A Room of One’s Own for Sophie—Help S. Qiouyi Lu write again

A Room of One’s Own for Sophie

“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.” —Virginia Woolf

Hi! I’m Sophie. You might know me as S. Qiouyi Lu, writer & translator of speculative fiction. My debut biocyberpunk novella In the Watchful City came out in August 2021. My translations of Chinese science fiction have appeared in many anthologies and magazines, including Clarkesworld.

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The quick summary:

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I came home from work on Wednesday, August 21, 2024 to find that I had been illegally evicted without notice from the place I was renting. I’m allowed one (1) day between now and Thursday, September 5, 2024 to move all my things out.

I need help with the move and finding a new place to stay. I also need help with the debt I’ve accumulated over the years due to my disability restricting my ability to take care of myself and work.

My hope is that, with my communities’ help, I can find some stability and get back to doing what I love—writing and producing thought-provoking work to help build a kinder, gentler world.

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The goal breakdown:

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Immediate needs:

- $700 to hire movers to box my possessions and ship them to the storage unit I’ve rented

- $3,400 for deposit and first & last month’s rent on a new place

- approximately $300 in transaction fees

Less immediate needs:

- $10,000 to clear credit card debt

- additional transaction fees (2.9% + $0.30 per transaction)

Anything beyond will go toward future rent payments.

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The longer story:

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I had been renting a room in a house in Los Angeles since October 2019. From the very beginning, the landlord would verbally abuse and harass tenants, and living conditions weren’t great, but Los Angeles is very short on affordable housing, so I had to take what I could get. I’d moved in with my then-boyfriend—who also turned out to be abusive. The abuse escalated over the course of the COVID-19 lockdown, leading to me being hospitalized four times in the psych ward over the course of two years. I had already been in a low place with my mental health, and the abuse and living conditions made everything worse.

Eventually, I kicked out my ex and found a job working at a paint store. I was pleasantly surprised to find that retail was a great fit for my personality and artistic talents. I’d never been able to hold down a job for more than a year before this position, but I’ve now been with the company for three years and have no intention of quitting. I performed so well that I was even promoted within a year to head of the production area.

However, up until this position, all of my work experience had been desk jobs. Any kind of full-time work regardless of physical intensity severely impacts my mental health, but the ultra-demanding pace and amount of physical labor for this position also began to take a toll on my physical health. As the symptoms in my body intensified, I soon realized that I’d been experiencing chronic pain for who knows how long—it had begun long before this job, possibly even in my teenage years. And I hadn’t even known I was in pain—I was so used to it permeating my life that I didn’t even realize the sensation had a name.

I had saved up $12,000 over the course of lockdown, back when we were getting the closest thing any of us had to universal basic income. But as I found myself more and more in pain every day, less and less able to do anything but lie down as soon as I got home—where I lived by myself, with housemates who couldn’t care for me—I found myself unable to stand long enough to even cook, and I watched as all those savings disappeared as I relied on takeout and delivery just to make sure I ate something after lifting thousands of pounds of paint daily.

Soon, I found myself calling out regularly because I couldn’t even get out of bed to get to work due to the combination of flare-ups between my physical and mental health. My company normally doesn’t do part-time work, but I was fortunate enough to find a branch that could accommodate it. I was able to get a reduced work schedule as a disability accommodation.

But of course, the reduced schedule came with a pay cut. And my pain wasn’t getting any better, even if my mental health was improving.

I’m good at a lot of things, but I’d never known how to take care of myself even in the best of times, so I figured the easiest solution was to pay for services to help me. And as the savings disappeared, I broke out my credit cards. But soon, I wasn’t able to pay them off in full every month like I’d been doing for the decade that I’d had my cards.

Still, in many other ways, life was getting better. My current partner has been so loving and supportive and has singlehandedly healed decades of trauma just by reminding me that I don’t have to earn things like comfort and care—that I deserve to have them, just because I exist.

But I had a growing sense that something was wrong. I overheard my housemate who worked for my landlord getting into more and more screaming phone calls. The landlord suddenly asked me to pay my rent to a different account. The house now seemed to be on the city’s radar. Something didn’t seem right about it all.

Then, Wednesday, August 21. I had taken care of myself through a flare-up and was able to go to work that day. It had been a busy day at work, with nonstop orders of heavy buckets to mix.

Toward the end of my shift, I received a text message from my housemate who worked for the landlord. It contained an AirBnB address and check-in instructions—nothing else.

“What is this?” I texted back.

No reply.

I spent that last hour of work wondering what the hell was going on. When I got back home, I found that my other housemate had been waiting in the driveway for hours for me to come home.

He told me the cops had come by with a court order. The locks had been changed. There was an eviction notice in the window. He only stayed to tell me because he knew how much I loved my cat, who’d been locked inside with all my things, and he wanted to make sure I knew what had happened.

Turns out my landlord hadn’t been paying the mortgage on the house. This must have been going on for several months, maybe even years—the bank doesn’t foreclose if you miss just one payment.

Not only that, they had been hiding notices from the tenants. I know you’re supposed to be given warnings via the mail or via posted notices on the door if eviction is imminent. But my landlord had been taking those down and hiding them from us. We hadn’t been told a single thing, not even that there’d been an issue with payments. We thought everything was fine.

And the whole time, they still collected rent from us.

My housemate gave me the bank representative’s phone number. I called him right there and told him that I had a cat inside and medication locked away. Fortunately, the bank representative was able to stop by and gave us an hour to collect valuables and whatever we immediately needed. I was able to rescue my cat and move out some of my most essential items, but things such as all the author copies of books I’ve been in, all my journals where I’ve drafted stories, all my clothes—those are still locked away.

In my haste, I didn’t even think to grab my work uniform. I’d just have to wash the one set on my back after every shift.

I’m lucky that my dad lives half an hour away from where I’d been renting and that he has a spare room I can stay in for the time being. That’s the only reason why I haven’t suddenly found myself unsheltered.

The bank rep told me that I have one single day within the next fifteen days—starting from the date of the eviction—to move out all my things, or else they’d go to auction. So the last few days have been hectic, to say the least. I’ve hardly had the space to process what I’ve been through; I’ve been in Handling It mode.

At least all the work I’ve been doing recently on my health is paying off—I’ve finally found a clinic with doctors whose treatment methods mesh with my cultural background, doctors who take my pain and fatigue seriously and have come up with a recovery program that targets the various severe deficiencies my body has developed. Had something like this happened just a couple years ago, I wouldn’t be writing all this up for a Gofundme—I’d just be in the mental hospital again.

So that’s where I am now. While I can stay with my dad for the time being, it’s really not a permanent solution. There’s a bedroom, but there’s no place for me to work, think, or thrive. All that momentum that I’d finally built up healing my health issues, permitting me to even do things like make friends!, now has to go toward managing this crisis instead.

I’d still had to take so many days off work due to flare-ups of my disabilities, so my paychecks have been getting smaller and smaller. I’d already been asking my mom for some money every month because I couldn’t make ends meet, and that was when I was only paying $850/month for the one room and had cut out pretty much every expense that’s not bills, food, and household supplies. No fun money; no treats.

And now, as I browse apartment listings, I’m looking at $1,600–$2,000/month just for a one-bedroom apartment.

I’m a fiercely independent person, for better or worse. I’m capable. I’m talented. I’m skilled. If I can get through it myself, then there’s no need for me to burden other people. And if I can at all not ask for a single cent from other people, that’s what makes me feel a sense of dignity—that I can make it on my own. Every time I ask for money, I feel humiliated. Like I’ve failed.

But I think it’s time to admit that I’m not as okay as I thought.

I may be doing better, but I’m not doing great. I used to have twenty, thirty, forty bylines a year. Over the past couple years, I’ve had maybe only one or two publications, and they’re all things that I’d finished years prior. I have another book contracted that I haven’t been able to write a single word on. I keep pushing the delivery date back. My editor and publisher have been saints for not just dissolving the contract on me.

I have such grand visions for my next book—I know that it’ll be groundbreaking, gutwrenching, all the mindblowing, experimental, vulnerable, genrebending best that people have come to know me for.

But I can’t write it if I’m worried every day about debt and trying to secure a roof over my head... that might still be snatched away again.

I don’t want people to get the idea that I’ll die if I don’t get help. I won’t; I have a job, I have a family that’s willing to help. But my parents aren’t made of infinite money, and the scale of this setback is still huge. Furthermore, I’m my own person anyway, and all I’ve got when you figure the numbers is debt.

Chipping away at it myself hasn’t been working. I’ve been trying my best, but I just can’t seem to do it on my own.

So, much as I hate to ask for it, I need help. If a hundred people chip in $5, that’s still $500. That’s not trivial. It all adds up.

And I guess the more vulnerable part of me is just hoping that, you know... people want to help... that they’ll show up. I’ve lost so much community over the years that I’ve pretty much been isolating myself, thinking that I don’t have community or support. I almost talked myself out of making a fundraiser. But my friends remind me that there are people out there who care and want to help—people who are even happy to see me! Yet, I’m almost scared to believe that that’s possible. I’ve been trying to make it on my own for so long that I don’t even know what it feels like anymore to be part of something bigger.

So, really, the thing that’s more important to me than how much money I raise is the number of people who chip in at all. The monetary support will keep me afloat, but what will really keep me going is looking at a list of names and knowing that every one of them is a real person with their own life who took a moment out of their day to help me. That’s what restores my own faith and shows me that I’m not alone.

I just want to write fiction that makes people have faith in the world again and dream that there’s more peaceful, compassionate, tender, and loving ways to do things. That the world doesn’t have to be fear, pain, violence, war. I have so many words I want to write. I know my biggest strength is that I can change minds and bring peace through storytelling.

But to do that, I’m going to need money and a room of my own.

So, thank you for being here. For reading this at all. Even if you don’t contribute, at least you read my words. To a writer, that’s still something. And if you do contribute, know that I will see even a single dollar as a touch of human life and compassion. Thank you for that.

～恩重如山～