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 are both of such a dark brown that they're prone to be called black.  Unusually her nose is straighter, sharper, more ridged, hinting at perhaps some Manchu blood in the distant family tree, but the thick, 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 mysterious reasons.  (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 neighborhood) 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 behavioral blemishes on her record, with her pick of universities for a fine arts program.  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, experience life in its many varied forms, and 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, to snap photos, stopping places just long enough to sell freelance pictures to fund her next leg of her life's journey.