Face Claim: Zhang Liyin

Jianing is quite short, only barely topping 5' at exactly 153 cm. She often makes up for it by wearing quite high heels, though more than anything for her added ability to reach things that taller people have inconveniently placed too high up. She's perfectly comfortable wearing flatter shoes as well though, and doesn't make a particular big deal of the fact that she's short. She keeps her hair long, and she often bleaches and dies it a bit lighter and redder than its natural dark brown. She's got a distinctive face with strong cheekbones and warm, dark honey brown eyes. She has her ears pierced and often likes to wear large artistic earrings to match her carefully styled clothes. While she often wears dresses and skirts and pretty clothes, she also has a large functional wardrobe to support the times when she is out doing research for travel writing that involves such things as slogging through ten miles of ankle deep mud.

Jianing loves learning more about just about anything. She generally especially has a fascination for other cultures and ways of life which she attributes partially to the sheer amount of time she spent travelling from place to place as a kid. She is pretty much always down to try new foods, learn new customs, and meet new people. But she also keeps subscriptions to slews of journals in all sorts of fields, from science and medicine, to literature and history.

Jianing is incredibly focused and driven when she gets onto a project. She sometimes forgets to do basic things that she should generally be doing (like eating enough and sleeping) in pursuit of whatever she's interested in. She can be overwhelming for people who aren't used to working at a similarly breakneck pace.

Jianing also has a deeply caring side that comes out in her being kind and gentle with just about everyone she meets. She is patient, listens carefully, and always makes sure that everyone in a conversation is being heard. She is the kind of person that people gravitate towards if they are scared or shy because she is easy to be around.

Jianing has had a life full of small focused bursts of fascination which has led her to acquiring a fascinatingly large array of not always seemingly consistent skills. She has done some things consistently from a very young age, like practicing qigong and wushu, as well as singing, and she has always been curious and fascinated especially by other people. She was not always a good student in school though because she would go off on tangents and forget to do day to day assignments. For all that people like her, and she is a genuinely kind and caring person, she struggles a bit to form strong attachments with others because she hasn't met many people who keep up with her pace. She adores clothes and style, and she definitely does a lot in terms of care towards her appearance, but she will also happily throw all that normal routine off for a chance to go somewhere unusual and see something special, even if it means hours of slogging through mud up mountains. She's definitely a contradictory sort of person in many people's eyes.

MOTHER
Name: Cai Meiling
Birth Year: 1970
Occupation: Actress
Feelings Toward: Jianing and her mother are very distant towards each other. As a child, she rarely saw her mother more than once a year, and even then, it was usually at rather formal occasions. She never got the impression that her mother really wanted her as a part of her life, though she was pretty sure that her mother wanted her in some abstract sense.

FATHER
Name: Xu Mingan
Birth Year: 1971
Occupation: Sociology and Anthropology Field Researcher
Feelings Toward: Incredibly close and caring. Jianing spent her childhood travelling with her father, from research area to research area, and she definitely inherited his curiosity and intellectual tendencies. While they don't see each other as often anymore, since their travels don't really sync up well, they are regularly in contact and generally can talk for hours at a time.

STEP-FATHER
Name: Jason Jinsu Tang
Birth Year: 1976
Occupation: Anthropology Professor at CBCC
Feelings Toward: She was rather cautious of Jinsu at first, when he met and hit it off with her father, but over time, he has become one of the closest and most caring adults in her life. They see each other more regularly than she sees her other parents, and while she isn't as close to him as she is to her father, they've definitely got a strong bond.

Jianing was definitely an accident. She was the result of a relatively short fling between her mother and father when her mother was attending acting conservatory in Berkley and her father was, at eighteen, completing his Junior year at UC Berkeley. Cai Meiling didn't entirely know that she wanted to keep the kid, but her own indecision and the fact that she hadn't realized she was pregnant for quite some time, led to her basically defaulting into having the kid. Her mother was all but ready to put her up for adoption, but Xu Mingan wanted to keep her, whether or not Meiling was interested in being involved. There was a lot of complex paperwork, especially since of the three of them, JiaNing was the only one who was actually a US Citizen (though Mingan would earn his citizenship later the same year, having moved to the US as a kid).



Her father finished his undergrad and graduate degrees with her in tow, while she was still a baby and toddler, and when she was three, he set out on a set of research trips that carried him all around the Pacific Rim. Jianing grew up rarely spending more than six months to a year in one country, primarily home schooled due to necessity, though her father often enrolled her in courses wherever they were. She conversationally can get by in quite a few languages, though she is more confident in Mandarin and English than any others.



When Jianing was twelve, her father met Jason Jinsu Tang on a research trip, and they immediately hit it off as friends. MingAn had been seriously considering that it might be a good idea for JiaNing to at least have a consistent high school experience so that she would have a solid base for going to college in the US, so with some gentle prodding from Jinsu, he decided to accept a temporary position at CBCC. Jianing attended Cedar Beach High School from age 13 to 16, graduating a year early despite a slightly mixed academic record for not always having the best grades in classes that she didn't find interesting or important. She attended UW Bothell on full scholarship, and her father returned to travelling for his research visits, but this time without her.



However, during the time when he was working at CBCC, Mingan and Jinsu fell in love, and when it became possible, formed a civil union, which much more recently was able to become an official marriage. While she attended UC Bothell, Jinsu was her parent in the states the most because he enjoyed a much more stable and steady lifestyle than his husband. She had been a bit baffled by the idea at first, but she ended up quite liking Jinsu, and he is one of the people who can actually keep up with the sorts of full steam ahead fascinations that she and her father both get.



At UW Bothell, Jianing double majored in Modern Languages (with a focus on East Asian Languages) and Journalism, along with a music minor. She dabbled in classes in just about everything she could though while she was there. She was able to get a job doing translations for a publishing house straight out of undergrad, and because it didn't require her to have a physical office as long as she had internet and got her assignments in regularly, she started occasionally joining her father on trips again, and soon, taking her own to places she thought were interesting. She showed a blurb of her writing to the agent she worked with about one of these trips, and he told her that if she wrote him a short travel narrative, he'd see what he could do to publish it. She did, and when it sold moderately well, her contract with the company was expanded to other similar pieces of writing.



She has always loved to sing, and along with a few friends she made in college, when she is in town, she will sometimes go do small live shows in coffee shops and bars that have local singer nights or open stages. They aren't so much a musical group as a group of friends with similar musical interests who occasionally meet up to sing for an audience. They started doing this at college, and it's not nearly as frequent an activity now, it's still something she really enjoys doing. She has also maintained friendships with some of her pretty tight knit group of GSA friends from high school in Cedar Beach.

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