The West Coast girl was elevated. Royalty above the crowd, throwing back a glass of clear liquid. She danced on a table placed at the club’s peripheral, transforming the sidelines into the center of attention, for she had what the burly bouncer would call a bangin’ body, accentuated with knee-high boots, a skin-tight sleeveless black dress, and an O-ring choker that struck the perfect balance between BDSM usefulness and kink aesthetic appropriation. The club was dark, but the strobes swung onto West Coast like her personal spotlight, highlighting her milk tea-colored hair.
The East Coast girl pushed her way through the crowd of Asians, buzzing with free-shot-of-soju-for-the-ladies-boosted confidence—most east coast Asians, excepting New York City Asians and a handful of Korean Americans, had not yet built up tolerance to soju, having only just discovered its glories after years of binge drinking cheap vodka at their east coast university frat parties. East Coast girl tripped over five pairs of feet and three empty shot glasses before she could reach the source of her yearning that had engulfed her as soon as the bouncer finally agreed to let her in.
East Coast tilted her head up, cupped her hands around her mouth, and drunkenly, euphorically, yelled: “Want a drink?”
West Coast looked down, refocusing her eyes, a hard task for tipsy girls with electronic music-damaged eardrums wearing dresses whose hems do not stay down.
“Fuck yes!” West Coast grabbed East Coast’s hand, but instead of letting East Coast pull her forward to the bar, West Coast pulled East Coast up, the greatest example of Asian-on-Asian femme solidarity the club had ever witnessed.
“Which men?” West Coast yelled.
“What?” East Coast yelled back.
“Which men?” West Coast pointed haphazardly around the room. East Coast understood: West Coast had misinterpreted her flirtatious intentions for the more common Asian girl action in nightclubs: inducing horny men to buy them expensive drinks.
East Coast might have been a clueless east coast Asian, but she still knew this game. She could play along.
“How about those two?” East Coast pointed toward two men who looked like the majority of the other men in the club, wearing tight jeans and fitted t-shirts accessorized with a cross pendant necklace. Hair styled in neat fades. The two men East Coast had pointed out were, as straight men in clubs tended to do, standing awkwardly like robots, occasionally pumping a fist or swaying off-beat.
West Coast determinedly hopped off the table holding East Coast’s hand. They stumbled with the reminder of gravity. Four men rushed forward to help them steady, but they didn’t need the men. They had each other. They dodged, regained their balance against the other, and bumbled toward their targets.
West Coast shimmied up to the first man, tapping him on the shoulder.
“Wanna buy us drinks?” West Coast asked as East Coast twirled a strand of hair around her finger, bobbing to the music. East Coast watched the two men looking them up and down. She knew that no matter what she looked like, she would get the free drinks, because that was how these clubs worked: induced by feverish inebriation and strobe lights and deafening music, men bought women drinks with the false assurance of fruition.
The two men, Fade 1 and Fade 2, fist bumped.
“What would you like, ladies?” They asked. Fade 1 ran a hand over his gelled hair, showing off his glittering gold watch.
The ladies looked at each other. “Gin and tonics, please,” they said.
They bent their bodies into the requisite seductive position, resting their forearms onto the bar, leaning forward so that their butts stuck out and their cleavage dangled. West Coast rested her head against East Coast’s shoulder. Fade 1 looked over and smirked, thinking the pose indicative of how freaky they were; how, for another drink, the two girls would make out with each other. But East Coast knew West Coast was just playing her part.
“Here you go, ladies, cheers, and what—hey!”
Before Fade 1 and Fade 2 could ask their names, the two girls had disappeared into the pulse of the club, clutching their drinks and giggling.
“What do you think his name was?” East Coast asked.
“Which one?” West Coast dropped her now-empty glass onto an abandoned table. The faster one drank, the lesser the risk of getting drugged.
“Both. Either.”
“Kevin. Both their names are Kevin. All the Asian American boys here are named Kevin.”
The beat dropped, and the club grew more frenzied. East Coast swayed to the beat, alternating between staring at the screen behind the DJ displaying graphics like pandas and chopsticks, and observing the crowd—she had been to these types of clubs before, but she had never been to one that was made for Asians, filled with Asians. She couldn’t believe the sheer number of Asians cloned before her very eyes; she’d never been around so many Asians her age—she was an east coast Asian, and there had been very few other Asians where she grew up, making her so neurotic about her Asianness that it drove her to self-analyze every little thing her and her immigrant parents did. East coast Asians were proud of their Asianness, for shame had to exist before pride, and she had been nothing but ashamed growing up in one of those east coast liberal arts college towns where people wore Birkenstock sandals in the summer and socks with their Birkenstocks sandals in the winter, where she had learned how to make five different flavors of granola before she could fold a dumpling. But it was okay, because she was in her “connecting with her roots” phase, which meant that she was slowly learning how not all Asians in America were anxious east coast Asians like her: Some Asians were actually from Asia and thought nothing of being Asian, and they could speak perfect English because they had attended expensive international boarding schools, or because their countries had been colonized by English-speaking countries, or because they were just smarter than the average American; some Asians were too busy studying for their fancy degrees to think about being Asian; some Asians were too busy coding at their well-funded startups to think about being Asian; some Asians were too busy organizing toward a more just and equitable society to think about being Asian; some Asians were too busy delivering food and collecting plastic bottles to think about being Asian; some Asians were busy making art because all they could think about was being Asian; some Asians were wasian; some Asians had adoptive non-Asian parents; some Asians were just Asian and that was that, no big deal, get the fuck over it; but whatever kind of Asian you were, it was undeniable that all Asians like all humans had been hurt in some way, and what set your type of Asian apart from other Asians was whether you were using that hurt to create more hurt or to heal that hurt—but East Coast girl hadn’t yet learned how this line between heal and hurt was blurry. She was at the club not because she had Asian friends who took her there, but because she had read about it in disbelief on a New York City Asian nightlife roundup article. It was the type of club with a vague name—Rhombus—the type of monotonous EDM club infected with finance bros, letting hot girls in for free and charging Kevins a $40 cover. Blatantly, proudly racialized, serving cut fruit and soju, run by Asian American men who compensated for their perceived diminished masculinity in America with big wheeled cars and big grills; a club that only let in East Asians (different from east coast Asians, keep up, will you?) and occasionally Southeast Asians if they were girls with bleached blonde hair, thick eyelashes, and press-on nails, with first names like Vivi or Jenny.
East Coast girl was having the time of her life.
The men circled East Coast and West Coast. Those who grinded directly onto their backsides were better than the men who hovered, leering, because the men who were direct could be rejected outright. West Coast danced flailing her limbs like she was wasted, but East Coast could tell the girl was simply trying to convince herself she was having fun. That was the point of these clubs anyway—if you looked like you were having fun, then you would feel like you were having fun, because how other people saw you was more meaningful than how you felt about yourself.
Sober and suddenly overcome with exhaustion, East Coast grabbed West Coast by the wrist and leaned close. “Wanna get food?”
They left the club, and without discussing where they were headed, ended up along K-Town’s 32nd, settling themselves into West Coast’s favorite late-night spot, with tables spilled outdoors onto the sidewalk. Drunken Asian revelers staggered past their table. East Coast observed them curiously.
“What are you looking at?” West Coast asked, munching on her japchae noodles.
“Just admiring the Asian hetero debauchery,” East Coast replied, embarrassed to have been caught seeming like a tourist. She looked down at her plate and began shoving tteokbokki into her mouth.
“Part of the charm,” West Coast said. “It’s fun. Sometimes.” West Coast put her chopsticks down and looked pointedly at East Coast. “Your first Rhombus visit?”
“Kinda.”
West Coast shrugged. She knew East Coast’s type, for she was a west coast Asian accustomed to clubs like Rhombus. She believed it entertaining to witness the awe of those who had never visited. She was the type of west coast Asian so absolute and secure in their Asianness that they almost didn’t realize they were Asian, at least until some random white person started hitting on them solely because they were Asian. She was the type of west coast Asian who came of age at raves; who had friends who were weebs and Koreaboos but not weird about it; who had hooked up mostly with other west coast Asians, so it was stranger to run into a circumcised dick than it was to run into one not. West Coast had come to the east coast after getting her degree at a University of California campus, to work in marketing at one of the newer startups with an office only in New York, not Silicon Valley, because the startup wanted to be edgier, and these few years being around East Coast Asians had already given her the wisdom to sense how East Coast girl was attracted to her the way insecurity was attracted to confidence, the way a miniscule moth was attracted to electrifying beams of light.
“I go out to Asian places every weekend. Come with me,” West Coast offered.
“Can I?” East Coast asked, wanting confirmation, another of her east coast Asian habits. Accustomed to seasonal depression and diaspora angst, she could never believe when a welcome came easy.
“Of course!” West Coast wiped her mouth with the napkin, leaving a smear of lipstick trailing down to her jaw. Before East Coast’s anxiety could overcome her desire, she lifted her hand to rub gently at the stain. West Coast parted her lips, breathing heavily, and East Coast rested her thumb on the bottom, dragging it slightly downward. East Coast dropped her hand, hooking a finger into West Coast’s O-ring choker, then, abashed by her audacity, drew her hand back to her side.
“Okay, to be honest, I’m not usually into femmes like you,” West Coast said. “I’m usually into feminine men and butch women.”
East Coast snorted. “Most hot feminine Asian men are gay. And good luck finding a butch Asian woman. They’re rare around here.”
West Coast laughed, and East Coast joined in; they laughed and laughed and laughed, and the patrons around them stared with jealousy, wanting the joy for themselves, but the two girls were unaware of the gazes because they were no longer performing.
“No, I swear they exist,” West Coast insisted after her laughing subsided. “I’ve hooked up with them!”
“I think we’re being shown different algorithms.”
“You’ll just have to follow me around.” West Coast smirked.
“Gladly.”
West Coast sat back in her chair, thoughtfully perusing East Coast like she was a window display. “Okay, let’s try it out,” West Coast nods. “I get bored easily. I like sampling new things.”
They clinked their water glasses.
“My name’s Winnie,” said West.
“Emily,” said East.
◆
In the beginning, for Emily, everything was new. Winnie liked seeing Emily gawk at what she had long taken for granted. They texted each other every Thursday afternoon to confirm their weekend date plans: what to wear, where to pregame, which club promoters offered the best deals. They went to Rhombus again, but they also went to karaoke bars, techno warehouses, cocktail bars—wherever Asian hedonism thrived. They danced at the queer Asian techno party in the depths of the Brooklyn-Queens border, though as femmes, the party felt lonelier than Rhombus, for there were many Asian gays but very few other kinds of queers. They drank at the fancy Bushwick bars populated with the international Asians who were supposed to be studying fine arts at full tuition, but were really just taking selfies in the soft red neon designed after old-school Hong Kong, as if Hong Kong was a vintage aesthetic and not a present tragedy. They squeezed into the narrow underground bars in Chinatown, former basements and resident tunnels converted into trendy speakeasies, selling pricey cocktails named Mooncake Moonshine and Red Bean Rum, filled with east coast Asians like Emily and no actual Chinatown residents. They shaved each other’s vaginas during the weekends featuring electronic music festivals, held at one of New York City’s islands or stadiums, and the act of shaving each other was more motherly than sexy—follow the way your hair grows, Winnie would instruct, for she was an expert in making the skin appear baby-smooth, having grown up squeezing her body into high-cut rave bodysuits like other west coast Asians. Debauchery was an act of care: they offered ear plugs to those who had forgotten; helped groups take pictures for their Instagrams; complimented other girls fixing their makeup in the bathroom, where they would then lock themselves into stalls for a bump of ketamine, a snort of cocaine, a swallow of ecstasy, drugs they had bummed from some generous stranger. Winnie preferred cocaine because it kept her going; Emily preferred ecstasy because her natural state of being was anguish. On the dance floor, they vibrated out of their skin and into the pulse of decadence, their feelings for each other hot and sweaty as they bopped. Even the comedown was romantic—the comedown meant the real fun arose, for they held each other through each one, falling from the club to the taxi to Winnie’s bed, together at dawn, the sky a lightening navy, Winnie straddling and sucking on Emily’s fingers as she ground and twisted the way she never could in the club, her lust a better beat than the electronic music—no more separate coasts, merely one common land, wet on the shores of the others’ thighs.
◆
The weather colder, the nights out harder, though they tried to encourage themselves with coat check and the mantra of hoes don’t get cold.
Halloween arrived. They chose to dress as Tony and Maggie from In the Mood for Love without argument, their favorite film, though they had different reasons: Emily, because it was the first Asian movie she had ever seen that didn’t exist under the white gaze; Winnie, because she thought Tony and Maggie were the sexiest people to ever exist. Winnie was Maggie because her hair was already destroyed from bleach—a perm to mimic Maggie’s tight curls was less damaging to her than to Emily’s untouched hair.
That night, after whirling around for hours on Rhombus’s suffocating dance floor, they hobbled into a lesser-known karaoke bar Winnie claimed she had been to thousands of times and therefore knew would be less crowded, Winnie with her qipao unbuttoned to the top of her left boob and Emily with a loosened tie. They had both drunk too much at Rhombus, accepting never-ending drinks from men dressed up as Shang-Chi and BTS members from their latest music video. Winnie slumped on a bar stool, sipping a lychee martini, her head spinning, while Emily gyrated next to her, yelling encouragement to the timid-looking volunteer singer on stage, whose microphone’s screeching feedback made Winnie want to tear out every speaker wire and set the bar on fire.
“You wanna sing a song?” Emily asked Winnie as the performance switched to a skinny man dressed as Goku, who began belting out a slurred rendition of Tong Hua.
Winnie massaged her temples. “No.”
Goku clutched his microphone with both hands as he wailed about how his lover had realized the fairy tale was a lie.
“Let’s head out?” Winnie asked.
“Not yet!” Emily applauded Goku’s lament. Winnie frowned. Of course Emily would refuse. Emily never wanted to leave the bar until closing time, until the last restaurant in K-Town had shooed them out.
“Do you actually think there’s a meaning to any of this?” Winnie asked, draining her martini in one gulp, her quick throwback making her curls loosen and droop.
“This?” Emily gestured with her glass to the scene in front of them: Goku had ditched the last stanza to make out with someone dressed as Trixie Tang. Winnie turned away in annoyance as Goku dramatically flung Trixie’s pink headband off in an effort to grip her head better. Emily whooped as someone dressed in a Squid Games tracksuit caught it.
“Gross,” Winnie huffed.
“Oh, come on, we’ve made out plenty of times in public,” Emily giggled.
“Whatever.”
Emily, unnerved by Winnie’s sour attitude, returned to the question. “I guess it means whatever you want it to mean,” she answered slowly. Emily had to believe there was a meaning, or else she would succumb to the woe that stalked her, and so Emily chose to believe that the meaning was safety, that these clubs and bars were safe spaces for Asians in America to connect with each other under the haze of alcoholic overindulgence, just like the Asians in Asia would, because wasn’t that the point of it all, to be just like them, to exist as they were, before the wars and separations and visas?
“Are you really having fun?” Winnie played with the rim of her glass, rubbing its edge with her finger like she did with Emily’s body in bed.
“Of course!” Emily said, throwing her arms in the air. When Winnie did not respond, she wrapped them around Winnie’s shoulders.
“I’m having so much fun,” she whispered in Winnie’s ear. “With you,” she added, trying to convince Winnie, and, she realized, herself.
Winnie pushed Emily off. She stared moodily across the bar at a version of Bruce Lee, as sexy as the original, who had been trying to catch her eye since they arrived. She wondered what his body looked like underneath his yellow and black jumpsuit. Bruce grinned at their eye contact and motioned for the bartender.
“I’ve had fun since I met you,” Emily tried again.
Winnie looked at Emily carefully. “I’ve mourned you since I met you.”
Emily faltered, then regained herself, rolled her eyes. “Okay, Wong Kar-wai.”
“Let’s go home,” Winnie said, swinging off the stool before Bruce could approach with a drink.
◆
Near the end, the texts dwindled—no more where should we go tonight, you can borrow my dress, I heard Rhombus might actually have a good DJ. Near the end, they could predict who they would meet, where they would go, what they would wear, because as Winnie had known all along, everything was the same: the same pregame, the same outfits, the same people, the same music, the same dance floors, the same drinks.
Near the end, Emily offered Winnie a last-ditch effort. Something new for Winnie and old for her.
The weekend before Thanksgiving, they booked a weekend retreat at an upstate farm Emily had found on Google. The nightly price and train tickets were expensive, more than they were used to spending on a weekend—getaways cost more than their drinks and club covers, for nature didn’t give herself up for free like male clubbers and bouncers. Winnie was hesitant, but Emily convinced her this was what east coasters did to stay content: go to picturesque little towns, wear boots, kiss under red and gold autumn leaves.
But the apples were out of season, whatever fruits left on the branches grainy and moldy. The leaves had long ago crumbled into dust with the encroaching winter. The apple cider’s acidity made Winnie’s stomach hurt, while the temperature made Emily miserably cold—she had misjudged her east coast tolerance for late fall weather and hadn’t packed enough layers. Their limbs were heavy and tremorous with alcohol withdrawal, and their conversations died after tentative fits and starts. Their sober attempts at sex left them both unsatisfied, the room’s floral pastel wallpaper and Jesus cross above their bed discouraging desire.
“Are you asleep?” Emily whispered around 2 in the morning.
Winnie was not, but she didn’t respond. There was nothing she could have said to make the sober night more bearable under the judgmental eye of the hanging Jesus, the two girls laying parallel and untouching underneath the patterned quilt.
The next morning, Emily suggested the petting zoo, believing gentle farm animals would offset the impending separation damage. The owner had pointed them down an uneven dirt path behind the apple orchard toward the small zoo, consisting of three sheep, two pigs, and one goat trapped behind a rotting wooden fence. Kicking up dust as they aimlessly scattered about, the shabby creatures looked more molested than at peace.
Winnie and Emily rested their forearms against the fence, in poses similar to those they would strike at the bar. Emily wanted to choke on her desire. The dread, the waiting, the foretelling—worse than the actual end. She couldn’t bear to look at Winnie, so she stared ahead at the animals instead, locking eyes with the lone goat, who stared straight back at her, chewing, its throat moving mechanically, unlike the other animals attempting to graze at whatever treats they could find in the dirt.
To distract herself, Emily began humming along to the tinny country ballad playing through the speaker attached to the henhouse, about daisy dukes and red pickup trucks with souped-up wheels.
“I don’t know this song,” Winnie said.
Emily knew because it had been popular at her east coast high school, played across the parking lot during every football tailgate, which she had thought weird considering how her liberal arts east coast area was geographically nowhere near the south.
Winnie pointed to the snuffling sheep and pigs. “Look at their cute shaking butts. It’s like they’re dancing.”
Emily laughed. “The Petting Zoo isn’t a bad name for a nightclub.”
“That would just encourage the grubby paws.”
Both girls were quiet.
“I think we end things,” Winnie said finally. Her voice was dry, like she had smoked an entire pack of cigarettes bummed from the international Asians who congregated outside Rhombus, though Emily hoped the warble was not from tobacco, but from reluctance.
Emily didn’t respond. She was remembering, from her childhood school field trips to east coast farms, how goat eyes were unique because of their horizontal rectangular pupils, allowing them to see panoramically, forwards and backwards, offering a wide view of their surroundings while zooming in on what was ahead, and as Emily stared into the goat’s eyes, she realized that she too could see panoramically now, and she saw that the magic between her and Winnie had fled, or perhaps it had never been there at all, and Emily had simply been clinging to the sense of misguided belonging Winnie offered. The goat was now blinking, slowly, hazily, and Emily remembered how once, at Rhombus, Winnie had dared her to approach two men and offer a threesome—Emily had been hesitant, but Winnie claimed she would watch and come to Emily’s rescue if things turned dangerous: Blink once if you actually wanna do it after talking to them, and twice if you need me to save you. The goat was fluttering its bristly eyelashes, just like Emily had as she teetered over to the men, for it had been nearly 4 in the morning, close to closing time, and she was so drunk and exhausted she couldn’t remember the instructions, and had blinked her way through the entire conversation, and when the men eagerly gripped her buttcheeks, one for each of them, she had panicked and looked around for Winnie, only to realize that Winnie had disappeared. Later, after disentangling herself, she had found Winnie wrapped around another girl in the bathroom, but the transgression was tolerable, because they had agreed on ethical non-monogamy. The wider message of this specific moment, the blinking goat seemed to say, is that you never communicated properly with each other in the first place, because you had different attitudes, you were from different coasts, differences that somehow everybody still believed were the same, and though you looked alike, you were not alike at all.