Rose*

            Rose* is my roommate of four years, and she is tall and thin and beautiful, and she gets a lot of attention—but that’s also accredited to her flashy, flirtatious confidence. My friends have called Rose the perfect Chinese girl, which for a long time I thought was based off of her round face and her thin legs and her long black hair and small hands. But later, when I asked them why they called her that, they explained to me that it was more about her intelligence and her desire to become a doctor.

            Rose is alright to live with. She’s fun to tease and make fun of because she grew up not learning words like “dildo” or how two men or two women have sex or how thongs really aren’t that uncomfortable (and on a more PG note, she didn’t understand the connection between numbers ending with “teen” and the word “teenager”). And when she’s in high spirits Rose will take my facetious remarks with a thin smile and her perfect teeth, or a huge gasping laugh mimicking a guinea pig. And when she sees me around campus she’ll run with her arms dangling awkwardly like a zombie, and yapping my name brightly like a Pomeranian because she’s happy; and that’s good, because she’s happy.

But sometimes Rose annoys me to no end. With her catty announcements that she hates girls, her judgmental attitude toward anyone who does not look like her, and with her booming shrieks at three in the morning while she is Skyping with her long-distance boyfriend, I find it difficult to open up to her or to have a meaningful conversation. When I do try to have a discussion with her, she ends up getting mad at me for not agreeing with her about how annoying girls are and how vicious they are, all of them. Or how wrong homosexuals are, and how they shouldn’t exist. And how pointless religion is. And how anyone who believes that people should be allowed to live their life their way, are wrong, because there is only one way to live life: her way. But I know there are people who think like this, and that is her choice, and you don’t have to agree with everybody.

It just hurts me the most when Rose tells me she doesn’t like white people because they smell. And when she tells me she doesn’t like girls because they’re too emotional. Because I’m half white. And I’m a girl. And she tells me I’m different, but I don’t see how.

            Sometimes I want to be like her. She works hard for what she wants and always gets where she wants to be, while I doubt and fret and worry myself into nothing. When I ask her if she will get married to her boyfriend, who she has been dating long distance for two years, she tells me maybe, but maybe not, because she is not planning on dropping med school to follow him, and he won’t be going to a nearby graduate school. I don’t really understand why they do it, then, but it’s their relationship to live.

            But I want to be like her in the same way as I want to grow up to be like my mother, who is a different story entirely.

Everyone has their strong points and everyone has their fatal flaws. It’s just important to like what you have to offer the world, and Rose does just that.

*name has been changed