Face Claim: Jeon Wonwoo (of Seventeen)

BaiAn is relatively tall at 183 cm/6' and he has a relatively lean but solid frame. He exercises regularly but not terribly seriously, mostly rather casually continuing to participate in wushu, taichi, and qigong that he started learning as a kid. He often ends up looking a little bit sleepy or spaced out when he's not directly focused on something, and he has a rather uninterested in his surroundings resting face. His hair is dark brown, but it sometimes gets a little bit sun bleached because he likes to be outside a fair amount. His eyes are so dark they are basically black, but they do have a certain warmness to them in color.

BaiAn is generally very restrained in his interactions with others. He is slow to warm up to people when it comes to giving them personal insight on himself, and he just generally takes a while to warm up to others. He enjoys his personal space and boundaries, and there are very few people that he lets into his inner circle.

BaiAn has goals, and he gets very focused on achieving them. He's not prone to listening to people who criticize without clear reasons, and instead just uses that as motivation to prove them wrong and achieve his goals by the means available to him. He's very dedicated to things like school work, but his focus extends to just about everything he puts his mind to.

BaiAn likes to learn. Part of what attracted him to the idea of being a librarian was the idea of having so much knowledge easily accessible to him. He really enjoyed distribution requirements being a thing when he was in college though because they allowed him to take a variety of classes that seemed interesting to him (though he sometimes found really weird ways to meet a requirement).

BaiAn is quiet and a little bit shy. He always thinks his words through, possibly a bit too long before saying them, and his shyness links to his natural (and in some cases learned) reserve. It generally takes him a long time to warm up to people, though there are occasional exceptions. He's generally a little bit afraid of how people will treat him and react to him because he's often felt like the outsider in most of the communities he's theoretically been a part of. He wants to be a librarian, preferably in a public library, and he's well on his way to achieving that goal.

MOTHER
Name: Kang LiWen
Birth Year: 1974
Occupation: Head Chef at her family's restaurant (co-owner now with her older brother)
Feelings Toward: Fairly close. BaiAn is probably closer to his mother, as she has generally put less pressure on him to be like his older siblings. She was the first of his parents that he came out to, and she helped smooth things over with his dad and older brother.

FATHER
Name: Tan JiQun
Birth Year: 1971
Occupation: Software Design
Feelings Toward: Frustration though also fondness. BaiAn and his father have a difficult relationship because JiQun wants all of his children to follow prestigious academic careers, and BaiAn at one point in high school told him flat out that he'd rather stay in the family restaurant business than go into medicine, law, or engineering. And his father was very very against that idea, though all of the kids worked at the restaurant in high school. Their relationship has slowly gotten better as Baian has become a successful (enough) adult, though his father still questions his choices sometimes.

UNCLE
Name: Kang LiFen
Birth Year: 1972
Occupation: Head Host at his family's restaurant (co-owner now with his younger sister)
Feelings Toward: Very close. LiFen loves poetry and books, but he moved to the US late enough that he didn't really ever get comfortable with English in a way that would let him go to college with how poor their family was at the time. He loves libraries, and learning, and he's the family member who has always encouraged BaiAn. The first adult that Baian came out to.

OLDER BROTHER
Name: Alexander BaiQun Tan
Birth Year: 1993
Occupation: Surgeon
Feelings Toward: Distant fondness. BaiQun was sort of their father's golden child. He's very close to exactly three years older than BaiAn, but they were never that close for various reasons, mostly that they just have jarringly dissimilar personalities.

OLDER SISTER
Name: Jane BaiLi Tan
Birth Year: 1995
Occupation: Junior Law Partner
Feelings Toward: Fairly close. BaiLi was always the more sympathetic of his siblings. While her interests happen to align with what their father wanted fairly well, she understands where BaiAn is coming from, and is generally willing to be supportive of him.

"TWIN" COUSIN
Name: Timothy BaiWen Kang
Birth Year: 1996
Occupation: Restaurant Chef/Waiter at the family restaurant
Feelings Toward: Very close. BaiWen and BaiAn were born the same week, and they grew up very very close. BaiWen had basically always been expected to take on the family business, and fortunately he likes it relatively well. He got a degree in restaurant management and hospitality from his local community college, and he talks about someday going and getting a bachelors. BaiAn always felt very frustrated as a kid that BaiWen didn't have all of the nice things that he was able to have, and he was very conscious of sharing with his cousin.

HUSBAND
Name: Lin Minglong
Birth Year: 1996
Occupation: Martial Arts Instructor, Composer, Chinese Teacher, Session Musician, Music Teacher
Feelings Toward: Love, enjoyment of bickering/teasing. MingLong was a rare person that BaiAn felt almost instantly at ease with, and he's honestly just gotten closer to him since the beginning. They're pretty physically affectionate, though they also like to roughhouse a fair bit. They've developed a steady comfort in their relationship, and Baian is very glad that their marriage has made it possible for Minglong to safely stay with him in Cedar Beach.

Both sides of BaiAn's family came to the US (SF Bay Area) from Heilongjiang Province in China (the northern most province) when his parents were in their teens. The two families were a bit different in background though. His mother's family was partially ethnically Korean partially ethnically Mongol, and not very well off at all. They started a restaurant in the US, and now that restaurant is owned by the two kids (BaiAn's Mother and Uncle) of the family. His father's family was ethnically Manchu, and relatively well off, with all of the people in the family pursuing "respectable scholarly" pursuits. The two of them met through temple events in the US, and bonded while they were still in high school and getting used to the US. They do love each other dearly, but they still sometimes have rather strange differences in expectations.



BaiAn's parents got married about a week after his father graduated college, when his mother was just shy of nineteen, and his eldest brother was born about seven months after they got married. There's about a year and a half gap between each of the kids, and he's the youngest. BaiAn was always the quietest of his siblings, and he's in many ways closer to his Uncle and his "twin" cousin, than to his immediate family. His Uncle's wife passed away before BaiAn can remember, so in many ways, his mom played the mother figure role to BaiWen as well.



BaiAn decided that he wanted to be a librarian when he was about 10 because the library was basically his favorite place in the whole world. Among other things, there were books there, and books helped him learn things without ever sneering about why he was interested in that specific thing. As he learned more about the profession, he liked it more and more. During high school, he worked at the family restaurant and volunteered at his local library in the Bay Area.



His father never liked his career goals, so BaiAn decided to do the scholarship library sciences program at Cedar Beach Community College before going to a four year school so that his father could have no say in his choice because there would be no money coming out of his own pocket for it. BaiAn settled in far more quickly than he expected to, partially because of the suitemates he ended up with at CBCC. He immediately bonded with MingLong, somewhat confusingly to him, and since that point has started going to temple a lot more often, partially because it's something that they have in common. YongJi and Denis both took him longer to warm up to, but he really loved all three of them. He'd never been in a relationship before, though he'd known that he was gay since he was about 12, so he was surprised at how comfortably he settled into a rather unconventional relationship with all three of them during his first year at CBCC.



After their first year, they moved out into a little two bedroom apartment near CBCC that they were just able to afford, and they managed well enough the four of them. BaiAn was often the stable, calm one of the group, and he was the one who made sure that everyone was fed and taking care of themselves for the most part. After Denis's parents passed away late their second year at CBCC, things started to get a little less settled. After they completed their two year degrees, BaiAn and MingLong started their Bachelor's programs together at UW, and they were spending a lot less time at home because they spent large amounts of their days on campus. Denis went to deal with some family stuff and just ended up never coming back, and eventually they sent him the stuff he'd left behind. BaiAn and MingLong ended up deciding to get married part way through their first year at UW, and they got married quietly that spring. It meant that MingLong would be able to manage the paperwork to stay in the US long term, even not as a student. YongJin ended up getting into UW Tacoma for a program that worked well for him, and along with Jess, one of their other friends, moved down there to attend.



These days, BaiAn and MingLong live together in a one bedroom apartment in the same little complex as the one that they had been living in before, and they're doing pretty alright for themselves. Baian finished out his Masters in Library Science and got a long term position as an Assistant Librarian at the Cedar Beach Public Library, so for now, the two of them are settling in well to living in Cedar Beach long term, and starting to look at the idea of finding a slightly more permanent place to live than their little apartment. They've been happy and comfortable there though, and the rent is really good, so they're not in a rush.

Hello! My name is Etienne!
I was born in 1989.
My pronouns are he/him.