Soo-bin Kim-Reyes

[Cicada]

Name: Soo-bin Esteve Kim-Reyes
Gender: Female
Age: 18
Grade: 12
School: John Endecott Memorial High
Hobbies and Interests: Spirituality and prayer, volunteering, sketching and digital art, academics and especially history and political science, learning languages, foreign policy and geopolitics, Model United Nations, drama club.

Appearance: Soo-bin is 5’3” and clocks in at an average of 100 lb, and her silhouette is generally described as rectangular and scrawny, an effect exaggerated by a virtually flat chest and naturally noodly arms and legs. The color of her skin is a fair hue, generally described as tan with a distinctly yellow-golden undertone, and she bronzes easily with only some sun exposure. She has little in the way of muscle, and has bony, naturally small shoulders.

Her facial countenance is rounded, and takes in most aspects more after mother than father. She would be identified as fully Korean by most casual onlookers despite her mixed heritage. She inherited her father’s dark green eyes, with the iris ring almost indistinguishable from the pupil. Her eyes have an angular shape and can be described as hawkish. The bell of her nose is small but she otherwise has a strong profile nose with a tall, narrow bridge. Her lips are naturally on the darker end of the flesh-pink spectrum in shade. Due to her eye shape and a natural tendency to sneer, she has a face described colloquially as a resting bitch face by many, looking naturally mean and harsh even when unintended.

Soo-bin’s hair is jet black, and naturally wavy past neck length. She takes particularly good care of her hair and wears it degrees of more straight and more curly at her leisure, generally preferring having no bangs to prevent her face from looking too small. In her senior year Soo-bin used a french twist half updo, hair grown to the blades of her back and straightened extensively. Soo-bin speaks with a relatively low pitch and is breathy with her enunciation. She tends to pause in conversations frequently and has a generally halting cadence. She speaks Korean and English fluently, is fluent in ASL, conversational in Spanish and LSE, and is already practicing Mandarin and CSL at an advanced student level.

Soo-bin’s fashion is for the most part unabashedly feminine. She notably adores accessories and specifically all manner of hats with which she is willing to be more unisex to show off her collection: baseball caps, berets, pageboys, sunhats, and even the odd stetson which she does not seem to be embarrassed by. Besides this she also has a collection of jewelry, mostly bracelets and necklaces, though she has yet to pierce her ears. On the day of the abduction she wore a black denim overalls over a long sleeve shirt with thin white and grey plaid, along with a brown felt stetson. She wore a silver chain necklace and white trainers.

Biography: Soo-bin was the second child, born July 29, out of a family of three children, including her older brother by four years Min-ho and younger sister by a year Yu-jin. Soo-bin’s father, Valente Esteve Reyes, is an accomplished foreign service officer of the United States State Department who at the height of his career served as Deputy Chief of Mission under the Ambassador to South Korea during the Bridges Administration. It is during the tailend of his thirty years of service in the Asian-Pacific region that he met his wife, Ji-hyun Kim, the youngest child of a prosperous business-owning upper middle class family. Valente was long estranged from his family in Mexico at the time due to having run away from home to pursue his scholarship in the United States, and Soo-bin can count only her mother’s side of the family as extended family.

Soo-bin was born in South Korea and spent her formative years there. As a child Soo-bin was inquisitive and curious about the world, but spoke infrequently despite hitting her development milestones in time. She was naturally artistic and would spend her time doodling with pencils. Her parents were not bothered by her quiet tendencies, assuming it was part of her natural personality. Soo-bin had little interest in exploring other art mediums, and when her parents did get her a set including watercolors and modeling clays she rarely touched it after her initial curiosity.

Shortly before she turned four and was about to start pre-school she developed a habit of following her father around and insisting he bring her to work. She had an interest in his job, and he in turn was good at explaining his work in a manner she could understand as a little girl. Soo-bin would become Valente’s favorite, as he saw in his little daughter a potential natural passion for the sort of academic work his job demanded. Min-ho was more of an athlete in his interests, and that would also be the case with Yu-jin when she was born two years after Soo-bin, so Soo-bin and her father had a more natural synergy with their similar interests and thus he would be her biggest influence growing up. Most of Soo-bin’s early exposure to her father’s work was him explaining history and providing her maps to play with.

Soo-bin would run into trouble as she began her education. She sincerely enjoyed learning and had a broad curiosity in most subjects, but she had a number of struggles most of her peers didn't share: difficulty recalling specific words from short stories when questioned, with following teacher instructions due to poor recall of what was said, and so on. From a young age Soo-bin had to put more effort into her studies, repeatedly rereading assignments and checking her work. Though the extra work made school tiring, she was reluctant to seek help from adults or peers. From a young age she was disinclined to share things that were bothering her and preferred to work through problems on her own, and at that young age the amount of adjustment needed was manageable. Her parents merely thought she was doing extra studying for pleasure as doing such a thing was in character for her.

Both Ji-hyun and Valente were practicing Catholics, and all members of the family from Soo-bin’s youth were steeped in the traditions of the Church from a young age. Min-ho in particular intended to be a priest when he matured, and his two younger sisters by default would end up participating in a lot of the same activities he did such as Sunday school and a youth bible study group. Soo-bin enjoyed the bible study group socially as she enjoyed sharing in others' spiritual journeys. Much as the added workload of reading and studying a dense text in the form of the bible was for Soo-bin, she gladly took on the extra work in order to fit in and participate properly.

Soo-bin’s social life in church settings came at the cost of her becoming more introverted in school. She had to often focus her energy in class on keeping up with class despite her mental difficulties so she was prone to being silent and shrugging off friendly approaches. She also felt little reason to engage in extracurricular activities like sports when she entertained herself well enough with her church activities. By the time she moved to America in the fourth grade, she was already established as a loner by her peers in school: polite and reliable during group work, but otherwise unlikely to engage with others.

The move to America was the result of Valente formally retiring from his government work and deciding to take up teaching. He was offered a position in Tufts University of Boston, where many of his adult friends lived. Valente and Ji-hyun were enamored with the idea of idyllic small town life compared to the bustle they’d lived with as a family based in Seoul, so they elected to stay in Salem, where Valente could commute to work.

Soo-bin found friends quickly through the church, and she had other more severe concerns soon enough: her education as an ESL speaker. Soo-bin had learned some English in her primary education in Korean, but hardly enough, and she had little conversational and listening comprehension ability as the household had otherwise been run fully in Korean. Even if she’d wanted friends it would be difficult to make them, and her performance in school suffered as the language barrier made it all the more difficult for her to follow along with teachers and parse homework instructions despite her best efforts.

Concern from her teachers and herself, along with a stark contrast in poor performance in her fourth grade year compared to her siblings, led to her parents formally consulting a psychologist. It was determined that she had dyslexia, both in terms of writing and reading and with audiological processing dysfunction. A humiliated Soo-bin immediately withdrew further into her social frigidness, and she was very reluctant to discuss the diagnosis. Only her family and her teachers in school would be permitted to know for a long time, as Soo-bin would have rare tantrums when her parents discussed her opening up with her developmental disorder to help friends and peers accommodate her needs.

She was severely frustrated, and with her dreams of being an academic or in foreign service like her father remaining she was determined to overcome her condition. Valente himself couldn’t dissuade her despite being her inspiration. She studied for an incredibly long amount of hours each day considering her age, took up speech craft practices that she’d drill herself with, in pursuit of improving her English and her performance in classrooms.

One approach she intuited from her extensive poring over internet research on her condition was that sign language was often more intuitive to grasp for dyslexics. By the time she was halfway through her fifth grade year she remained frustrated and stuck, and grades below the reading level she was supposed to be at. In her desperation she tried studying ASL alongside her English studies, and she found that she picked up ASL faster and that the ability to cross-reference also improved her actual English listening comprehension as it grew her vocabulary. More importantly the breakthrough was significant for her confidence. She picked up a number of foundational study habits and styles that suited her, such as speech-to-text for online research, notes that used her drawing skills to create visual references, and noise canceling headphones. By the time she graduated to middle school she was in a stable place, with improved grades, and she’d catch up to her grade level by the time she graduated into John Endecott. She had a newfound ambition of conquering her shortcomings by becoming fluent in multiple languages.

Her personal growth did not come easily, however, and she developed a number of bad habits that haunt her to this day. The amount of work she had to put into stubbornly fighting her own neurology as a tween was horrible on her sleep schedule. To cope she turned to caffeine at a young age. Her own parents were very strict about this and refused to stock the house while she was still young, but Min-ho was by this age also struggling with his own busy schedule of volunteering in high school and used increasingly regular coffee breaks at local cafes as his pick-me-up. The two were already close over shared spirituality and coffee out on the regular became their favorite bonding pastime, and by the time she was thirteen Soo-bin was already drinking as much coffee as a full grown adult on a daily basis to keep her schedule.

She also had the least amount of friends in school during this period, increasingly anxious and embarrassed with her struggles with English and often stone cold silent in classes. Her developing a reputation for looking mean and snobby as puberty changed her face did not help. She leaned on her social connections in church to the point that she became a doormat in friends groups consumed by typical teenage drama, her self-esteem and ego trampled on by fair-weather friends as she didn’t want to dare raise her tongue and lose what few social connections she craved. She would develop a long term social anxiety as a result of her struggles in this period of her life, growing very used to feeling ignored, silently judged, and keeping to herself due to concerns with her abilities to communicate her thoughts.

The only significant long lasting friend she made during this period of her life was Karin Han, whose mother knew her own mother through church and suggested the girls as mutual friends due to their respective troubles in school life. While awkward at first, Soo-bin found she appreciated that Karin was more honest and forthright than many of her more increasingly petty and irritating bible study friends. Karin's personality was refreshing and honest, and Soo-bin enjoyed someone to vent about annoying classmates with. Soo-bin in a way also benefited from her mother having slipped and let the secret of her dyslexia out- the hard part for her was out of the way, and Karin was indeed helpful and accommodating, and the low pressure situation made conversing easier. The two grew close quite quickly.

John Endecott hadn’t been her father’s first choice, but Soo-bin was insistent she follow Karin, and she also wisely intuited that she stood a better chance to excel in a school where there was lower pressure as opposed to a more prestigious one. Graduating into high school Soo-bin dropped her bible study outside of school- or rather, it dissolved around her due to internal drama peaking and members naturally moving away to other schools. She joined worship and prayer in John Endecott to replace bible study. Through Karin’s influence Soo-bin found that she over time grew more spiritual than outright dedicated to the Church, especially as her older brother likewise drifted from his planned future in the Church over mistreatment of his close gay friends. In WAP Soo-bin is primarily interested in sharing in solidarity with others spirituality, and also generally enjoyed herself more when she had less study to do for club activities compared to her old bible study group. Unlike Karin Soo-bin is quiet and tends to be viewed as a reliable yes-girl by those in the club she is close to.

Soo-bin likewise joined Karin in Drama Club, and found that despite her initial apprehensions she thrived in an environment where her disabilities did not particularly hinder her once she had a script memorized. She was surprised by the degree to which it turned out she was naturally capable of being dramatic and projecting presence on stage- she was no great actor, but she could hold her own and contribute and she had the respect of other members. She found it mildly distressing that she was often typecast into villainous roles, but she did well with what she was given.

Making friends in either setting was difficult for her. She remained leery of being judged and generally anxious with getting close to others, and very few people in school besides teachers and those she and Karin mutually trust know of her dyslexia. After a time of rejecting invites to hang out and party and an unabashed association with Karin who had a more distinctly negative reputation, Soo-bin’s reputation solidified: people in her clubs tended to like her, but not bother to get particularly close to her, and few would really call her a friend more than acquaintance. Beyond not triggering her anxiety Soo-bin also prefers this state of affairs as dealing with people in general is still exhausting due to the sensory issues associated with her disability, despite her adaptive methods. More privately she has found herself indulging in being judgmental like Karin is, gossiping and people watching with her to destress. She’s usually not as mean as Karin is, but all the same enjoys the opportunity to be harsh in her critique of others.

In a way her social life being stagnant benefitted her, as she had more time to study. While Soo-bin entertains Karin's conspiratorial nature without irony, Soo-bin is still ultimately an academician. She has a reputation among teachers as a good student. Sometimes her writing is riddled with typographical errors, but besides this she has high grades and a mentors among the teachers who encourage her and advise her on the next steps to take to eventually join the foreign service.

In particular, her love of languages as a challenge that proves she can overcome her most powerful roadblock continues strong- she has picked up Spanish to an conversational level within three years of hard study, and would be considered fully fluent by a professional standard in LSE, using it similarly to her own mastery of ASL as a study aid. With her fluency in Spanish she often get entrusted with extra responsibilities in her volunteer commitments where being a Spanish speaker is useful. She got a perfect grade on her Spanish AP, and has already continued on to Mandarin and CSL while expanding into slowly tackling Spanish literature to deepen her understanding.

Soo-bin, in her junior year, resolved to work to overcome her social anxieties to an extent in pursuit of her long-term career goals. She joined the MUN, as her father had in college, and started to volunteer more. As a volunteer she gravitated towards those with a bend similar to her interests in foreign policy, such as conservation and health advocacy groups that fundraised for international causes. This she was at least familiar with given her community service in the Church as a youth, but she is a bit more mercenary about it this time around. Despite good intentions she is in part doing it for a resume, single minded as she is chasing her father’s legacy.

She studies late nights, partially to offset extracurricular hours needed for her volunteering, and has a full blown caffeine addiction that surpasses even her brother’s to fuel her sessions. She often needs 300 mg of consumption a day or she will feel sluggish and weak. Her long study sessions, often alone as she can only keep Karin around for so long, have led to her taking up the solitary practice of visual arts as a break time habit. She graduated into digital art solely because it most naturally flowed with her sketching style, as she remains disinterested in all other forms of art. Her artistic skills are multipurpose too, due to her need for visual notes to help keep her memory at its best. She makes her art just for herself, and has no interest in publicizing it.

Her deficiencies aside she has hope and faith in herself and her future, and generally has come to terms with the sacrifices asked of her due to lifelong disability through the work she has put into overcoming it. While she is strongly career oriented and generally fiercely loyal with her time to her few friends such as Karin, she does make time for family, being a reliable older sister to a more disorganized Yu-jin and a cheerleader for Min-ho as he now works hard at becoming a doctor. She also does nurse a belief that she will be a mother someday, perhaps settling down after she’s satisfied with having followed in her father’s footsteps, though she remains chaste in school and only crushes on boys from afar. Politically she prefers candidates who are hawkish in foreign policy but does not elaborate on this outwardly. Broadly she is socially liberal, though usually due to more general spiritual belief in being kind to others than specifically understanding social justice issues. Following her lifelong Republican parent's examples of no longer voting due to distaste with the modern party, she has considered registering as a Democrat but has yet to commit.

Advantages: Soo-bin has strong dedication and work ethic that may allow her to consciously check her natural flaws when she is in danger and survive past her limits through stubborn determination. She has a strong spirituality and faith that may buoy her mentally to further improve her resistance to the island trials. The amount of languages she can speak while not under duress may afford her unique communication advantages.
Disadvantages: The effect of her dyslexia and general anxiety on her hearing and speech may make it difficult for her to adeptly communicate in dangerous moments, or even more generally, which can also further add stressors unique to her circumstances. She is used to being aloof and disengaging from others preemptively due to personal hangups and anxiety, meaning she may have difficulty developing inroads with peers. Her dependence on caffeine due to her strict scheduling is such that acute withdrawal on the island will likely produce severe symptoms that will last weeks.

[Ruggahissy]

Hello, I am here to judge your coffee gremlin.

This is good even though it is long and you know I'm allergic to words. Here are the few issues:


- The big one is Valente's job. I talked to staff and we felt that former ambassador to South Korea was a little too high up/ close to government official than we'd like. If you're willing to downgrade him a little to someone who manages the embassy or some other job under the ambassador, I think we can swing it. Or a non-government job would also work.

- I'm not sure if gossiping is enough of a presence in her life to be a hobby since it just seemslike a feature of friendship with Karin. She's got a lot of hobbies so I think cutting it won't hurt. Same for people watching.

- LSE wasn't really mentioned as something she picked up. I kept waiting for a second mention but it got dropped.

That's pretty much it. I don't really have anything else for you.

[Cicada]

[+] notes

I tried to trim words where I could but you know I struggle with non-verbosity. Other concerns:

- As discussed, the capstone of Valente's career was changed to your recommendation of Deputy Chief of Mission for the Embassy of the United States, Seoul.

- Both those hobbies were removed.

- Elaborated on LSE and her Spanish speaking in general, and added CSL as it serves a similar role in her language acquisition there.

- Added a bit about politics at the end because that's probably important for general reference.

[Ruggahissy]

Be gone

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