Ji-hyun "JiJi" Christensen
Posted: Sun May 19, 2019 4:11 pm
Name: Ji-hyun “JiJi” Christensen
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Art (paintings and sculptures), chemistry, Buddhism, thrift shopping, charity, activism
Appearance: Ji-hyun is 5’4”, a Korean-American girl with an overall light skin complexion but the slightest hint of a tan. She has a tiny slim body, with proportionately small legs, small shoulders, and featureless waist and bony hips - on average, she weighs approximately 116lb. Her face is heart-shaped with a soft chin and jawline, as well as a thin neck. Her cheekbones are nothing to write home about, but she has very prominent dimples when she smiles. Her lips are thin, but shapely, and Ji-hyun often coats them with the brightest, pinkest lip gloss she can get her hands on - her lips sit beneath a short, perky but slightly rounded nose. Her eyes are slightly less narrow than that of her sister and mother, owing to her father’s genetics - they are grayish green, barely distinct in hue unless up close. She has thin eyebrows, usually shaped into a perfect curve. Her facial skin is very clean and she has almost no blemishes. Her hair is naturally jet black and slightly wavy, and she generally wears it back into a high ponytail. In general facial and body shape, as well as how she carries and dresses herself, she bears almost no resemblance to any of her female family members, which is just the way Ji-hyun likes it.
Ji-hyun wears almost exclusively second-hand clothing, bought from charity and thrift stores. She does this not because she is poor or struggling, but because she embraces thrift store chic in her clothing style, what she sees a full rejection of mainstream trends and brands - the only items she buys from non-second-hand stores are bras, underwear and socks. She isn’t as conservative as her sister in her manner of dress, but she does tend towards more modest clothing, almost always wearing pants or skirts that reach her knees and tops that cover her armpits. In the summer, she prefers shorts for practical reasons, as well as light tops. In winter, she leans more towards layering her clothing, opting for long-sleeved tops, jumpers, high-top boots or heels, and leggings over long-legged pants like jeans. She wears five loose bracelets on her right hand, made of numerous materials and patterns, with one almost exactly resembling the one regularly worn by her sister. Her left ear is pierced with a simple studded earring. She also wears glasses, but they are frames without glass in them - she has no eye problems, and only wears her glasses because she feels she looks better with them.
Ji-hyun speaks with a voice that rings contrary to her tiny appearance, slightly loud but not piercingly high in octave, slightly fruity and grating, with the southern twang that is common all throughout her immediate family almost unnoticeable. She cannot sing as naturally well as her sister can, but is a naturally good speaker and likes to have her voice heard when she has something to say she considers important. She speaks Korean, but only ever really uses it to get out of awkward conversations by pretending not to speak English, or in regular conversation within her family, so she is fairly rusty; she can understand it fairly well even if she can’t speak it fluently.
On the day of the abduction Ji-hyun was wearing a grey logo t-shirt underneath a cream zip-up hoodie, sky blue shorts, and bright pink lace-ups shoes with brown laces. She wore her usual bracelets, earring, and glasses. She wore a decently natural-looking amount of makeup, and tied her ponytail up with a plain black hair tie.
Biography: Ji-hyun was born on the 23rd of July, 2000, the younger to her sister Gyu-ri Christensen, to Nam Mi-jeong and Clyde Christensen. Mi-jeong was the cynical and ambitious daughter of evangelical members of Yoido Gospel, swept off her feet by the charming innocence of Clyde who was a 28-year old Tennessee native stationed as a drill sergeant with the Eighth. They eloped to America in 1996 when Clyde’s term of service ended. Mi-jeong faced severe disapproval from her parents and elders over her choice of life partner and contact between them ended when she left. Mi-jeong was a successful pharmaceutical sales rep while she was alive. The couple moved from base to base almost every year, moving all over the South and Midwest of the United States. Clyde spent the intervening years on active duty as a drill sergeant while Mi-jeong worked mostly over the phone.
Ji-hyun was very loud and boisterous as an infant - she tended to cry a lot as a toddler and was quick to try out things new to her. She developed at a slightly quicker intellectual pace than her sister, although her physical pace remained roughly the same, and she was a healthy child. Ji-hyun, much like Gyu-ri, was well spoiled by her father from a young age, as both she and her older sister were her father’s beloved princesses, and he was the one in charge of the household since Mi-jeong was more frequently out of the house making meetings in sometimes far away cities. As for Mom, Ji-hyun would observe her working often, hustling to make extra dollar, and Ji-hyun was from a young age was saddened and put-off by how her mother shouted in the throes of her work - she wanted her family to be together, but she learned quickly that it wasn’t possible all the time. Living on a military base Ji-hyun was from a young age also well versed in military life, choosing to observe from a distance rather than take part - although she felt sympathetic towards the soldiers and their families, and felt connection with their unique plights and points of view from a young age, she saw the military as the reason her family was the way it was, and she dreamed for something better.
While Gyu-ri was usually interested in following her Mom and Dad around in taking care of household chores, Ji-hyun’s childhood was well immersed in watching cartoons or playing outside, activities she partook with other children on the base. While always burdened with the knowledge that they would soon be uprooted and stationed somewhere else entirely, the concept never put Ji-hyun off from making friends. While it was somewhat frustrating to have to become friends with a new group of people every time they relocated, Ji-hyun leaned towards an optimistic approach, treating each new group of school and family friends as though they’d be with her for life. While this made the eventual parting hard, she was eventually able to properly deal her feelings and prevent herself from becoming too upset at the eventual parting - while some would see it as losing progress, Ji-hyun saw it as the opportunity to grow and create more relationships, and would even re-acquaint herself with her old childhood friends over social media during her later teenage years.
As much as Mi-jeong liked to praise her children and pay attention to them, those attentions could also be negative. Mi-jeong had a very Darwinian outlook on the world; she was classist and strongly meritocratic, and she attempted to impart those tendencies onto her children’s pliable youth minds. She was ultimately successful with Gyu-ri, teaching her that hard work was all the morality that mattered, things she herself had learned to get ahead as a career woman, but with Ji-hyun she faced much more difficulty and coded defiance. Mi-jeong openly rejected some of her daughter’s more innocent and altruistic claims in the good of her friends, and would set what Ji-hyun saw as bad examples in life, like looking down on househelp and shortchanging people with cold displays of domineering, and as such she often took a lot of her mother's example as similarly bad, such as her smoking in the house, which caused Ji-hyun to develop a sensory aversion to from a young age. Ji-hyun would never take these lessons to heart, which was a difficult task in a household where this was the prevailing attitude.
Mi-jeong also proved to be very ambition oriented and paid very close attention to her daughters grades and intellect. While Ji-hyun, as the younger sister, would never receive anywhere near the amount of criticism that her older sister would, this did not give Ji-hyun room to slack off or do anything less than her best. She was also incredibly lucky in that she was born so soon after her older sister, which meant they shared classes and teachers from the moment they entered grade school due to their mother's insistence on the two sharing a grade and thus being able to keep a close eye on both of their schoolwork more efficiently, and they could both closely help and confide in each other closer than most siblings were able to. In fact, Ji-hyun was one of the only people Gyu-ri was capable of showing weakness to. Due to being unintentionally shielded from the brunt of her mother’s criticism, Ji-hyun was able to observe the effect Mi-jeong’s attitude had on Gyu-ri and was able to independently come to the conclusion that there was something wrong in the person her sister was becoming, and from an early age learned to both fake her attitude and demeanor to her mother, and forge her own identity from that point onwards. While there were times Ji-hyun wanted to confide in her father, Clyde was fairly submissive to Mi-jeong’s child rearing designs and would never intervene, so she fought alone.
Clyde’s parents helped the family become reaccustomed when they were fresh from the plane, and they were as close as family as Ji-hyun would get besides her direct family members. They lived in Chattanooga and would commute down and help with raising the girls whenever Clyde was stationed at Camp Frank D. Merrill Army Base, in Dahlonega. Ji-hyun had plentiful exposure to her grandparents when she was young, as they dotted extensively on their granddaughters whenever they visited. Ji-hyun’s grandmother, a decade younger than her husband and an art museum director, unintentionally helped foster an interest in the arts for her youngest granddaughter from an early age. She would often take Ji-hyun on tours of exhibitions whenever Clyde and Mi-jeong brought the family up to Chattanooga, and although the young child had to be taught not to touch the sculptures, which she held a lifelong love for even if she wasn’t any good at making them, she was fascinated by all the colours and shapes constructed on canvas or through sculpture. As Ji-hyun got older, she began learning more about the artists and asking more questions about the art itself, eventually becoming able to drop artist and piece names in conversations, and even began to want to learn to create art for herself, upon which her grandmother bought her her very own easel and paint set, which was kept at her and her husband’s house. Ji-hyun came to associate time with her grandparents as a particular source of joy and nostalgia in her later years.
The overall favorite family activity of Ji-hyun’s that the six of them could engage in was board and card games, not the least because Mi-jeong had a good poker face and ended up teaching it to her daughters. Ji-hyun was average compared to her mother and sister, as she was more interested in the social aspect of the group activity, but even she was known to get highly competitive and focused when she was starting to win or come close to winning over her family. Ji-hyun was never one for playing on her own, preferring company over solitude, and as such a lot of her favourite games were ones in which large groups of people could play, like Poker, Sevens, or Monopoly.
Ji-hyun has always considered Clyde’s parents her only grandparents, never labouring under the illusion that her Mom’s own parents would somehow enter her life. Mi-jeong herself assured her daughter it would someday happen ‘when they had enough money to make her idiot parents eat their words’. Mi-jeong remained proud of her Korean heritage and culture and imparted those things on Ji-hyun, with varying degrees of success: the language and insights into Korean superstitions being amongst the success stories, while recipes and traditions were less so. While not ruled by her superstition, Ji-hyun often hesitates to engage in activities that would seemingly invoke bad luck, like writing things in red pen or using the number ‘4’ too often.
The family permanently moved to Chattanooga when the girls were in fourth grade, as Clyde was approved to transfer into the recruiting battalions. In a new school, Ji-hyun’s years of social practice proved to be fruitful, as she was quickly and easily able to make friends with her peers. Her closest friends were those who were just as interested in the arts as her, although she tended to be much friendlier to those with a common background, such as any children of Korean descent or those who had lived on army bases like she had. While she was close with her sister, she tended to avoid sharing a social group with her when she could, as the new environment made her more conscious about forging her own identity.
Something that sets Ji-hyun apart from her sister and mother is her name - at least, the name by which people close to her outside of her family refer to her. Self-aware of the difficulty other students and teachers had in pronouncing her name right, Ji-hyun began to give herself a shortened nickname at school and with friends for them to remember and refer to her easier. She took the first syllable of her name and simply repeated it once, and thus “JiJi” was created. Her best friends still sometimes refer to her by her real name, but the vast majority of people who are meeting her for the first time only know her as JiJi rather than Ji-hyun.
While Ji-hyun’s mother never outright condemned her artistic interests, she would often drop hints about how much of an impractical career pursuit it would be as she entered middle school, as the arts were not as stable or profitable as the maths and sciences. However, thanks to her childhood, this only convinced her to pursue it more, and alongside learning her own painting and drawing skills she would become increasingly knowledgeable about art styles and art periods in history, often getting her grandmother to take her to the exhibits being shown at her art museum so she could learn more about artists and movements new to her. However, her mother was unable to be ignored completely, and Ji-hyun would eventually choose one of the science areas at random to gain enough interest in to satiate her, picking a chemistry book at random off the shelf at the library one day and deciding to gain knowledge in that area. While Ji-hyun has a large passion for art, in particular painting and drawing, she previously had no such passion for chemistry, and simply gains knowledge in it in order to keep up appearances with her parents and make it seem like she might enter a STEM field once she finished high school, even though she has no intention of doing so. While she never particularly hated chemistry, the broad subject particularly bored Ji-hyun, and as such she only learned what she needed to know about the subject in order to pass.
Ji-hyun’s relationship with her mother in particular at this time was particularly strained; as puberty grew, so cemented Ji-hyun’s own worldviews. She began to grow largely more resentful concerning her parents, in particular her mother’s harsh and unforgiving tendencies and her father’s passivity. She put on appearances for both of them, however, and simply remained committed to forging a path independent from her family, with Gyu-ri being her only confidant as they grew up and went through school together. However, one major event would change the entire family.
A family tragedy struck weeks into her Freshman year. Despite her occupation, Mi-jeong had a dangerous irreverence for her own health, and as such she worked long hours, smoked, and liked to ignore illnesses and assume they’d resolve themselves naturally. This time around Mi-jeong complained of a stiff neck and slight disturbances in her vision, but kept going out to do chores and see friends. Mi-jeong eventually developed fatigue and a severe rash and finally checked into a clinic. She had to be rushed into the ER, but she had developed septic shock due to meningitis and severe internal hemorrhaging had already begun. Mi-jeong was declared dead hours later. When Ji-hyun and Gyu-ri were alerted they were in class and Clyde was in Nashville.
The devastating event sent ripples through the family. Clyde was besides himself, unable to face his daughters he holed himself up in Nashville for a month, working long hours and barely taking calls. Grandma and Grandpa stepped in, living in the house while the grieving occurred and helping make preparations for Mi-jeong’s funeral. Ji-hyun herself did not know how to feel - with her only mother now gone from her life she began to question all of her choices, especially her constant ongoing rebellion and silent defiance, as well as believing she didn’t care enough about her own family to notice something was so obviously wrong before it occurred. While at school she previously carried herself as a happy, outgoing, care-free, girl, she became slowly withdrawn from a lot of her old friends and started making their main method of communication through social media and text messaging rather than in-person - she was not feeling up to interacting with even her friends so soon after her mother’s passing, and needed time. She would even go weeks without speaking to her own sister, instead spending nights and weekends in her room on her computer, surfing the internet and alternating between finding clothing ideas on Pinterest, and absentmindedly searching the web to see if there was a way to cure sadness with tea.
Ji-hyun was only able to properly process the event through a long talk with her father once he ended his self-imposed exile in Nashville, during which she confessed her guilt for not being a better daughter. Clyde told his daughter that parents loved their children no matter what, and that her mother would have been proud no matter where she ended up after high school, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted for her daughter. While this didn’t automatically cure her grief and solve her issues, it helped immensely, and Ji-hyun managed to forge some semblance of moving on. She continued to be herself from before her mother’s death, but finally spoke of her mother in a much more respectful tone, and even evolving her originally feigned interest in chemistry into an actual interest, if only because it remained a faint connection to Mi-jeong.
Ji-hyun began visiting the school counselor on her own terms shortly afterwards, hoping to find a way to deal with the loss properly. She regularly booked sessions and confronted her conflicting emotions in the ways her counselor suggested she do, and after several months she ceased attending. Despite what her counselor told her, she believed that constantly reliving her feelings and guilt was doing nothing to help, so she just wanted to move forward and not have to deal with her lingering feelings over her mother’s death anymore. This has left her with some complicated emotions regarding Mi-jeong, although nothing that truly affects her day-to-day life.
However, one thing that bothered Ji-hyun was the lack of answers provided by the absence of her mother. She knew that people died every day, some seemingly at random, but she began an inner conflict over the fact that her family’s faith only told them that everything happened for a reason, which didn’t provide any comfort to her. While not particularly religious herself beforehand, her circumstances meant that she wanted some form of comfort, and she began drifting, trying to find other answers to the universality of death and what came after, and the most comforting to her ended up being in the ways of Buddhism. Through her readings, she found that life did not truly end, but instead continued onward in a new form. This ended up being the gateway through which Ji-hyun read into as much Buddhism as she could, and she soon considered herself a Buddhist.
While Buddhism helped her cope with her mother’s passing, it did not help with her home problems. Gyu-ri had begun to drift wildly from the person Ji-hyun knew her as, and there were times the younger sibling had to take a hands-on approach to caring for her older sibling, often forcing her to bed in the face of her caffeine addiction. She and her father would bring these concerns to Gyu-ri, but these would be brushed off. Ji-hyun wanted to help her sister as much as she could, but the further into high school she went the more she became focused on her own problems: schoolwork, social connections, social status, keeping her hobbies fresh, none particularly unique to Ji-hyun but still things to be conquered and handled.
Ji-hyun’s grandparents were larger presences in her life after Mi-jeong’s death, and something her grandmother regularly encouraged her to do was to keep painting. While Ji-hyun had been a painter since she was young, and didn’t particularly need reminding of this, she eventually began to realize that art was an outlet for her feelings surrounding the family loss. While the first paintings she created were morose and dark, typical of someone in her position, she eventually began to paint less about loss and death and more about re-growth and renewal. Ji-hyun is inspired mostly by Zen Buddhism in her artwork, but she puts a little bit of herself into everything, and a little bit of everything into herself. She regained a fair amount of her hope of moving on with her life through painting, and much of the current art she creates is centered around similar themes and ideas, influenced especially by her Buddhist learnings. While her school assignments will lie in the parameters of her teacher’s instruction, prompted by the words of the syllabus, a lot of her own art is for the future she wants.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for all of Ji-hyun’s old hobbies - while chemistry was something that eventually became a genuine interest due to the way it was imparted on Ji-hyun, her old love of card and board games only became a haven of bad memories for her. She felt uncomfortable playing a lot of old games they used to play as a family, due to being reminded of how her mother played. She will play with family, especially if they want to spend time together during one of the rare instances both Ji-hyun and Gyu-ri aren’t busy, but it’s not something she particularly seeks out any more.
Ji-hyun’s regular patroning of her high school’s art clubs meant that her friend groups tended to be some very alternative people, and while Ji-hyun was a strong enough person that she wasn’t too influenced by peer pressure, she began to take a lot of ideas from her art-inclined friends. Namely, they tended to be thrift-shoppers, a practice Ji-hyun had never done before. Her friends took her out thrift shopping one day, Ji-hyun ended up with a healthy haul from the experience, and slowly but surely her wardrobe started to become replaced; out were the plain boring shirts and pants, in were rustic second-hand clothing that cost far less than anything bought at a mainstream store, and looked better too. Her favourite piece of thrift shop fashion was a pair of black, glassless glasses she found in an entire bin of them, that she tried on and checked out on a whim and found that she loved the way they made her face look, and it became a staple of her wardrobe. Ji-hyun rarely has a negative experience when she goes thrift-shopping, and always makes it an outing with friends if she can.
Her frequenting of charity stores also meant that started giving much more - Ji-hyun was a nice girl before, but she became much more active in how she participated in altruism, and eventually donated a lot of her old clothing to the store itself and even dropped a lot of her spare change in donation tins for any of the stores she frequented. On a whim, she joined her school’s activism club, wanting to see if there was more she could do than what she was doing, and she quickly became engrossed. She now regularly attends protests for causes she or her friends believe in, even volunteering at any of Chattanooga’s soup kitchens on the occasional weekend when she’s not overwhelmed with schoolwork or social responsibilities. There were a few causes which conflicted with Ji-hyun’s general upbringing, most notably the more radical LGBTQ+ causes that Ji-hyun wasn’t used to - both Clyde and Mi-jeong were fairly conservative and despite Ji-hyun’s hidden defiance she absorbed a smattering of their opinions and beliefs - but Ji-hyun was not a closed-minded girl, so she always did her best to learn and grow. Some of it was hard to wrap her head around, such as what her friends always told her about Monsanto and their genetic modification of all the world’s food crops, or the concept of someone’s gender not matching the sex they were assigned at birth, but Ji-hyun always did her best to try and understand.
Ji-hyun’s eclectic upbringing and variety of clubs and interests mean that she has picked up a number of various and peculiar habits under which she lives her life. These mostly run the gamut of superstition and alternative medicine; while Ji-hyun is not particularly beholden to her Korean superstitions, she has a particularly irrational fear of Fan Death, mostly due to her mother mentioning it a fair bit as they grew up, and the idea stuck around enough that she feels uncomfortable going to sleep with her fan on at night no matter how hot it gets in the summer. She also likes to sage rooms after negative or aggressive conversations or confrontations in order to get rid of perceived bad energy as quickly as possible, which Ji-hyun recognizes as somewhat of a placebo, but a placebo that makes her feel better either way. A lot of her interests, such as her fashion, music taste, and interest in television and other forms of media, also skew fairly outside of mainstream, mostly due to the influence of her friends. All of her tastes in the previously mentioned categories lean towards what some would call ‘alternative’, and others would call ‘hipster’, something which Ji-hyun half-heartedly embraces even if the latter has somewhat negative connotations.
The summer between Junior and Senior year, Gyu-ri made some speculative efforts into contacting the family back in Korea, Mi-jeong’s biological parents and extended family. While her sister eventually opened dialogue, Ji-hyun made no such effort. After all her years living in Chattanooga and remaining only vaguely associated with her mother’s national traditions and her ethnicity, Ji-hyun saw herself much more as an American than a Korean, or even a Korean-American. She knew that some people would not let her forget about her ethnicity, and she deals with these instances when they occur, but Ji-hyun only lends herself vague association with being Korean. The most claim she lays to her Korean heritage exists only in the hashtags she uses on her Instagram photos, and when she finds something Korean at her regular thrift shopping store, but that is the extent to which Ji-hyun embraces her Korean heritage.
Ji-hyun is known around school as a very peppy, outgoing, and kind girl, much more so than her sister. She has a rather unique conversation and confrontation style, mostly a result of her upbringing and family, where she tries to keep conversations light-hearted and optimistic. If there is negativity or aggression to be had in a conversation, she prefers to bring it to the floor on her own terms and find a way to get through it that is agreeable for all parties - an applicable adage is that she “kills them with kindness”. This does not make her a pushover, though; Ji-hyun can argue her side if all else fails, and she is never one to let her opinion be dismissed or walked over. She simply believes that people interacting with each other in a way that helps them find common ground, even if they’re at odds or dislike each other, is the best way forward.
Her senior year, compared to the years that preceded it, has been mostly uneventful. She has many friends she has kept close over the years from her many social groups, she keeps her GPA steady and high, and she hopes to completely figure herself out completely before she finishes high school. Her two favourite subjects are Art and Chemistry, as well as being her best performing subjects, and she also maintains high marks in her mathematics subjects due to their close tie with Chemistry. She is hoping to attend University of Chattanooga and complete a Bachelor of Fine Art in the university’s Departments of Arts and Sciences, and become an established artist and painter after she graduates. However, her back-up goal if she fails to graduate or achieve success is to begin her own charity. While she does not know a focused cause she wants to help or a particular ailment she wants to eliminate, she is hoping she can use her resources to her fullest potential and help out anyone who needs it. This goal is not far along enough that she knows how she is going to complete it if her artistry does not pan out, but she is hoping she’ll figure something out in university.
Ji-hyun has a close relationship with her family in Chattanooga; she is on good terms with her father, who helped her through the roughest time of both their lives, and even better terms with his parents and her grandparents, who she has lunch with every weekend at the very least. While Clyde is not the closest person in Ji-hyun’s life, she tells him about school every day and keeps him up to date with her charity and activism ongoings, and sometimes even gets him to drive her to meetings as long as there is an adult supervising and they are not engaging in anything illegal, or planning on doing so. Clyde’s parents are also the only people who can wring out the occasional game of cards or occasional board game from Ji-hyun, as she associates many good memories with them even if they come alongside the ones that involve her mother.
Ji-hyun’s relationship with Gyu-ri is as sparse as one can be with their older sister - they care for each other, they catch each other up on their school’s going-ons, and they hang out on occasion when they’re feeling down, but they’re not particularly closer than that. There are times that Ji-hyun wonders what might have happened if Gyu-ri had taken the same path to the point they’re at now as she did, choosing to defy their mother’s rigorous expectations rather than cowing to them, and if there was a way she could have turned out healthier and less neurotic, but Ji-hyun still loves her regardless.
Advantages: Ji-hyun is almost effortlessly social, as she has a large amount of friends in her grade and she is very quick to try and thwart potential aggression, which could prove very useful to her in an environment in which many assume aggression is the only answer. Ji-hyun's time as an child of a member of the army means that while not a complete survivalist, she has picked up snippets of army survival training knowledge from her childhood, which could prove situationally useful if the SOTF arena was particularly hostile or she needed to survive on her own with little gear for extended periods of time.
Disadvantages: Ji-hyun also has a history of not dealing with grief and death well on her own, and the environment could prove too much for her if forced to confront death head-on. She is also smaller, thinner, and far much less athletic than most of her grade, which could prove to be to her disadvantage if someone were to get their hands on her.
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: 12
School: George Hunter High School
Hobbies and Interests: Art (paintings and sculptures), chemistry, Buddhism, thrift shopping, charity, activism
Appearance: Ji-hyun is 5’4”, a Korean-American girl with an overall light skin complexion but the slightest hint of a tan. She has a tiny slim body, with proportionately small legs, small shoulders, and featureless waist and bony hips - on average, she weighs approximately 116lb. Her face is heart-shaped with a soft chin and jawline, as well as a thin neck. Her cheekbones are nothing to write home about, but she has very prominent dimples when she smiles. Her lips are thin, but shapely, and Ji-hyun often coats them with the brightest, pinkest lip gloss she can get her hands on - her lips sit beneath a short, perky but slightly rounded nose. Her eyes are slightly less narrow than that of her sister and mother, owing to her father’s genetics - they are grayish green, barely distinct in hue unless up close. She has thin eyebrows, usually shaped into a perfect curve. Her facial skin is very clean and she has almost no blemishes. Her hair is naturally jet black and slightly wavy, and she generally wears it back into a high ponytail. In general facial and body shape, as well as how she carries and dresses herself, she bears almost no resemblance to any of her female family members, which is just the way Ji-hyun likes it.
Ji-hyun wears almost exclusively second-hand clothing, bought from charity and thrift stores. She does this not because she is poor or struggling, but because she embraces thrift store chic in her clothing style, what she sees a full rejection of mainstream trends and brands - the only items she buys from non-second-hand stores are bras, underwear and socks. She isn’t as conservative as her sister in her manner of dress, but she does tend towards more modest clothing, almost always wearing pants or skirts that reach her knees and tops that cover her armpits. In the summer, she prefers shorts for practical reasons, as well as light tops. In winter, she leans more towards layering her clothing, opting for long-sleeved tops, jumpers, high-top boots or heels, and leggings over long-legged pants like jeans. She wears five loose bracelets on her right hand, made of numerous materials and patterns, with one almost exactly resembling the one regularly worn by her sister. Her left ear is pierced with a simple studded earring. She also wears glasses, but they are frames without glass in them - she has no eye problems, and only wears her glasses because she feels she looks better with them.
Ji-hyun speaks with a voice that rings contrary to her tiny appearance, slightly loud but not piercingly high in octave, slightly fruity and grating, with the southern twang that is common all throughout her immediate family almost unnoticeable. She cannot sing as naturally well as her sister can, but is a naturally good speaker and likes to have her voice heard when she has something to say she considers important. She speaks Korean, but only ever really uses it to get out of awkward conversations by pretending not to speak English, or in regular conversation within her family, so she is fairly rusty; she can understand it fairly well even if she can’t speak it fluently.
On the day of the abduction Ji-hyun was wearing a grey logo t-shirt underneath a cream zip-up hoodie, sky blue shorts, and bright pink lace-ups shoes with brown laces. She wore her usual bracelets, earring, and glasses. She wore a decently natural-looking amount of makeup, and tied her ponytail up with a plain black hair tie.
Biography: Ji-hyun was born on the 23rd of July, 2000, the younger to her sister Gyu-ri Christensen, to Nam Mi-jeong and Clyde Christensen. Mi-jeong was the cynical and ambitious daughter of evangelical members of Yoido Gospel, swept off her feet by the charming innocence of Clyde who was a 28-year old Tennessee native stationed as a drill sergeant with the Eighth. They eloped to America in 1996 when Clyde’s term of service ended. Mi-jeong faced severe disapproval from her parents and elders over her choice of life partner and contact between them ended when she left. Mi-jeong was a successful pharmaceutical sales rep while she was alive. The couple moved from base to base almost every year, moving all over the South and Midwest of the United States. Clyde spent the intervening years on active duty as a drill sergeant while Mi-jeong worked mostly over the phone.
Ji-hyun was very loud and boisterous as an infant - she tended to cry a lot as a toddler and was quick to try out things new to her. She developed at a slightly quicker intellectual pace than her sister, although her physical pace remained roughly the same, and she was a healthy child. Ji-hyun, much like Gyu-ri, was well spoiled by her father from a young age, as both she and her older sister were her father’s beloved princesses, and he was the one in charge of the household since Mi-jeong was more frequently out of the house making meetings in sometimes far away cities. As for Mom, Ji-hyun would observe her working often, hustling to make extra dollar, and Ji-hyun was from a young age was saddened and put-off by how her mother shouted in the throes of her work - she wanted her family to be together, but she learned quickly that it wasn’t possible all the time. Living on a military base Ji-hyun was from a young age also well versed in military life, choosing to observe from a distance rather than take part - although she felt sympathetic towards the soldiers and their families, and felt connection with their unique plights and points of view from a young age, she saw the military as the reason her family was the way it was, and she dreamed for something better.
While Gyu-ri was usually interested in following her Mom and Dad around in taking care of household chores, Ji-hyun’s childhood was well immersed in watching cartoons or playing outside, activities she partook with other children on the base. While always burdened with the knowledge that they would soon be uprooted and stationed somewhere else entirely, the concept never put Ji-hyun off from making friends. While it was somewhat frustrating to have to become friends with a new group of people every time they relocated, Ji-hyun leaned towards an optimistic approach, treating each new group of school and family friends as though they’d be with her for life. While this made the eventual parting hard, she was eventually able to properly deal her feelings and prevent herself from becoming too upset at the eventual parting - while some would see it as losing progress, Ji-hyun saw it as the opportunity to grow and create more relationships, and would even re-acquaint herself with her old childhood friends over social media during her later teenage years.
As much as Mi-jeong liked to praise her children and pay attention to them, those attentions could also be negative. Mi-jeong had a very Darwinian outlook on the world; she was classist and strongly meritocratic, and she attempted to impart those tendencies onto her children’s pliable youth minds. She was ultimately successful with Gyu-ri, teaching her that hard work was all the morality that mattered, things she herself had learned to get ahead as a career woman, but with Ji-hyun she faced much more difficulty and coded defiance. Mi-jeong openly rejected some of her daughter’s more innocent and altruistic claims in the good of her friends, and would set what Ji-hyun saw as bad examples in life, like looking down on househelp and shortchanging people with cold displays of domineering, and as such she often took a lot of her mother's example as similarly bad, such as her smoking in the house, which caused Ji-hyun to develop a sensory aversion to from a young age. Ji-hyun would never take these lessons to heart, which was a difficult task in a household where this was the prevailing attitude.
Mi-jeong also proved to be very ambition oriented and paid very close attention to her daughters grades and intellect. While Ji-hyun, as the younger sister, would never receive anywhere near the amount of criticism that her older sister would, this did not give Ji-hyun room to slack off or do anything less than her best. She was also incredibly lucky in that she was born so soon after her older sister, which meant they shared classes and teachers from the moment they entered grade school due to their mother's insistence on the two sharing a grade and thus being able to keep a close eye on both of their schoolwork more efficiently, and they could both closely help and confide in each other closer than most siblings were able to. In fact, Ji-hyun was one of the only people Gyu-ri was capable of showing weakness to. Due to being unintentionally shielded from the brunt of her mother’s criticism, Ji-hyun was able to observe the effect Mi-jeong’s attitude had on Gyu-ri and was able to independently come to the conclusion that there was something wrong in the person her sister was becoming, and from an early age learned to both fake her attitude and demeanor to her mother, and forge her own identity from that point onwards. While there were times Ji-hyun wanted to confide in her father, Clyde was fairly submissive to Mi-jeong’s child rearing designs and would never intervene, so she fought alone.
Clyde’s parents helped the family become reaccustomed when they were fresh from the plane, and they were as close as family as Ji-hyun would get besides her direct family members. They lived in Chattanooga and would commute down and help with raising the girls whenever Clyde was stationed at Camp Frank D. Merrill Army Base, in Dahlonega. Ji-hyun had plentiful exposure to her grandparents when she was young, as they dotted extensively on their granddaughters whenever they visited. Ji-hyun’s grandmother, a decade younger than her husband and an art museum director, unintentionally helped foster an interest in the arts for her youngest granddaughter from an early age. She would often take Ji-hyun on tours of exhibitions whenever Clyde and Mi-jeong brought the family up to Chattanooga, and although the young child had to be taught not to touch the sculptures, which she held a lifelong love for even if she wasn’t any good at making them, she was fascinated by all the colours and shapes constructed on canvas or through sculpture. As Ji-hyun got older, she began learning more about the artists and asking more questions about the art itself, eventually becoming able to drop artist and piece names in conversations, and even began to want to learn to create art for herself, upon which her grandmother bought her her very own easel and paint set, which was kept at her and her husband’s house. Ji-hyun came to associate time with her grandparents as a particular source of joy and nostalgia in her later years.
The overall favorite family activity of Ji-hyun’s that the six of them could engage in was board and card games, not the least because Mi-jeong had a good poker face and ended up teaching it to her daughters. Ji-hyun was average compared to her mother and sister, as she was more interested in the social aspect of the group activity, but even she was known to get highly competitive and focused when she was starting to win or come close to winning over her family. Ji-hyun was never one for playing on her own, preferring company over solitude, and as such a lot of her favourite games were ones in which large groups of people could play, like Poker, Sevens, or Monopoly.
Ji-hyun has always considered Clyde’s parents her only grandparents, never labouring under the illusion that her Mom’s own parents would somehow enter her life. Mi-jeong herself assured her daughter it would someday happen ‘when they had enough money to make her idiot parents eat their words’. Mi-jeong remained proud of her Korean heritage and culture and imparted those things on Ji-hyun, with varying degrees of success: the language and insights into Korean superstitions being amongst the success stories, while recipes and traditions were less so. While not ruled by her superstition, Ji-hyun often hesitates to engage in activities that would seemingly invoke bad luck, like writing things in red pen or using the number ‘4’ too often.
The family permanently moved to Chattanooga when the girls were in fourth grade, as Clyde was approved to transfer into the recruiting battalions. In a new school, Ji-hyun’s years of social practice proved to be fruitful, as she was quickly and easily able to make friends with her peers. Her closest friends were those who were just as interested in the arts as her, although she tended to be much friendlier to those with a common background, such as any children of Korean descent or those who had lived on army bases like she had. While she was close with her sister, she tended to avoid sharing a social group with her when she could, as the new environment made her more conscious about forging her own identity.
Something that sets Ji-hyun apart from her sister and mother is her name - at least, the name by which people close to her outside of her family refer to her. Self-aware of the difficulty other students and teachers had in pronouncing her name right, Ji-hyun began to give herself a shortened nickname at school and with friends for them to remember and refer to her easier. She took the first syllable of her name and simply repeated it once, and thus “JiJi” was created. Her best friends still sometimes refer to her by her real name, but the vast majority of people who are meeting her for the first time only know her as JiJi rather than Ji-hyun.
While Ji-hyun’s mother never outright condemned her artistic interests, she would often drop hints about how much of an impractical career pursuit it would be as she entered middle school, as the arts were not as stable or profitable as the maths and sciences. However, thanks to her childhood, this only convinced her to pursue it more, and alongside learning her own painting and drawing skills she would become increasingly knowledgeable about art styles and art periods in history, often getting her grandmother to take her to the exhibits being shown at her art museum so she could learn more about artists and movements new to her. However, her mother was unable to be ignored completely, and Ji-hyun would eventually choose one of the science areas at random to gain enough interest in to satiate her, picking a chemistry book at random off the shelf at the library one day and deciding to gain knowledge in that area. While Ji-hyun has a large passion for art, in particular painting and drawing, she previously had no such passion for chemistry, and simply gains knowledge in it in order to keep up appearances with her parents and make it seem like she might enter a STEM field once she finished high school, even though she has no intention of doing so. While she never particularly hated chemistry, the broad subject particularly bored Ji-hyun, and as such she only learned what she needed to know about the subject in order to pass.
Ji-hyun’s relationship with her mother in particular at this time was particularly strained; as puberty grew, so cemented Ji-hyun’s own worldviews. She began to grow largely more resentful concerning her parents, in particular her mother’s harsh and unforgiving tendencies and her father’s passivity. She put on appearances for both of them, however, and simply remained committed to forging a path independent from her family, with Gyu-ri being her only confidant as they grew up and went through school together. However, one major event would change the entire family.
A family tragedy struck weeks into her Freshman year. Despite her occupation, Mi-jeong had a dangerous irreverence for her own health, and as such she worked long hours, smoked, and liked to ignore illnesses and assume they’d resolve themselves naturally. This time around Mi-jeong complained of a stiff neck and slight disturbances in her vision, but kept going out to do chores and see friends. Mi-jeong eventually developed fatigue and a severe rash and finally checked into a clinic. She had to be rushed into the ER, but she had developed septic shock due to meningitis and severe internal hemorrhaging had already begun. Mi-jeong was declared dead hours later. When Ji-hyun and Gyu-ri were alerted they were in class and Clyde was in Nashville.
The devastating event sent ripples through the family. Clyde was besides himself, unable to face his daughters he holed himself up in Nashville for a month, working long hours and barely taking calls. Grandma and Grandpa stepped in, living in the house while the grieving occurred and helping make preparations for Mi-jeong’s funeral. Ji-hyun herself did not know how to feel - with her only mother now gone from her life she began to question all of her choices, especially her constant ongoing rebellion and silent defiance, as well as believing she didn’t care enough about her own family to notice something was so obviously wrong before it occurred. While at school she previously carried herself as a happy, outgoing, care-free, girl, she became slowly withdrawn from a lot of her old friends and started making their main method of communication through social media and text messaging rather than in-person - she was not feeling up to interacting with even her friends so soon after her mother’s passing, and needed time. She would even go weeks without speaking to her own sister, instead spending nights and weekends in her room on her computer, surfing the internet and alternating between finding clothing ideas on Pinterest, and absentmindedly searching the web to see if there was a way to cure sadness with tea.
Ji-hyun was only able to properly process the event through a long talk with her father once he ended his self-imposed exile in Nashville, during which she confessed her guilt for not being a better daughter. Clyde told his daughter that parents loved their children no matter what, and that her mother would have been proud no matter where she ended up after high school, even if it wasn’t exactly what she wanted for her daughter. While this didn’t automatically cure her grief and solve her issues, it helped immensely, and Ji-hyun managed to forge some semblance of moving on. She continued to be herself from before her mother’s death, but finally spoke of her mother in a much more respectful tone, and even evolving her originally feigned interest in chemistry into an actual interest, if only because it remained a faint connection to Mi-jeong.
Ji-hyun began visiting the school counselor on her own terms shortly afterwards, hoping to find a way to deal with the loss properly. She regularly booked sessions and confronted her conflicting emotions in the ways her counselor suggested she do, and after several months she ceased attending. Despite what her counselor told her, she believed that constantly reliving her feelings and guilt was doing nothing to help, so she just wanted to move forward and not have to deal with her lingering feelings over her mother’s death anymore. This has left her with some complicated emotions regarding Mi-jeong, although nothing that truly affects her day-to-day life.
However, one thing that bothered Ji-hyun was the lack of answers provided by the absence of her mother. She knew that people died every day, some seemingly at random, but she began an inner conflict over the fact that her family’s faith only told them that everything happened for a reason, which didn’t provide any comfort to her. While not particularly religious herself beforehand, her circumstances meant that she wanted some form of comfort, and she began drifting, trying to find other answers to the universality of death and what came after, and the most comforting to her ended up being in the ways of Buddhism. Through her readings, she found that life did not truly end, but instead continued onward in a new form. This ended up being the gateway through which Ji-hyun read into as much Buddhism as she could, and she soon considered herself a Buddhist.
While Buddhism helped her cope with her mother’s passing, it did not help with her home problems. Gyu-ri had begun to drift wildly from the person Ji-hyun knew her as, and there were times the younger sibling had to take a hands-on approach to caring for her older sibling, often forcing her to bed in the face of her caffeine addiction. She and her father would bring these concerns to Gyu-ri, but these would be brushed off. Ji-hyun wanted to help her sister as much as she could, but the further into high school she went the more she became focused on her own problems: schoolwork, social connections, social status, keeping her hobbies fresh, none particularly unique to Ji-hyun but still things to be conquered and handled.
Ji-hyun’s grandparents were larger presences in her life after Mi-jeong’s death, and something her grandmother regularly encouraged her to do was to keep painting. While Ji-hyun had been a painter since she was young, and didn’t particularly need reminding of this, she eventually began to realize that art was an outlet for her feelings surrounding the family loss. While the first paintings she created were morose and dark, typical of someone in her position, she eventually began to paint less about loss and death and more about re-growth and renewal. Ji-hyun is inspired mostly by Zen Buddhism in her artwork, but she puts a little bit of herself into everything, and a little bit of everything into herself. She regained a fair amount of her hope of moving on with her life through painting, and much of the current art she creates is centered around similar themes and ideas, influenced especially by her Buddhist learnings. While her school assignments will lie in the parameters of her teacher’s instruction, prompted by the words of the syllabus, a lot of her own art is for the future she wants.
Unfortunately, the same could not be said for all of Ji-hyun’s old hobbies - while chemistry was something that eventually became a genuine interest due to the way it was imparted on Ji-hyun, her old love of card and board games only became a haven of bad memories for her. She felt uncomfortable playing a lot of old games they used to play as a family, due to being reminded of how her mother played. She will play with family, especially if they want to spend time together during one of the rare instances both Ji-hyun and Gyu-ri aren’t busy, but it’s not something she particularly seeks out any more.
Ji-hyun’s regular patroning of her high school’s art clubs meant that her friend groups tended to be some very alternative people, and while Ji-hyun was a strong enough person that she wasn’t too influenced by peer pressure, she began to take a lot of ideas from her art-inclined friends. Namely, they tended to be thrift-shoppers, a practice Ji-hyun had never done before. Her friends took her out thrift shopping one day, Ji-hyun ended up with a healthy haul from the experience, and slowly but surely her wardrobe started to become replaced; out were the plain boring shirts and pants, in were rustic second-hand clothing that cost far less than anything bought at a mainstream store, and looked better too. Her favourite piece of thrift shop fashion was a pair of black, glassless glasses she found in an entire bin of them, that she tried on and checked out on a whim and found that she loved the way they made her face look, and it became a staple of her wardrobe. Ji-hyun rarely has a negative experience when she goes thrift-shopping, and always makes it an outing with friends if she can.
Her frequenting of charity stores also meant that started giving much more - Ji-hyun was a nice girl before, but she became much more active in how she participated in altruism, and eventually donated a lot of her old clothing to the store itself and even dropped a lot of her spare change in donation tins for any of the stores she frequented. On a whim, she joined her school’s activism club, wanting to see if there was more she could do than what she was doing, and she quickly became engrossed. She now regularly attends protests for causes she or her friends believe in, even volunteering at any of Chattanooga’s soup kitchens on the occasional weekend when she’s not overwhelmed with schoolwork or social responsibilities. There were a few causes which conflicted with Ji-hyun’s general upbringing, most notably the more radical LGBTQ+ causes that Ji-hyun wasn’t used to - both Clyde and Mi-jeong were fairly conservative and despite Ji-hyun’s hidden defiance she absorbed a smattering of their opinions and beliefs - but Ji-hyun was not a closed-minded girl, so she always did her best to learn and grow. Some of it was hard to wrap her head around, such as what her friends always told her about Monsanto and their genetic modification of all the world’s food crops, or the concept of someone’s gender not matching the sex they were assigned at birth, but Ji-hyun always did her best to try and understand.
Ji-hyun’s eclectic upbringing and variety of clubs and interests mean that she has picked up a number of various and peculiar habits under which she lives her life. These mostly run the gamut of superstition and alternative medicine; while Ji-hyun is not particularly beholden to her Korean superstitions, she has a particularly irrational fear of Fan Death, mostly due to her mother mentioning it a fair bit as they grew up, and the idea stuck around enough that she feels uncomfortable going to sleep with her fan on at night no matter how hot it gets in the summer. She also likes to sage rooms after negative or aggressive conversations or confrontations in order to get rid of perceived bad energy as quickly as possible, which Ji-hyun recognizes as somewhat of a placebo, but a placebo that makes her feel better either way. A lot of her interests, such as her fashion, music taste, and interest in television and other forms of media, also skew fairly outside of mainstream, mostly due to the influence of her friends. All of her tastes in the previously mentioned categories lean towards what some would call ‘alternative’, and others would call ‘hipster’, something which Ji-hyun half-heartedly embraces even if the latter has somewhat negative connotations.
The summer between Junior and Senior year, Gyu-ri made some speculative efforts into contacting the family back in Korea, Mi-jeong’s biological parents and extended family. While her sister eventually opened dialogue, Ji-hyun made no such effort. After all her years living in Chattanooga and remaining only vaguely associated with her mother’s national traditions and her ethnicity, Ji-hyun saw herself much more as an American than a Korean, or even a Korean-American. She knew that some people would not let her forget about her ethnicity, and she deals with these instances when they occur, but Ji-hyun only lends herself vague association with being Korean. The most claim she lays to her Korean heritage exists only in the hashtags she uses on her Instagram photos, and when she finds something Korean at her regular thrift shopping store, but that is the extent to which Ji-hyun embraces her Korean heritage.
Ji-hyun is known around school as a very peppy, outgoing, and kind girl, much more so than her sister. She has a rather unique conversation and confrontation style, mostly a result of her upbringing and family, where she tries to keep conversations light-hearted and optimistic. If there is negativity or aggression to be had in a conversation, she prefers to bring it to the floor on her own terms and find a way to get through it that is agreeable for all parties - an applicable adage is that she “kills them with kindness”. This does not make her a pushover, though; Ji-hyun can argue her side if all else fails, and she is never one to let her opinion be dismissed or walked over. She simply believes that people interacting with each other in a way that helps them find common ground, even if they’re at odds or dislike each other, is the best way forward.
Her senior year, compared to the years that preceded it, has been mostly uneventful. She has many friends she has kept close over the years from her many social groups, she keeps her GPA steady and high, and she hopes to completely figure herself out completely before she finishes high school. Her two favourite subjects are Art and Chemistry, as well as being her best performing subjects, and she also maintains high marks in her mathematics subjects due to their close tie with Chemistry. She is hoping to attend University of Chattanooga and complete a Bachelor of Fine Art in the university’s Departments of Arts and Sciences, and become an established artist and painter after she graduates. However, her back-up goal if she fails to graduate or achieve success is to begin her own charity. While she does not know a focused cause she wants to help or a particular ailment she wants to eliminate, she is hoping she can use her resources to her fullest potential and help out anyone who needs it. This goal is not far along enough that she knows how she is going to complete it if her artistry does not pan out, but she is hoping she’ll figure something out in university.
Ji-hyun has a close relationship with her family in Chattanooga; she is on good terms with her father, who helped her through the roughest time of both their lives, and even better terms with his parents and her grandparents, who she has lunch with every weekend at the very least. While Clyde is not the closest person in Ji-hyun’s life, she tells him about school every day and keeps him up to date with her charity and activism ongoings, and sometimes even gets him to drive her to meetings as long as there is an adult supervising and they are not engaging in anything illegal, or planning on doing so. Clyde’s parents are also the only people who can wring out the occasional game of cards or occasional board game from Ji-hyun, as she associates many good memories with them even if they come alongside the ones that involve her mother.
Ji-hyun’s relationship with Gyu-ri is as sparse as one can be with their older sister - they care for each other, they catch each other up on their school’s going-ons, and they hang out on occasion when they’re feeling down, but they’re not particularly closer than that. There are times that Ji-hyun wonders what might have happened if Gyu-ri had taken the same path to the point they’re at now as she did, choosing to defy their mother’s rigorous expectations rather than cowing to them, and if there was a way she could have turned out healthier and less neurotic, but Ji-hyun still loves her regardless.
Advantages: Ji-hyun is almost effortlessly social, as she has a large amount of friends in her grade and she is very quick to try and thwart potential aggression, which could prove very useful to her in an environment in which many assume aggression is the only answer. Ji-hyun's time as an child of a member of the army means that while not a complete survivalist, she has picked up snippets of army survival training knowledge from her childhood, which could prove situationally useful if the SOTF arena was particularly hostile or she needed to survive on her own with little gear for extended periods of time.
Disadvantages: Ji-hyun also has a history of not dealing with grief and death well on her own, and the environment could prove too much for her if forced to confront death head-on. She is also smaller, thinner, and far much less athletic than most of her grade, which could prove to be to her disadvantage if someone were to get their hands on her.