Face Claim: Xue Bayi

Yingxi is a relatively average height in the US, at 180 cm/5'11" but often comes off as taller because they have excellent posture and a very lithe, dancer's build. They keep their naturally black hair long, and often wear it up in a ponytail, bun, or braid, but sometimes will let it be down (and dramatic). They often wear makeup, at least basic makeup, sometimes more dramatic things, and they also enjoy jewelry, though they've not (yet) gotten their ears pierced.

Yingxi has a wide array of scars around his right knee and up and down his right leg that come from a combination of a bad dance injury, surgery to fix that injury, a compounding injury from the incident that caused the family to choose to leave for the US, and the follow up surgery to fix that injury. They are extremely self conscious of those scars and do not like other people seeing them.

Yingxi is still getting settled with being in the US, but slowly, his sarcastic, witty side is starting to come through more. He's generally pretty laid back and not at all competitive, but he's driven to do well for his own sake. He's definitely got some lingering trauma around events before his family moved to the US, and it comes up in his brain every time he's trying to get settled around new people which means it takes him a while to trust new people, especially around his own age. He's kind and caring and kind of a mom friend, if given the chance to get that comfortable with someone though.

He still loves dance, though he's only been slowly able to start doing it regularly again. He's also a little bit afraid of his own body betraying him again, which can be a little bit of an uphill battle with dance.

Yingxi interchangeably uses he/they pronouns for himself, mostly based on context and how comfortable they are with talking about their gender. They are genderqueer, but they do lean towards a more masculine part of the gender spectrum, and sometimes that's too complicated to want to explain.

FATHER
Name: Qiang Bingxian
Birth Year: 1973
Occupation: Chinese Teacher (Snohomish), was an English teacher in China, spent several years in the US as a 1:1 Language Para while earning his teaching certification in the US
Feelings Toward: Respect, love, security. Yingxi's father was the first person who really made them know that their gender, personal presentation, and feelings were OK to have. Their father has always made choices trying to focus on what was best for Yingxi and their family. Yingxi also feels really fortunate that they'd started learning English from their father from a pretty young age.

MOTHER
Name: Fu Meili
Birth Year: 1970
Occupation: Retired Dancer, teaches some private lessons and kids classes.
Feelings Toward: Love, admiration, slight personal fear of disappointing her. Yingxi's mother was the one who got them into dance from a very young age, and the one who started their training on that front. Because of her, Yingxi, despite being a very non-competitive person overall, was a very highly ranked competitive Chinese traditional dancer from the time that they were in elementary school. Yingxi knew that their mother felt very guilty about their injury, and she's been very supportive but tentative about Yingxi slowly starting to dance seriously again.

COUSIN
Name: Fu Shimei
Birth Year: 2000
Occupation: UW Student (class of 2022)
Feelings Toward: Friendly but still tentative. They're living together, but Yingxi really hasn't relaxed with her yet. So far they mostly seem to get along, but Yingxi is tentative. She's his mother's much older half-brother's youngest daughter, and she's studying abroad at UW. They didn't grow up in the same part of China.

Yingxi was born to an English teacher and a professional traditional Chinese dancer in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, China. He was a healthy child who showed strong early skills in coordination and speech, speaking and walking early, and from a very young age, his mother started teaching him traditional Chinese dance. He was well on his way to eventually becoming a professional himself by the time he was six. His father nurtured his academic interests more, teaching him to read very young, and starting to teach him English (the subject that his father taught in school). The first eight years or so of Yingxi's life were pretty peaceful.

When he was around eight was when Yingxi started really getting teased at school, for his long hair (allowed to be kept long because it was for traditional dance), his unfortunate mix of shyness and sharp humor, and for being considered just generally weird. He didn't have many friends, and a few years later, it got worse when he started getting crushes on the boys in is grade. He became isolated and scared. Dance and academics truly remained his retreats though, and he excelled in both, performing very well in competitions for dance mostly because he wanted to do his own best, not out of a real desire to compete.

His world came (quite literally) crashing down when he was thirteen. He came down wrong from a jump at the end of a competition and destroyed his right knee. It took several surgeries to get him back to the point where he could walk, and where he could maybe hope to dance again eventually. He spent months doing his school work from the hospital, getting further and further ahead because it was now his only passion that he could focus on.

Two weeks after he returned to school, hair still long though knowing that he'd likely have to cut it because of school rules if he wasn't able to return to dance soon, some of his most frequent bullies cornered him on his walk home from school. It escalated from them taunting him to Yingxi getting beaten up (blaming himself for not being able to hold his tongue), and back in the hospital for a second round of surgeries on his right leg to fix the compounding injuries caused by him being beaten up.

His feelings about gender and the fear about going back to school but also desperately not wanting to cut his hair and the crushes on boys and everything came pouring out to his father while he was in the hospital the second time. Unbeknownst to him, during this time, his father started the process to try to move them to the US.

Yingxi got out of the hospital for real right around the end of the school year, having gotten immensely ahead in their school work, and they discovered that the family would be moving to the US before they started back at school. Yingxi was slightly terrified, but they were also immensely relieved to be getting away from their tormentors. It would be a chance to start over.

The family ended up in Snohomish, WA where in fairly short order, their father had managed to get a job as a 1:1 Language Para for a Chinese speaking student, and their mother had started a small dance school, having retired from professional dancing less than a year before. While Yingxi would theoretically been in 8th or 9th grade based on age when they arrived in the US, their dad worked with the school district to get them placed into 10th grade based on their high level of academic performance and fluent English.

For the next few years, Yingxi focused almost exclusively on school in the US, settling into how it was different from at home. They weren't able to make many friends during high school, but they did quietly join the GSA, and they were out to people who bothered to pay attention as genderqueer and queer in general, not having really narrowed down their sexuality beyond that point.

They were admitted to UW on a full scholarship, and they started at UW when they were still only 16. After a few months (and passing their 17th birthday) of commuting down to Seattle from Snohomish, they moved into a 2 bedroom 1 bath apartment (Ocean Breeze Apartments) in Cedar Beach with their cousin who was attending UW as a Chinese exchange student. Yingxi at this point had permanent resident status and would likely be able to gain citizenship prior to their graduation in the class of 2024.

Shortly after moving down to Cedar Beach, they discovered that the dance studio in town offered some classes in traditional Chinese dance that were actually taught by someone who knew what he was doing, and he quietly signed up for some private lessons. He's been working with his physical therapist and the dance teacher there to get himself back in practice, and he's really excited about feeling like he has more control over his body and dance again. He hopes that he'll be able to perform again sometime in the not too distant future, and he was thrilled at how happy it made his mother when he told her that he'd started dancing again and was able to show her a little bit.

They are double majoring in Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies and East Asian Studies.

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