Nickname(s): Jess, JJ
Age: nineteen
Birthday: November 19, 1997
Gender: Male
Sexual Orientation: Pansexual
Residence: Golden West Street
Member Group: Ox
Occupation: College Student, not entirely sure of his major yet, but wanting to do something that connects to activism and gender related stuff

Face Claim: Choi Minki (Ren of Nu'est)
Appearance: Jess isn't terribly tall or terribly short at around 173 cm (5'8"), and he's quite slender, but more muscular than he looks at first glance. He's taken martial arts classes ever since he was pretty young, and that's left him with a lot of muscle. He is very pretty, and people regularly think that he's a girl, but Jess is perfectly happy in his gender presentation, but also in his gender. He likes to wear skirts and dresses and makeup and does so on the regular, along with a fair amount of jewelry. His ears are both double pierced in the lobe, and he has a cartilage piercing on the left side as well. He's currently contemplating his first tattoo, but he hasn't decided what exactly it should be yet.

Personality Traits:

• Passionate: Jess gets really devoted to causes, to hobbies, to subjects of interest, to people, basically everything. Once he cares about it, he cares really strongly.
• Gender Non Conforming: Jess has a patch on his bag that he always carries with him that sums up part of his personality really well: "Destroy Gender Roles, Not Genders."
• No Time for Your Nonsense: Jess has very little tolerance for people who are nasty, or for people who try to push stereotypical, bigoted roles on others. He will snap and people and argue with them, and overall, he has completely run out of the ability to put up with this stuff.

What Sets Them Apart: Jess modeled some as a kid because he was ridiculously pretty and didn't mind getting dressed up and put in front of cameras. From that, he picked up a taste for pretty clothes, and a pretty fluid notion of what he was "supposed" to wear. As he got older, he decided that he liked skirts and dresses and started wearing them pretty often. His parents were pretty into letting him choose what he wanted, but it didn't take long for that to lead to a lot of people bullying him. He ended up taking martial arts, and rather dramatically stopped putting up with anyone trying to push him around ever. He's pansexual, but has mostly dated guys and non-gender binary folks in the past, though he's had crushes on plenty of girls. He likes people who care strongly about things and are willing to step out of comfort zones with him. He's generally very fond of nature, liking to go on hikes and stuff, and he keeps in quite good shape overall, still practicing martial arts. He really likes school, and is good at a wide variety of subjects, but he's not entirely sure what he wants to study yet, just that he wants to go into something that will allow him to do good work as an activist. He's contemplated social work, he's contemplated law, he's even contemplated something in acting or film. Who knows at this point, he certainly doesn't.

Mother:

• Name: Hannah HaYun Kang
• Age: 53
• Occupation: Nurse
• Feelings Towards: His mother always makes him feel supported and loved. She's very open to whatever he wants to do, and he knows that he is the precious baby of the family. He wants to make her proud, and sometimes he wishes that she'd give him a little bit more of a push in the right direction when he's uncertain.

Father:

• Name: Ian JiHun Park
• Age: 51
• Occupation: Nurse
• Feelings Towards: Very close. Jess's dad was the one who accidentally got him into modelling when he was a kid, through a contact that he got from one of his patients after he'd showed off a picture of his kid. His dad always supported him in choosing his own path and doing things he enjoyed, and it was his dad who pushed him to try martial arts when bullying started to be a problem in elementary school.

Half Brother:

• Name: Taylor TaeSeok Kang
• Age: 37
• Occupation: Elementary School Teacher
• Feelings Towards: Tay was one of the people who took care of Jess the most often when their parents had long shifts when Jess was a kid. They definitely grew up with different backgrounds though, with Jess being a lot more well supported with much better prepared parents, so sometimes they don't understand each other. There's a lot of love and caring there though, and in the end, Tay supports Jess really strongly.

Half Sister:

• Name: Jennifer JaeEun Park
• Age: 35
• Occupation: Social Worker
• Feelings Towards: Jenn was in school far away for a good chunk of his early childhood, so they didn't start getting to know each other as much until she'd finished her masters degree. Jess feels like they get each other really well though, and he really admires her and what she does.

History: Jess's parents were both born to parents who moved to the US from Korean quite young. They grew up in the states and both had bright futures ahead of them, both planning for med school, and looking like they would be excellent doctors when they got to that point. They had friends, excelled as students, and were generally on a path to great success.

When Jess's mom was a senior in high school, she got a college student boyfriend who was an exchange student from Korea from a rather well off family, studying to be an engineer. Her parents quite liked him, and turned a lot of a blind eye to whatever the two of them were getting up to because they wanted to encourage the match. He was a charming, not terribly responsible, if quite intelligent young man, and Hannah was in a bit of a rebellious phase. Between these things and just plain bad luck, about three months before he was set to return to Korea at the end of the fall semester, she got pregnant. There were lots of promises made, that he'd come back with a job, that they'd be able to get married and once the kid was a few years old, he'd support her through degrees. But once he returned to Korea, those plans started getting thinner and thinner, with delays and then his parents not wanting to have him leave, and Hannah not wanting to go to Korea to join him, by the time Tay was born, they'd broken up, leaving her parents stressed and her a single mom at seventeen, just after having graduated high school. Her plans to go to a top school were put on the back burner, and instead, she enrolled in the nursing program at the local community college, taking classes a little bit at a time, and doing what she could to support her kid. She felt lucky that her parents, while frustrated with the whole situation, felt responsible, and were very caring and helpful to her.

When Jess's father was in high school, he met a girl through a bunch of his classes who he adored. Ian asked her out at the beginning of his sophomore year, and he was stunned when this brilliant girl, nearly a year older than him, was actually interested. They had a lot of classes together, and they ended up spending a lot of time together. Both of their parents worked long hours, and no one really realized how much time the two teenagers, in their first love, were spending together completely unsupervised. They started out kind of slow, but they didn't really know enough to be sensible, and right around the end of his sophomore year (and her junior year) she got pregnant. However, no one knew until she started to obviously show about five months later. She freaked out, her parents freaked out, and Ian and his parents did too, but there was no getting around the kid would exist at that point. She broke up with him, almost as soon as they found out, and he understood, but it also made him sad. They still saw each other a lot, and she told him when she decided that she couldn't stand to keep a kid. She was too young, not ready enough, she had hopes and dreams. Her parents were much better off than his, and they threatened his parents with legal action if they didn't do something about the situation. They talked about it a lot with Ian, and eventually, it ended up being resolved that he would get custody of the kid, with partially custody to his parents until he came of age himself. Ian adored Jenn instantly from the time that he first met her at the hospital. He was a natural with kids, and he couldn't resent her that his plans to go to an high tier school and become a doctor were kind of having to rearrange. He found a community college with a good nursing program at the other end of the state, and he started figuring out what he would need to do to take care of the baby and do nursing school.

Their first week of the nursing program, Hannah and Ian basically met by running into each other everywhere, daycare, classes, adviser meetings. Hannah had taken a little while to actually be ready to go into the program, so despite their two year age gap, they started at the same time (one semester after Ian graduated from high school). It turned out that they clicked and bonded over their similar backgrounds, and having a study partner who could double as another person to help watch a young kid was a blessing for both of them. It was a slow thing for them to start dating, but by the time they both finished, they were starting to get pretty serious. They started living together during their first jobs, taking alternating shifts so there was always someone around for the kids. They moved around a bit, but when they both got offered permanent positions at the hospital in Huntington Beach, they took them. And then, about six months later, they decided to get married, and did so pretty quickly and quietly. Their families liked each other, their kids liked each other and were basically already siblings, and overall, they were just happy together. They'd built a successful, working new life together despite everything.

About three years after they got married, they decided that they wanted a kid of their own, one that was sort of the last thing that tied their varied family together. Jess was that kid. He was 16 and 17 years younger than his older siblings, and he was definitely the doted on baby of the family. His brother went to college nearby, and all through his childhood, he spent a lot of time being looked after by his older brother. His older sister went to college and then a master's program on the East Coast, so he didn't really start getting to know her until he was about 10 years old, when she finally moved back. They've gotten close over the years since then, but it's definitely different than the closeness with his big brother.

Jess was a bright, friendly, sweet child, who loved pretty bright things from a very young age. He was also just absurdly photogenic, and one of his dad's patients saw a picture of him at one point, and suggested that if they wanted, Jess could model for her children's clothing line. Jess's dad took the card and the idea home, and Jess was interested in the idea. It ended up with Jess doing a lot of child modeling from ages 5 to 13, and then continuing every now and then to do it for longer. Through that, he got really into clothes and makeup and eventually drama. Jess grew up with a loving, supportive network of adults who really encouraged him to do things because he wanted to, and there wasn't really anyone who would discourage him when he experimented with clothes, loving skirts and dresses, or when he eventually decided that he was interested in all genders. His parents were there for him, both of them having learned a really valuable lesson from their own parents standing by them through some pretty tight spots. (The only reason that Jess isn't super close to his grandparents is that both of his grandfathers passed away when he was still pretty young, and his grandmothers both live pretty far away now (one at the other end of the state, and one with her sister in Chicago)).

When Jess started getting bullied pretty badly in elementary school, his dad decided that it would probably be a good plan to have him take some martial arts classes, and it turned out that Jess loved them. He did well, and has continued them as a hobby ever since. It means that under the "girly" exterior outfit, he has a six pack, and he's gotten in a few pretty dramatic school fights that eventually scared off the bullies for good.

Jess got to be pretty politically active about gender and sexuality stuff from a pretty young age, being active in the GSA at his school, and just generally being motivated to go volunteer and do work relating to helping move the cause forward. He doesn't know what he wants to do with it long term yet, but he knows he wants to do something that will help on that front. He's settled pretty happily into the role of being weird and rolling with it. He wears skirts and dresses often, wears his hair long, but he does not consider it drag: they're his clothes, and he likes them, gender is irrelevant. On the bag that he carries constantly, he has badges that read: "Destroy Gender Roles, Not Gender Identities" and "I use he/him/his/the most fabulous."

Because he didn't know what he wanted to do entirely when he graduated high school, and for all that his parents have a good steady life and income now, he decided to go to the community college while living at home after he graduated high school in the very top of his class, only a tiny bit off valedictorian. It's been a good experience so far, and he's enjoying getting distribution requirements out of the way and just feeling his way around the fields that might interest him.