Name: Chen Xiaoling/Charlene Chen
Age: 23
Gender: Female
Home town/country: Born Shanghai, China, but brought to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada by the age of five and thus culturally far more North American (Canadian) than Chinese, despite her mother's best efforts.

Physical description and Personality: According to her mother, Charlene is fat and will never be able to attract a proper husband.  According to the prevailing standards around her she's a looker, though not really model-grade.  She's more "the girl next door" (if the boy next door is REALLY lucky).  According to her own crippling body issues (thanks, Mom!) she's plain and as a result she really doesn't like what she sees when she looks in the mirror.

Straight up she has the usual things you'd expect of someone who's genetically Han for as far back as anybody has cared to trace.  (This is a long way back.)  She has the more angular jaw look of her people, instead of the "moon-faced" look that is also common, but that sharpness is mitigated by the, yes, fleshiness she has.  (Her mom is right to a point: she is, by Chinese standards, a little plump.)  Her hair and eyes both are of such a dark brown that they're prone to being called black.  Unusually her nose is straighter, sharper, more ridged, hinting at perhaps some Manchu blood in the distant family tree, but the tick, wide, expressive lips are purely from her heritage.

Bodily her frame is slim and she is fit, though again that little hint of plumpness that makes her mother wild with fear for her marital prospects masks much of this, and goes to more than masking levels when looking at the backside which juts out below the hips and to the rear both in ways that she's very self-conscious of.

It's probably for this reason that you rarely, if ever, see her straight up.

Causing her mother even more stress, Charlene is into many forms of body modification.  Her tattoos tend to be discreet, peeking out in little bits here and there from under her clothing when it's revealing enough, but her piercings are another thing.  Ear (both lobe and beyond) piercings are easily visible and frequently changed.  (As for other, less public portions of her body, you'd have to ask her what, if any, piercings she has there.)

Background: Born in Shanghai to Chen Rong (father) and Mao Miao (mother), Charlene was relocated to Regina just as she was about to enter primary school for reasons which remain mysterious to her.  (The truth is that her father, a mid-ranking Party functionary, escaped a purge when tides shifted in the power bases in Beijing.)  The timing was right, however, since ALL of the children at the school were going to be new to the school (if not necessarily to the neighbourhood) so she didn't have that "new kid in school" smell that tends to alienate.

Nonetheless she got alienated since, well, the prairies aren't exactly a place filled to the brim with Chinese people and central Canada isn't exactly noted for being racially enlightened.  (It didn't help that she was constantly mistaken for a native child and treated with the shocking disregard-to-distaste that gets paired with that perception.)  She withdrew into herself all the way through primary school before flaring out in open rebellion in high school.

All that aside, however, apples don't fall far from trees and she'd inherited her father's studiousness and her mother's ability to stand up to adversity with fierceness, leading her to graduate from high school, despite the behavioural blemishes on her record, with her pick of universities for a fine arts program.  For while she was acting out, she also blossomed as a visual artist, finding joy in painting, sculpture, computer illustration, photography, and videography.  Her special love was photography, enhanced by computer manipulation, because she enjoyed the power of making what didn't exist come to life before her.

Upon getting her baccalaureate in fine arts, and then her master's in art history, she felt the need to leave the academic world for a while, to experience life in its many varied forms, to get the experience she'd need for her doctorate.  Over the shrill objections of her mother she set out, jobless, just her camera, her laptop, and her phone (plus clothes and personal grooming supplies) in her backpack, to walk, snapping photos, stopping places just long enough to sell freelance pictures to fund her next leg of her life's journey.

It is in this phase of her life that she found herself suddenly waking up, naked, in a strange room.

Tattoos:

On her back, Charlene has a tattoo of a willow tree in the spring, covering from her lower back to her shoulder, wrapping across her right side to peek ever so slightly out the front from under her lowered arm.  Next to the tattoo is a work of calligraphy spelling out (vertically, not horizontally):

  咏柳
      贺知章

碧玉妆成一树高，
万条垂下绿丝绦。
不知细叶谁裁出，
二月春风似剪刀。

At the base of her neck, hidden beneath her long black hair, there is a tattoo of a peacock spider in a display dance.

Wrapping around her left leg, from ankle to mid-thigh, is a colourful Chinese phoenix (凤凰) in flight.

Around her left wrist is a tattooed necklace of barbed wire whose points are made to look embedded in her flesh.

Piercings:

Strangely only the right ear is pierced.  There is a large platinum hoop in the lobe cunningly constructed to look as if it is a solid piece that was forged in place (though it is actually removable).  In addition she has a triple helix piercing into which a gold coil is wound.

For more intimate piercings, she has a plain barbell in her left nipple and a platinum Isabella with a mounted diamond.