Mei Lin
Standing merely 150cm (remark on this at your peril) Mei is hardly the first thing people picture when they hear someone intends to be a CQC instructor. Black eyes and long midnight hair seem to drink in the light, with the latter typically held in a bun by a pair of lacquered sticks. On-duty they're plain, but off-duty she has a rotating collection of brightly painted versions. Being mixed-race shows clearly on her features, the shape of her face somewhere distinctly between mom's and dad's, the folds around her eyes shallower but still present, and the whites of her eyes easily visible.She's much heavier than most would expect by looking at her, enough that a naive BMI calculation would call her fat, but such an accusation is laughable on the face of it. She's just really dense... "physically, not mentally Cecil!" *Smack* "Brothers"
Around her neck, when she's not in uniform, she wears a pair of little wooden pendants with no discernable features other than the age of the wood, and her brothers do likewise. One is a piece of her father's childhood home, blown to bits by the Japanese and carved into simple keepsakes, a little piece of where Dad came from. The other is from a tree in Gram's yard, a little piece of Mum's childhood home.
When wearing makeup she inevitably ends up scraping some of her lipstick off with her teeth, chewing on the left side of her lower lip is a habit she's never been able to break.
At present she's done with her first tour in the Army, and is in the TA while she goes to school, then it'll be back to the Army with her.
Mei Lin is the youngest child and only daughter of Ru Lin and Sarah Lin nee Smith, a couple who met in wartime when her mother was a nurse with the 14th Army, and her father was wounded in battle. When the war ended, he tried to return to his village in China, but there was no village anymore, so he moved to England with his 'Nightingale' and settled there. Some mockery was made of them for getting the whole "war bride" thing backwards, but they were, and still are, happy.
The couple has three sons and a daughter, all of them raised learning martial arts and at least the basics of how to shoot, and now the eldest two sons are in the army, while the third is working with these newfangled computer things. It seems to pay well enough, and it's a skilled trade, so that's fine in Ru's eyes. He's not so sure about his only daughter joining the Army, that's a job for sons not daughters.
Mei was doomed to be short by genetics, but will cheerfully challenge anyone who makes fun of her height to a sparring match. It might be telling that she has three older brothers, and they don't call her 'shorty'. At least, not to her face and not anymore. ;)
A consummate tomboy, and particularly rough and tumble even by that standard, she can't even count the number of times growing up that she needed a stitch or two. But with a fully qualified nurse for a mother, those injuries rarely required a visit to casualty. Just a scolding while Mom cleaned the wound and patched her up.
The restriction on combat facing roles for women chafes mightily, particularly as she's angling to be a CQC instructor, but she's closer than Mom was allowed to get, and who knows what the future holds?
Family
Mother: Sarah Lin nee Smith
Father: Ru Lin
Brothers: Jie, Cecil, Hui
"My...first kiss was a disaster, but that wasn't his fault. My second was much better, a half hour later. It was at a school dance, I agreed when he asked me because everyone expected me to go with someone. After the first dance he leaned in and... I just froze. I couldn't turn away in time." She shudders at the memory, but her voice cheers up significantly for the next bit. "His older sister came and found me crying in the bathroom after. He asked her what he did wrong, and she told him she'd take care of it. Hehe, that she did. She was two years ahead, more cute than pretty, but I mostly noticed her lips. I never understood my friends being boy crazy, but I told myself it was just 'not yet'. That's when I stopped lying to myself. Nothing more happened with her, she likes both so it's easier to pretend, but I'm still grateful she was there."