Face Claim: Yuna Shiraiwa

Liz is pretty short for her age, but considering both of her parents are/were not nearly so short, she probably has some growing left to do. She's about 152 cm/5'0" and relatively small in overall build, but she's got a lot of muscle from figure skating. She tends to wear fairly simple clothes, a lot of them from thrift stores or things that she or her mom made/recrafted at home. She recently got her ears pierced as an easy way for her to add shiny elements to her costumes. She also wears a lot of figure skating training clothes just in general. Her workout clothes are mostly hand me downs from other girls at her rink, but they're pretty nice in general, and her costumes are mostly homemade or hand me downs as well.

Liz has goals and dreams and plans, and she will work really hard to achieve them. She knows that her mom is working so hard to let her get a chance at figure skating, and just that her mom has worked so hard in general to keep them afloat, and she doesn't want to disappoint that.

Liz is both somewhat shy and somewhat reserved. She's not quick to be talkative with new people unless they somehow manage to get her into her comfort zone quickly, but she's also just a fairly quiet person in general.

Liz understands that things are sometimes bad for others far better than a lot of people. She tries really hard to help people in ways that she can, and she's started to get involved in peer tutoring programs while she was still in middle school, and she continues to be involved in mentorship/tutoring programs even now that she's graduated from high school.


Liz wants to be a champion figure skater. She loves the sport, and she'd do it just for the joy of it, but even more, she wants to win to prove that she belongs there. She started figure skating fairly young, mostly going in for cheap community classes for several years because that was all her mom could afford. She entered into a local competition mostly for fun because the gym was helping students enter in the lower levels, and she won, completely to her own surprise. That sparked a desire to pursue it farther, and she's incredibly determined to keep going on that path. She's scared of failure, of disappointing her mom, and of not reaching her potential. She is determined to keep her grades up and her academics strong because she knows that figure skating isn't a for sure thing no matter how much she loves it.

MOTHER
Name: Sarnai Monkhbat
Birth Year: 1983
Occupation: Cafe cook / Grocery store clerk
Feelings Toward: Liz hugely respects her mother, and loves her, but they don't always understand each other. Liz has spent her entire life in the US, learning English with complete fluency, and only speaking conversational, somewhat childish Mongolian as her mother encouraged her to focus on what would allow her to thrive in their new country. Sarnai is now fully functional in English, but her speech is somewhat broken at times, and very accented. The two of them often very much feel like they are speaking a different cultural and actual language. Even so, they care deeply for each other, and they are very supportive of each other when they can be. Liz knows that her mother would do just about anything to see her happy on a path of her choosing.

FATHER
Name: Ganbold Batbayar
Birth Year: 1974 (deceased 2003)
Occupation: Chemical Engineer
Feelings Toward: Curiosity. Her mother almost never talks about him, though once or twice she's managed to get some of the story from her mother about him. She knows that he was a good, kind man, and that her mother did care for him deeply, though they were partially a match of convenience and a chance for her mother to escape from the destruction caused by droughts and heavy snows that led to the complete depletion of her family's herds and death of large parts of her family. She is told that she takes after him in many ways, such as intelligence and drive.

SKATING COACH
Name: Sungyong Han
Birth Year: 1993
Occupation: Skating Coach
Feelings Toward: Sungyong is the person who really propelled her to believe that her dream was possible. He was willing to spend extra time working with her during open sessions and encourage her to try competing more, and she was his first ever private skating student, which led to him actually becoming a full time coach. She trusts him a lot, and she really wants to make him proud. He's somewhere on an older brother/father figure range to her.

Both of Liz's parents were born in Mongolia when it was still under Soviet Union control. Her mother was quite young during the change, but her father remembered it well, and did some of his crucial schooling during that time period. He had the saving chance for him of being very good at academics, and it allowed him to end up with a government chemical engineering position by the time he finished his schooling, as the country was stabilizing. Sarnai was from a herding family, but they lived close enough to Ulaanbaatar that she and her siblings were able to attend fairly regular schooling. Sarnai did quite well, and it afforded her a government scholarship to the Mongolian University of Sciences and Technology, where she met and was mentored by Gambold.



Less than a year into her college education, disaster struck for her family, due to a dzud (combination of drought and then harsh winter causing a great deal of livestock death), not only did they lose the vast majority of their herds, but her father and two of her three siblings also passed away. Gambold's family also suffered losses that year, but he was offered a chance at a position with a company in the US, and in an attempt to give both of them a way out, he suggested bringing Sarnai with him if she would marry him. They liked each other quite a bit and respected each other, but it was certainly not a love match. Sarnai was 18 and Gambold was 27 at this point. For them though, it worked, and within months, they were in Washington for his job, working on acquiring the paperwork to fully immigrate to the US.



Elizabet Sarangarel was born less than a year after they arrived in the US, when Sarnai was still 19, and the pregnancy had been a bit of a surprise to both of them. Liz was a happy surprise mostly though, as her arrival actually helped them with their immigration papers and acquiring permanent residence status. Both of her parents adored her as well, though they were both working very hard to provide for her at that point. Sarnai was trying to take courses at CBCC while holding down a line cook job at a small Mongolian Grill style restaurant, and her father was working at the position that had brought him to the US.



Only three months after she was born, another disaster struck, and in a work related accident, Gambold was exposed to fairly severe toxins, and the aftereffects of the exposure ended up killing him. Sarnai was left with a secure position in the US and a decent chunk of money to solidify it, but also completely alone with the three month old child to care for at 19. She did everything she could, working multiple jobs. She didn't quite know how she made it through to the point where Liz was old enough to enter school, but she did, and she continues to work hard to support her daughter.



Liz thrived in school from the very start, being naturally quick with both language and numbers, and she had the idea reinforced by her mother that it was important for her to always try her hardest. She learned quickly and often found it easy so she pushed on ahead of the level of most of her classmates. When she was seven, she finally found something that really, truly captured her interest. There was a class field trip where she was able to try ice skating, and immediately, she fell in love with the experience. She'd seen it on TV a few times and thought that it was beautiful, but she did remarkably well even from the first time she stepped out on the ice.



Her mom, always wanting the best possible outcome for her daughter, and pleased that her daughter seemed so happy with something that she'd tried, especially when Liz was often shy and uncertain outside of whether or not she knew something academic, found a way to get her signed up for figure skating lessons at the local gym. She took group classes until she was 11, when a new coach hired by the gym managed to help arrange things for them so that she could take private lessons with him. This was shortly after she'd competed in her firs tournament and won, much to her own surprise.



With a beginner coach, and his choreography, and made at home or hand me down costumes, Liz managed to do well, pretty much always landing on podiums at her various local competitions, and within the year after she started working with Sungyong, she made it all the way to Nationals at the Novice level. She managed to test up into the Junior competitive level, and based on her competition results, she had her first ever International assignment that fall while still skating for the US. She was both thrilled and terrified about it, especially since it is right around the same time she started high school. Her mother was worried that there would be no way to support her going to international competitions, but she was able to receive a small travel grant from the USFSA based on her performances and situation. After she had had a small amount of success, the Mongolian Figure Skating Association reached out to her, and she was sponsored by her Uncle, who she had never previously met to visit Mongolia and become a part of their figure skating team. She switched to skating to Mongolia, and she was cleared to compete just in time to go to Junior Worlds that year where she placed a surprise sixth.



She finally started to really make some friends at school her sophomore year of high school as well, though two of them were seniors, Thomas and Kangwan, and she knew that she wouldn't get the chance to see them much after they graduated. Inkar though was only one year ahead of her in school, and the two of them ended up spending a lot more time together than she would have expected.



She grew some over the off season, and while she did well on the JGP circuit her first season on it, she was just shy of making the JGP Final, with one third place finish and one fifth place finish. Even so, she was pretty happy with how her skating went that year. It was also her first season doing some senior international competitions, though only ones that were close enough that she could be driven to them or take the train. Even so, with plans on track to go to Four Continents and Junior Worlds that year, she was pretty happy with where her skating career was going. She's starting to think about colleges now, but unless she can get a scholarship somewhere local, she's going to start out with CBCC, but for now, she's taking a year off between the end of high school and beginning of college to focus on skating.

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