understand.

I’m about to graduate from the American Film Institute, the #1 film school in America, with an MFA in screenwriting with a Pigott BAFTA scholarship, into a writer’s strike. It’s been difficult to keep spirits lifted but I know I have the drive to make it.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
My friends have in fact come to visit me. Some of my favorite restaurants are Mr Rice in Westwood that serves yummy YunNan MiXian, Dan Sung Sa in Ktown, the Wat Thai temple market etc. I’ve taken my friends to hike Griffith, of course, and Santa Monica to catch the sunset. I also like to go to Mulholland Drive view point in the dead of night and look over the city of stars.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
Lapu the Coyote that Cares (LCC) at UCLA is the largest intercollegiate Asian American theatre company in America. Co-founded by Randall Park in 1995, with a mission to give a voice to the voiceless. I owe so much of my success to this club. It is a safe space to allow artists to explore and most importantly fail. It is a community of creative Asians and other BIPOC students who have otherwise been stifled by their upbringing, their culture and society. It was where I first performed, first tried improv, first wrote the short play that I then adapted and applied to AFI with. It taught me that Asian stories matter, immigrant stories matter, and comedy matters. I have made some of my best friends there and I still live with them to this day.

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Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/april-peng-74a544195/

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