Sunny Yang
| THE BASICS |
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| Name: | Meili Yang |
| Nickname: | Sunny (English name), Straight-Talk (to the local Indians) |
| PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION |
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| Gender: | Female |
| Age: | 21 |
| Hair: | Black |
| Eyes: | Dark Brown Almond-shaped |
| Distinguishing Marks: | None |
| General Appearance: | Sunny stands about 5' 5" tall. She is slender and poised. Her dark brown almond-shaped eyes are often alert and open. A friendly smile adorns her lips for favorite customers and strangers alike. Sunny will rarely dress in Chinese clothing and mostly wears dresses of western make. Nothing too fancy but always clean and well presented. |
| HISTORY |
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| Occupation: | General Store and Trading Post owner |
| Personality: | Sunny's a born dealmaker who knows how to put her best face forward when she wants to. She puts on a sunny face for customers, bargains hard but keeps her deals, deals honestly with anyone regardless of race or sex, and makes a point of remembering names and faces as much as she can. She's known for her sobriety, preferring "her personal tea blend" to alcoholic beverages (and knowing to stay away from the laudanum) and sticking to vegetarian food in her own home. She tends to play more to be entertaining at the poker tables than to win, though she doesn't play for high stakes and normally breaks close to even. |
In truth? A lot of the above is a role Meili plays, and While she plays the cheerful huckster where she has to (and in the rough-and-tumble Sweetwater, that's most of the time), at heart, she's a quiet bookworm. She's highly literate, with a personal library in two languages, and always orders more from the catalog. She's also a fairly devout Buddhist, but this is something that she absolutely avoids discussing with whites; she goes to church on Sundays to keep up appearances and meditates on the Noble Path in the back of her house.|
| Sexual Preferences: | Bisexual But at the moment unattached. She is awaiting confirmation of an arranged marriage from her father in San Fransico. |
| About Your character: | Meili's second-generation half-Chinese; her father came over to Mexican California before the Gold Rush, married a white woman, and then made his fortune running a store for stampeders. Meili, his eldest child, quickly started learning the ins and outs of running a store. But in California, wealth alone didn't buy status, and Meili grew up in the paradoxical situation of being a rich man's daughter, well-educated, and yet spat on as a second-class citizen by California's white population. As the years went on, while her father's prudence had ensured substantial savings and wealth, California's racial tensions grew even worse, and his business began to suffer. |
A year ago, after an anti-Chinese riot nearly burned down the Yang store, Meili had had enough and started making plans to start over. With her father's blessing, advice and starter money, and the Sears-Roebuck catalog, she traveled out to Wyoming; out on the frontier, people cared less about what she looked like so long as she could bring things they liked into town: everything from mining tools and Levi's jeans to quality tobacco and laudanum, and good steel knives she could trade to the local Indians for buffalo hides. If her family's joss and the town's growth holds, she plans to repeat her father's success (and hopefully avoid his decline) as the town booms.|
