Face Claim: Shi Mingze

Devi is tall and lanky, with a well toned dancer's body. He's 190 cm (6'3"), but he generally slouches a little bit around a lot of people because he doesn't want to come off as intimidatingly tall. His posture does a complete turn around when he's in a dance setting. He's generally got at least a little bit of a tan, even during the winter because he spends a fair bit of time outside, and he has dark brown eyes that are nearly black and naturally black hair. He sometimes dyes it a slew of vibrant colors, but he's had it his natural color for a while now. It's getting pretty long, but he hasn't felt like cutting it, and it makes it easier to do interesting styles with. He's got two piercings in each ear lobe and one cartilage piercing in his left ear. He's also got several tattoos, the one of a stylized scorpion on his left shoulder being the most prominent. He usually wears makeup and a fair amount of jewelry along with fashionable clothes, but not Kali's kind of fashion.

Devi is so forgetful that his parents had to change his name order from what it was originally on his birth certificate because he consistently couldn't remember that Jonathan was actually part of his name because no one had called him that at home as a little kid. Even now, he routinely forgets how to spell his own middle name (how many h's does it have though). This spills over into a lot of other things and has caused him to actually be slightly neurotically tidy with his things or else he loses everything.

Devi is generally a fairly sweet and caring person. He likes making people around him feel cared for and understood. He's generally pretty soft spoken and listens to what others have to say before he puts in his own opinion. He sometimes wishes that his younger siblings seemed to see this side of him more, but that's all part of the complicated dance of getting in between them and their grandparents and the force of nature that is Kali.

Devi isn't always good at detecting jokes. Even if what he does with his life doesn't seem to be something that a serious and focused person would do to a lot of people, he takes things in his life very seriously, and he takes other people's feelings very seriously.

Devi is a very caring and protective person in general, but the way he goes about showing that sometimes comes off a little bit strangely. When he was very young, Devi was the first of the siblings to encounter his grandparents' disapproval. He was too soft and feminine, too gentle, wanted to be too much like his older sister at the time. When he saw them turning some of that same sort of disapproval towards Nicky and later Sam, he decided that since he was already the dark sheep of the family, he might as well play it up for their sake as a distraction. He's very closed off with his family about a lot of things, and the one sibling that he might have confided in more as they got older ended up siding with his grandparents and just making everything worse.

MOTHER
Name: Dara Hong
Birth Year: 1965
Occupation: Stay-at-Home Mom
Feelings Toward: Reserved, but slightly more trusting than towards most of the rest of the adulty adults in his family.

FATHER
Name: Kosal "Correy" Yun
Birth Year: 1965
Occupation: CEO of a company based in Seattle
Feelings Toward: Slightly bitter, not very trusting, admits that at least his dad did a decent job with regards to Sam. They never quite recovered from Devi being a teenager.

OLDER BROTHER
Name: Richard Kosal Yun
Birth Year: 1986
Occupation: Worker at their father's company
Feelings Toward: Fairly neutral, but doesn't trust him with his secrets.

OLDER SISTER
Name: Kalianne Emily Yun
Birth Year: 1988
Occupation: Fashion Designer
Feelings Toward: Regretful. They used to be closer when they were little, but he knows that she doesn't get his choices in life, and he doesn't trust her with people's emotions.

YOUNGER SISTER
Name: Sophea Elizabeth Yun
Birth Year: 1992
Occupation: Bookstore employee
Feelings Toward: Protective, somewhat distant. They don't have a lot in common.

YOUNGER BROTHER
Name: Nicholas Ponleu Yun
Birth Year: 1994
Occupation: Safeway employee
Feelings Toward: Protective. While in some ways he thinks that the two of them are the most similar to the outside viewer, he doesn't really know how to talk to Nicky. They also have one of the more fraught relationships in terms of getting along if they are in the same room.

YOUNGEST BROTHER
Name: Samnang Yun
Birth Year: 1996
Occupation: Starbucks Manager
Feelings Toward: Extremely Protective, though he's realized that until recently Sam didn't know it. He's been doing a dance of getting in between Sam and some of their relatives for years. He's pretty sure that he annoys the hell out of his youngest brother sometimes, and Sam can be a complete pest at times, but he cares about him deeply and stands up for him to Kali especially a lot. They've gotten closer recently since Sam actually found out about what Devi's career is, and Devi came out to Sam.

MATERNAL GRANDFATHER
Name: Lo Hong
Birth Year: died at 81 in 2018
Occupation: Retired
Feelings Toward: Deep seated, burning resentment. Though his grandfather wasn't as vocally cruel as their grandmother could be when it came to pointing out differences that they disagreed with, Devi remembers his grandfather regularly taking away things that he thought Devi liked that were too feminine, and also trying to drag him to get his hair cut regularly when he was a kid and wanted to keep it long.

MATERNAL GRANDMOTHER
Name: Shrey Chan
Birth Year: died at 80 in 2018
Occupation: Retired
Feelings Toward: Deep seated, burning resentment and extreme distrust. She may be dead now, but Devi will never forgive her for how she treated Sam. He might eventually have forgiven her for how she'd been towards him when he was little.

Devi was born Jonathan Devi Yun, which lasted all of until Kindergarten when he just consistently could not adapt to the idea that Jonathan was part of his name. In frustration, about halfway through the school year, after talking to him and a therapist with him about it, his parents took him to change his name to Devi Jonathan Yun. Devi has never really considered his middle name a proper part of his name and consistently only uses it as an initial.



As a little kid, Devi followed Kali around constantly, wanting to try everything that she did. He had very little interest towards what his older brother did, and he was constantly scolded by his grandparents for not being more like Ricky. As Nicky started to get a little bit older and liked some of the same "feminine" things as him, they added on to that that he should stop being a bad example for his little brother.



Following Kali around was how he got into dance, and even as her interest in it seemingly waned when they got to junior high, Devi kept doing it, joining all the dance clubs at their school, and outside of school teams and classes. His grandparents and parents stopped bothering to come to recitals and performances when it was just him and not also his sister, and Devi started to withdraw from the family. This was only compounded when there were a few comments directed at him after the family realized Sam's gender dysphoria that they thought that Sam was just disappointing like him (except the other way around).



As Kali started to do her strange to him social climbing things and tried to hide the heritage that she'd seemed so proud of when they were kids, Devi started to find his own friend groups instead of constantly following in his much more outgoing older sister's shadow. A lot of his friends from dance were in the GSA in middle school, and he was starting to be pretty sure that he got crushes on guys and girls both, so he started tagging along. He made a small tightly knit group of friends there, and they were the people who came and cheered him on at dance performances and competitions and listened to what he worried about when his family seemed to often forget that he existed.



Middle school was also when it was finally figured out that Devi was pretty badly dyslexic and had a speech impediment that was the reason that he'd always talked very slowly (not what his grandfather had been prone to saying which was that he just wasn't nearly as smart as Ricky). With some help for the learning disability, he went from being a decent student with confusingly spotty grades to actually doing just as well as his older siblings in school, but the opinion of him as the only OK student had already been formed in his family's mind, and he wasn't terribly interested in academics. He still speaks fairly slowly, but it doesn't frustrate him anymore because he's learned how to find a pace that he's happy with that doesn't trip him up.



When Kali kissed a girl and then hurt Sam's feelings and broke his trust all over again, Devi decided that he was only ever going to bother coming out as bi to his family if he ended up in a serious enough relationship with a guy that he'd want to bring him home because it was going to be something permanent. Otherwise, he'd use his disconnected status and being the "bad boy" of the family to draw attention off his younger siblings when they needed it. He also warned Jianing, one of his friends from GSA, though not super close, that Kali probably wasn't worth the effort of dealing with because of what she'd said to Sam about the kiss (that he'd heard both Kali and Nicky's versions of later).



Devi didn't go to college right out of high school, instead directly taking a teaching job at the dance studio in town where he'd been in master level classes since he was thirteen, and going to competitions with his dance teams at the international level. Once he'd turned 21, he also started working as a performer in some clubs, mostly gay and gay friendly ones, both in drag and not. He's been working on a two year degree off and on at Cedar Beach Community College, but he had made very very sure to never have his classes be on campus at the same time as his brothers.



Somewhere down the line, he's pretty sure that his siblings got the impression that Devi gets "all the girls," but while he has a lot of female friends, he only goes on dates with men or women occasionally, mostly preferring to just hang out with friends. He hasn't discouraged the impression though because it seems like it would be more trouble than it was worth.



Since their grandparents passed away and Kali came back, Devi has a small sliver of hope of starting to make things right in their family again, but he's not sure that Kali is along for the ride. He doesn't really have much hope that his family will ever acknowledge the fact that he's actually respected in his fields of dance after all this time, though he occasional wonders if Nicky and Sam would be interested if he actually dragged them to a performance one day.

Since Sam came to one of his competitions by chance and found out about him doing drag similarly, Devi has been building a solid adult siblings relationship with his favorite brother. Interestingly though, this has probably worsened his relationship with Nicky a little bit. Devi also finally saved up enough to buy a 2-bed 2-bath townhouse not too far from his family home and has moved there. He is finding the independence from his parents (and ability to give Sam the chance to get out of that house as well) very rewarding. It also makes having a boyfriend and getting private time with him much simpler. He also finished his early childhood education degree through Cedar Beach Community College in early 2021, and as of the start of the 2021-2022 school year is working as a kindergarten para (classroom and language support) at Cedar Beach Elementary School.

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