Face Claim: Lee Sungho (Rie of OnlyOneOf)

Wooram isn't particularly tall at 160 cm / 5' 3" and is relatively slight in his build. He in many ways looks a little bit delicate, and a tiny bit baby faced, since his cheeks never stopped being kind of softly round. He has naturally somewhat pouty lips, and he often just looks a tiny bit sleepy, even though it's not necessarily true.

He doesn't have any noticeable scars. He does have both of his ears pierced and usually wears small hoops or studs in them, though he does have some more noticeable earrings that he wears at times. He doesn't currently have any tattoos, though he's thinking about them a bit.

He regularly wears a rainbow bracelet, but because he also often wears long sleeves, it's not super noticeable. His clothing style ranges from collared shirts and slacks to soft (usually long sleeved) t-shirts and turtlenecks with jeans. He likes wearing soft sweaters in general too, especially ones that let him cover his hands.

He also wears a medical alert bracelet at all times.

Wooram is generally calm, soft spoken, and somewhat serious. He has a slightly understated, sarcastic sense of humor that can at times catch people off guard and goes over very well with his 5th graders. He's generally a pretty cautious person.

A lot of his early personality development and habit forming was heavily impacted by the fact that he was always being told to be careful and aware of his surroundings because if he had a seizure he could get hurt, and while he's gotten better at knowing how to estimate risk and such as he's gotten older and had more power over himself, he's still antsy in unfamiliar places where there's no one who he knows well.

He loves teaching, and libraries, and nature. He's developed a love for hiking as an adult, though he has to have someone to go with.

He hates people treating him like he's not competent to take care of himself or be an adult because of his epilepsy. He also hates bigotry in general, having experienced a fair amount of it between being disabled (epilepsy, blind in one eye), a minority in the US (Korean), and queer.

MOTHER
Name: Min Hana
Birth Year: 1951
Occupation: Nursery school teacher, had been in upper management at an energy firm until he was about 5
Feelings Toward: Conflicted. He loves her dearly, and he knows that she basically sacrificed a career to take care of him as a child, and that she's happy to have moved to the US, but hasn't been able to translate a lot of that. They were very close when he was little, but her not really understanding his sexuality and his desire to be able to be independent has made them more tense with each other.

FATHER
Name: Mok Doyoun
Birth Year: 1947
Occupation: Marine Biology Researcher and Professor (UW - Friday Harbor Laboratories)
Feelings Toward: Respect, some uncertainty. His path with his father has been somewhat opposite of with his mother. He didn't see much of his dad as a kid, and didn't feel like he knew him very well. He was more worried about his dad taking his coming out badly, but his father was tentatively positive if a bit confused, and his father seems to respect his desire to live independently. They still aren't entirely sure how to communicate, but he's had some really good interactions with his dad in the past few years.

OLDER SISTER
Name: Mok Woori
Birth Year: 1973
Occupation: Nurse
Feelings Toward: She was 23 when he was born, so she's always seemed more like another aunt than a sister. She's stayed in Korea, so he hasn't seen her in quite a few years. They do email and message each other regularly though, and she's been a really useful resource when he needs a medical sanity check on something at 3 am, especially since she respects his desire to be independent enough to not tell his parents things without checking he wants her too. He was relieved at how well she took him coming out.

PATERNAL AUNT
Name: Mok Darae
Birth Year: 1970
Occupation: Nurse
Feelings Toward: Conflicted. His dad's much younger half-sister, his aunt was one of his primary caretakers when he first got sick. She's very close to his older sister, the two of them growing up together, but unlike his older sister, his aunt doesn't entirely seem to believe that Wooram can take care of himself. She also stayed in Korea though, and so he doesn't have to deal with her all that often. She also was one of the family members who took him coming out less well.

Wooram was born and spent the first chunk of his life on Jeju Island, South Korea, where his father was a professor of marine biology at Jeju National University, and his mother worked in management for an energy company. He was a bit of a surprise, born 23 years after his older sister, when his mother was 45 and his father was 49. They'd tried for years for a second kid after his older sister, and had basically assumed at that point that it wouldn't happen. At first, the family was delighted about Wooram's existence, and he was a somewhat spoiled kid. They lived in a somewhat rural area just a short drive from the campus where his dad worked and the company where his mom worked, and his older sister and paternal aunt who were both nurses early in their careers lived with them. Wooram's early memories involved playing in the giant garden and learning to ride a bike on the little narrow rural road that connected them to their nearest neighbors who had a kid about the same age.

That peacefulness didn't last though. After Wooram got badly sick when he was five, he started having episodes where he would just suddenly collapse. While he otherwise seemed pretty healthy, his aunt and older sister made sure that he got taken to medical professionals in an attempt to figure out what was wrong. Eventually, Wooram was diagnosed with childhood epilepsy with atonic (drop) seizures and absence seizures. His medical team tried him on a whole slew of medications, and over time, they were able to find a combination of medication and a very carefully controlled diet that kept his seizures pretty much under control. Even so though, he continued to have seizures every few months, but they weren't terribly prolonged, and he seemed to otherwise be doing alright.

Wooram was a bright child who was well above grade level academically to begin with, and being restricted from doing much physical activity that wasn't carefully monitored (no more bike rides), he focused in very much on academics and reading because they were something where he could do very well despite the restrictions placed on him.

The year that Wooram was in fifth grade turned out to be a very strange year of his life. The first week of the school year, he had one of the worst seizures that he'd had in several years, and when it had passed, he found that he couldn't see much of anything from his left eye. There was a whole slew of tests, and while the doctors weren't quite sure what had happened, and his medication needed to be somewhat adjusted, he seemed to mostly go back to his normal, stable levels, just now only able to see properly out of one eye (the left eye can still see bright colors and sort of general shapes, but not much else). In September of that year, his father was offered a position at Friday Harbor Laboratories (UW) on San Juan Island in Washington, and the entire family moved there.

Wooram was thrown into a new school system, new medical team, living with just his parents for the first time (since his aunt and older sister stayed behind on Jeju-do), and it was rough. While Wooram had been somewhat bullied in school at home, he'd known everyone since he was young, and for the most part, he had a few friends, and the teachers liked him, and he did OK. In the US, he was isolated and didn't really know how to make friends and struggling with the language that he'd only started learning earlier that year.

Over the next year though, the family ended up falling in love with living in Friday Harbor, buying a house and starting the long term immigration process to become US citizens. Wooram really started to get comfortable in the Friday Harbor in middle school when there were a few other new students, and he really started to get the hang of English. For the first time since he was a small child, he also started to get the chance to have a physical outlet. There was a lot of gentle, beautiful hikes near where he lived, and with medical team encouragement, he was taken on a lot of hikes. He found it soothing, and decided that it was something that he loved doing.

In eighth grade, Wooram realized that he wasn't straight, and he was suddenly really really glad that they'd started the immigration process. While he'd been torn between missing Jeju-do and really liking his new home for the past few years, this was the tipping point to being invested in staying in Washington. He didn't join GSA until high school, but he started to make friends with the other queer kids during middle school, and by the time he was in high school had a pretty comfortable if small friend group. He continued to excel in school, and he decided that he wanted to be a teacher during that time frame.

He ended up accepted to an undergrad to masters teaching program through Western Washington University the same week that the family officially completed their immigration and became US citizens. It was a struggle to convince his parents that he would be OK going to school without them following him to Bellingham, especially because at least for his freshman year, he'd be rooming with someone he knew from high school. However, with to his surprise support from his older sister and his father, his mother eventually agreed that it didn't make sense for her to go with him to Bellingham.

Wooram ended up with his MAT in Elementary Education, and accepted a teaching position teaching 5th grade at Cedar Beach Elementary School after having spent a year teaching up in Bellingham on a noncontinuing contract after he graduated. Since he couldn't really commute down to Cedar Beach from Bellingham, and really couldn't from Friday Harbor, especially since between his partial blindness and his epilepsy, he can't safely get a license. He ended up putting up a Craigslist ad in an attempt to find someone to split an apartment in the Ocean Breeze Apartments so that he could live right near the school and the important bus lines. Cedar Beach is definitely the closest he's ever come to living in a city, and he's really finding himself liking it and liking how queer friendly the area is (though it's not too strange for him because Friday Harbor and Bellingham were both pretty good places to be a queer teen and young adult).

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