Face Claim: Cho Seungyoun (of Uniq)

Saehwan is 178 cm/5'10" and weighs about 70 kg/155 lbs. He's very lean and muscular, and most people would guess his weight at rather lower than it actually is, but the muscle is packed pretty densely onto his small boned frame. His hair is naturally black with a tiny bit of natural wave that he sometimes accentuates by actually curling it. He keeps it around shoulder length, and other than one brief experiment with dying it when he was 15, after which he shaved it all off because it kept not looking like him in the mirror, he's left it its natural color. His dark brown eyes are often lined with eyeliner, but that is most of the makeup he wears most of the time.

He has two piercings in his left ear lobe and one in his right in which he likes to wear a lot of dangly sparkly earrings, though he wears hoops that hug tightly to his ears when he's out doing field work. He has eight tattoos, all of them on his arms and torso but far enough up to be easily covered. A hybiscus syriacus (national flower of Korea), golden wattle (national flower of Australia), pink heath (state flower of Victoria (where Melbourne is)), wild rose (national flower of the US), and a pacific rhododendron (state flower of Washington) form an arc across his shoulder blades to represent the different places he comes from. He has a sparrow and a robin sitting together on a branch on his left shoulder to stand for him and his brother. He has a white chrysanthemum with his mother's birth date in the leaves as a memory of her in the small of his back. Finally, he has a camellia with rainbow petals on his right shoulder. He does plan to eventually get more, but he's not figured out what else he wants yet. He got the one of the two birds for his eighteenth birthday.

Saehwan has always been driven, persistent, and curious. Any time he feels frustrated or depressed, or feels like he can't help when someone he cares about is hurting, he finds a project, and then works on it until it is complete. He's always been a little bit rebellious, but he's good at covering it up when he feels like he needs to. He cares deeply for his brother, pretty much more than he cares about anyone else he's ever met, but he feels like he doesn't always know how to help him, especially because they are incredibly different people. He's in generally very very protective of Sparrow.



Despite growing up in Australia, Saehwan refused to learn to speak English until he hit school age (he understood it whether he wanted to or not), which has left him with a slight Korean accent his entire life and very little in the way of Australian accent after they'd been in the US for a few years. It also meant that from a pretty early age, he went much more heavily by his Korean name, and while he recognizes and uses both his English and Korean names, he mildly prefers his Korean name.



He basically runs on tea. He's found the places that he can get good Korean style green tea in the area, and he will, 100%, spend four hours there and back on the bus to go get it, but he likes all sorts of teas in general. On the other hand, he hates chocolate, and if any of it ever ends up in his possession, he gives it to his brother.



Saehwan loves to be outdoors, and he likes doing things with friends. He can be found hiking, kayaking, rock climbing, or just out in the park playing soccer with friends most weekends. But he also just starts his days with a 10 km run every day. He also loves animals, though not nearly as much as his brother, but after his brother started the animal shelter, he did end up bringing home a cat and a dog to their family home. Just like with most things he does, Saehwan didn't chose the easiest path ever with the animals he picked. His dog is a mixed husky and Australian shepherd (it goes running with him every morning) and the cat was a Bengal (F4) that was abandoned to the shelter as a kitten because it was too wild (he's made it a cat run that lets in get safe exercise outdoors, and he has a cat treadmill for it inside. Plus, he has it leash trained so that he can take it hiking and kayaking sometimes. The two animals get on with each other uncannily well.



Some of his biggest weaknesses involve not liking restrictive or seeming nonsensical rules. He definitely got in trouble far far more than his brother as a teenager because he was constantly testing rules, from dying his hair rainbow at age fifteen (and promptly deciding he hated it and shaving it all off a week later) to coming out at age 14 (ready to fight if his dad didn't accept it) to being the kid who both had the best grades in his class and some of the highest office visits (for fighting and breaking dress code). He's mellowed some as he got older, mostly because people don't tell him "because I said so" nearly as much when he asks for the logic behind a rule, and because he found a career path where his job is going to be making sure that the codes and standards actually keep things safe and functional.



He is an incredibly protective and caring person towards the people he cares for deeply, especially his twin. He is definitely the brother who is like a cat: wants to sit in the same room with you, but doesn't necessarily show his affection clearly to those who aren't used to him, and one-hundred percent ready to fight things ten times his size.

MOTHER
Name: Irene Sae (nee Kim)
Birth Year: 1973 (deceased at 27 - 2000)
Occupation: n/a
Feelings Toward: He misses her deeply. For much of his early life, she was his favored parent, especially because she never tried to force him to use English. While his memories of her have faded some as he has grown older, there are always going to be precious memories of sitting with her in the garden of their house in Melbourne helping her take care of the flowers. He also got his love of tea from her.

FATHER
Name: David Sae
Birth Year: 1973
Occupation: Professor
Feelings Toward: Saehwan has a complex relationship with his father. He cares about him deeply, but they butted heads a lot all of their lives. These days, they've reached a compromise, but Saehwan is very glad that his bedroom sort of has its own living space in the house, and they only have to share the kitchen. He respects his father a great deal, but they have had a good number of rocky patches throughout their lives (starting from his dad trying to get him to speak English when they were in public outside of Korea town when he was a very little kid).

(YOUNGER) TWIN BROTHER
Name: Sparrow Saeyoung Sae
Birth Year: 12/21/1996
Occupation: Studying elementary education (kindergarten teacher)
Feelings Toward: Love, intensely protective. Saehwan would do anything in his power to keep his younger twin brother safe. He struggled a lot with the time periods that Sparrow was self harming because it was really hard to protect his younger brother from himself, but he tried his best to be there and support Sparrow through the hard times.

Saehwan was incredibly bright and incredibly verbal from the time he was two. Just, only in Korean. While he understood English (it was hard to avoid in Australia), he refused to start speaking it until they were in school (primary school, they went to a Korean nursery school/kindergarten), and he grudgingly realized that English was useful. While he reached complete and verbose fluency quite quickly after that point, it left him with a distinct Korean accent that has never fully faded.



When he came home with his father from a doctor's visit after spraining his wrist getting in a fight with an older boy in their neighborhood when he was four to find his younger brother curled up beside their dead mother, his life devolved into chaos. At first, he was jarred from his own panic and fear because he knew that that was blood and that much blood was bad, by Sparrow crying and needing to protect his twin.



Their schooling up until high school (when they would move to the US) was a hard time for Saehwan. He was constantly getting in fights, standing up to people who teased him or Sparrow, and getting in trouble for not following the rules when he thought that they were stupid rules. He got perfect scores on all his tests, and did very well in school, but his father was constantly having to be called in to deal with him. It was a rough time for them, especially because Saehwan was still dealing with his own mental aftermath from the death of their mother. Eventually, his father helped him find an outlet by signing him up for Tae Kwon Do and Hapkido classes and getting him into a nature and hiking club while he was in middle school. The sense of community and also ways to help regulate his emotional control helped him immensely, and he continued to do those and add more physical activities that had interesting mental components (especially ones that got him out into nature) as he got older. One of the most important things in handling his own emotions was for him to keep himself challenged and engaged.



When their dad announced that they would be moving to the US and that was where the twins would go to high school, Saehwan wasn't sure what he thought entirely. He loved adventures, but for the first time in his life, he was a little bit scared of a new experience: what if he couldn't find community like the ones that he'd been able to build up around him through martial arts and athletics. The frustration and fear around the move made him revert to an old habit, and from the time that their dad announced the move until a few weeks after the move was complete, Saehwan completely refused to speak English, communicating entirely in Korean.



After they moved to the US, and they were able to settle in some, he and Sparrow seemed to be taking opposite trajectories. While Saehwan was still very rebellious (if anything more so), he was trending upwards: making friends, settling in, and figuring out what he wanted from his life. He felt very helpless when it came to Sparrow dealing with depression though he tried to do everything that he could to be there for his younger twin.



Saehwan also realized he was gay that summer before they moved to the US. One of his closest friends in Melbourne was someone he had done martial arts and outdoorsy stuff with for years, and on an impulse one day that they went hiking just the two of them before he left, he kissed his friend. There was a giant what if there, probably in many ways for both of them. But nothing else was said about it afterwards because Saehwan couldn't handle the idea of losing more with his friend than that kiss. About two months after he started high school, Saehwan came home in trouble again, and in the shouting match that he ended up having with his dad about why he kept getting in fights at school, rather impulsively and angrily admitted that he was gay. Which at the time stunned his father into silence. He was kind of afraid of how his father would react, but also ready to play dirty if it meant not being separated from his brother, and so when his father looked like he was going to get angry about it, he told him very quietly, so that Sparrow, who was in another room couldn't hear, that if his dad tried to make him take it back, it would make things harder on Sparrow because both of them were very important people in Sparrow's life.



That night, he also came out to his twin, but that went much better. Over the next few months, he and his dad hashed themselves out, and in the end, their dad was very supportive, especially once he was given more information, and he consulted PFLAG and some of the resources about parenting a gay kid. Towards the end of all the strife though, Saehwan, in a somewhat awkward rebellious streak, dyed all of his shoulder length hair rainbow and shaved the sides, giving himself a mohawk. He determined, approximately a week after he did it that he HATED it, and shaved all of his hair off. That wasn't great either, but at least it grew back, and since, he's kept his natural hair color.



He was in GSA, and all the hiking and outdoors clubs in high school, and he also joined various volunteering groups that did outdoor and wild spaces clean up, and that helped him get a lot of his anger out on pulling up non-native plants and helping to plant native plants in their stead. By the end of his sophomore year, with all the interaction with people in WA, his Australian accent (what little of one he'd had) had pretty much completely faded, leaving a non-distinct slightly off WA accent with a dash of his lingering Korean accent. It was one of the many things that made him very confused at the time that people struggled to tell him and his twin apart. Even though they were identical, they had different hair, different styles, took different classes, and didn't even have the same accent.



His incredible academic record and strong interest in the environment and nature led him to the field of Environmental Engineering, and that was what he applied to university for, focusing on the UW honors program as his first choice. He's got the summer and fall quarter left before he finishes his degree, and he's already done several government summer internships (including one the summer before he started college), that are leading him into getting some sort of engineering job with the state or one of the counties or a nearby city.



He looks forward to probably moving out of living with his dad at last after he's done and has his own job, though wherever he lives, there will always be a place for Sparrow to stay with him. He has made time to see Sparrow multiple times a week (even if it's just for a meal) all through his coursework, only missing a few weeks due to being out in the mountains for field work.



He graduated from UW at the end of the winter quarter 2020, and managed to land a job upon graduation working for the City of Cedar Beach in the Public Works Department as an Environmental Engineer working with the parks, wastewater, and infrastructure.

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