Post by xiulan zhou on Nov 19, 2020 14:33:16 GMT -7
TW/CW: Emotional and physical abuse; general psychological trauma; description of seizures; agoraphobia; infertility; death
Xiulan Zhou
pronunciation:
SHYO-LAHN CHO
nickname:
Julia (her English name, though she switches between it and her given name depending on the context); Julie; Jules
age and birthday:
35
January 1, 1990
gender and pronouns:
Cisgender female; she/her pronouns
basic info
blood status:
Pure-blood
sexuality:
Heterosexual
wand:
11 ⅖ inches, pine, phoenix feather core, brittle
playby:
Gemma Chan
appearance:
Xiulan is 5’8” tall with a relatively thin build. Of Chinese origins, she has black hair, which she typically wears at about shoulder length, and dark brown eyes. She has slight olive tones to her skin and full lips, which are typically accentuated with red lipstick. Xiulan also has a small mole above her lip on the left side, and her earlobes are pierced once in each lobe. She has no apparent scars, thanks to healing magic, but has been injured frequently in falls related to her “fits”.
It is readily apparent by the way in which Xiulan dresses that she is wealthy. She wears a lot of designer garments, particularly dress robes, and expensive jewelry. Even when she hasn’t left her flat, it makes her feel more human.
education and jobs
schooling:
The Lin Sòng
schooling status:
Graduate (2008)
current occupation:
Fortune-teller (2022 – )
Philanthropist (2012 – 2022)
Naming Seer (2008 – 2012)
personality
likes:
Opulence; living comfortably; red bean paste; divination, particularly traditional Chinese forms of it; gambling; red lipstick; phoenixes; tea; Chinese New Year; owl post, as her primary connection to the world
dislikes:
The Lin Sòng, particularly the abuse she suffered there; counterfeit goods; the extent of her Inner Eye; Legilimency; chipping a nail and having to redo all of the others to account for it; Muggles; Knockturn Alley; people who expect her to tell them their fortune without payment; her agoraphobia; being in public
erised:
Xiulan hopes to live out the rest of her life in exile in London in relative safety. She would also love to have a child.
amortentia:
Her late husband’s cologne, egg tarts, and fire
boggart:
Xiulan most fears being committed to a mental hospital or asylum because of her Inner Eye; she also fears returning to China.
overall personality:
reticent:
From the time of her studies at The Lin Sòng, Xiulan learned not to express herself openly to most people. While she was most free to be herself around her late husband, she is careful not to reveal much about herself, particularly in her dealings with strangers.
reclusive:
Xiulan remains in her flat whenever possible, due to a combination of her fears about her Inner Eye and the “fits” that she has alongside her visions, as well as her fears related to being targeted by the Chinese Ministry of Magic since having been widowed. She relies on owl post for most things and a small circle of contacts and fortune-telling clients for what she can’t have delivered to her by owl. It wouldn’t be her choice, by any means, but she’s accepted it as her life.
warm-hearted:
As much as she has become shut off from the world at large, Xiulan is a genuinely good person. She cares about other people deeply and feels terrible when she has to be the one to give someone bad news about their future. She and her late husband were involved in numerous philanthropic causes, and she still provides money to various charities as an anonymous donor.
glamorous:
Xiulan prefers to live a life of privilege and opulence, as that is all that she has ever known. Even in her own flat, she dresses well and tries to carry on her existence as closely to how she had previously lived as she can. She refuses to see herself as a “hermit” in any sense, and she certainly doesn’t want to look like one.
fearful:
While she could hold probably kill someone in a duel if necessary, Xiulan is mental and physically vulnerable and lives in fear because of it. She experienced years of abuse at her former school, The Lin Sòng, which she was forced to repress for years afterwards. Additionally, the way in which her Inner Eye manifests itself leaves herself vulnerable to injury from falls, which has conditioned her to avoid situations unless she knows that she is less likely to suffer the consequences of her Inner Eye.
intelligent:
Xiulan is very intelligent. She has studied many forms of magic, although her specialty is in divination. Her skills exceed those of most other witches and wizards in that regard, and she has continued work as a fortune-teller by word of mouth, allowing her to maintain a source of income.
cultured:
Having been raised in high society, Xiulan knows how to conduct herself in polite company. She might not speak much about her personal life, but she is good at dancing around the subject with small talk and the like. She can flit effortlessly between Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, and she is also careful not to cause anyone offense with the way in which she presents her fortunes to her clients.
personal history
origins:
Chaoyang District, Beijing, China
Prior to moving to London to live in exile, however, she was most recently resident in Macao.
relations: (All names are in Western order, to avoid confusion.)
mother:
Cuifen “Celine” Quong, 66, homemaker, pure-blood witch
father:
Junwei “Albert” Zhou, 67, magical real estate tycoon, pure-blood wizard
husband:
Aloysius Lau, 1989 – 2022, former magical philanthropist, half-blood wizard
pets:
Zhurong, 3, male phoenix, given to her as a tenth anniversary present by her husband prior to his death
history:
Xiulan Zhou was born to Cuifen Quong and Junwei Zhou on the first day of January in 1990. As the couple’s only child, her being female was initially a disappointment to Junwei, who had hoped for a son who would be able to carry on his real estate empire eventually. While that was not to be, Xiulan was nonetheless spoiled, particularly by her mother. Half of the coddling was because of how impossible Xiulan was to console when she was upset, which happened frequently. What began as crying spells as a newborn soon manifested as what could only be described as “fits”: Xiulan would go limp, her eyes would roll back into her head, and she would be incredibly difficult to rouse afterward. While her parents worried that she was seriously ill, one Healer had the peculiar suggestion that they should continue to watch their daughter’s abilities as she grew.
That Healer, as it turned out, had been onto something. The fits continued, but they became easier to understand once Xiulan was able to vocalize and explain what it was that was happening to her. Her parents eventually pieced together that she was seeing things; she was having visions, though they urged her to keep quiet about them, lest she be viewed as “crazy” by anyone in their social circles. Cuifen and Junwei continued to maintain to their friends that Xiulan was merely ill, as they felt that no one would believe them if they mentioned a word otherwise. Seers were exceptionally rare, and they had no known family history of anyone with an Inner Eye, which left Xiulan as an anomaly.
Despite this, Xiulan was a bright child. She was precocious and often described as beautiful from a young age, which led to her admission to The Lin Sòng, a private and highly selective school of magic far from the city. Cuifen and Junwei thought it ideal, as they had heard only wonderful things about it and its illustrious alumni. Additionally, the school ensured them that Xiulan’s Inner Eye would be appropriately nurtured and that the curriculum would provide her with ample opportunity to learn how to control it.
What Xiulan found there could not have been more different. It was highly regimented, which wasn’t much of a surprise to her, but it was an exceptionally small school. She was one of only a handful of students in her own year, though there was little time for her to socialize with her peers. The academics were difficult but nothing that she couldn’t handle, and she often found herself suffering from visions without adequate support from the school’s staff, who took a hands-off approach regardless of how much she screamed and begged.
The one month a year that she got to spend at home with her parents in Beijing was a welcome break from school, but Xiulan always had to return to school and a curriculum that became more and more intense as time went on. Gradually, the teachers began to encourage them to use their schoolmates as experimental subjects, and Xiulan’s Inner Eye became more exposed for the first time. It was difficult to focus on anything else besides the visions that she saw, which became more and more complex as time went on. She was often reduced to tears by those whom she knew she was supposed to view as authority figures who could help her, and everything seemed to have become a competition between her and her peers.
By the time that she was free of The Lin Sòng and among its supposedly “illustrious” alumni, Xiulan had repressed much of what had happened to her over the years. Maybe it hadn’t been so bad, in the way that she had been forcibly telling everyone. Maybe it had been in her head all along, like the visions her Inner Eye saw. She returned to Beijing and worked as a Naming Seer to earn money beyond her father’s fortune, enough so that she could develop her own savings independently of her parents. Her visions, and the fits that accompanied them, only worsened, which made it difficult to imagine holding a job other than one that made use of her Inner Eye.
Marriage was a topic that was thrown around relatively frequently, since it was expected that Xiulan would marry and begin a family once she had graduated from school, and it was through her father’s business connections that she met her future husband, Aloysius Lau. Aloysius was a well-spoken young man from a half-blood family, though both his parents were themselves magical, as had been both sets of his grandparents and their parents a generation further back. He was, in other words, as good as pure in her parents’ eyes, and they had a relatively short courtship before their marriage when Xiulan was twenty-two years old.
Having married into near as much wealth as she would one day inherit for herself and moved to Macao, Xiulan chose to quit her work as a Naming Seer in favor of engaging in philanthropy alongside Aloysius, whom she truly loved and who accepted her and her Inner Eye. When necessary, he would even go to great lengths to cover for her if a vision had incapacitated her before an important occasion, and he made a point not to leave her side if it could be helped.
The only thing that would have been more perfect would have been the addition of a child, but Xiulan discovered what she had suspected after multiple years of trying to have a child of her own: She was infertile, and having a child simply wasn’t to be. Devastated for her sake as well as Aloysius’s sake, she continued to put on a brave face in public and dodge questions about having children easily, as if it didn’t kill her inside every time.
While she worried that her inability to have a child would be enough for Aloysius to leave her, it turned out that she had been mistaken. Their marriage remained as strong as ever, and Aloysius even purchased her a phoenix chick as a present for their tenth wedding anniversary, which she relished. Her life might not have been perfect, but she had gotten the perfect husband out of it.
One particular vision on a summer morning in 2022 terrified Xiulan beyond anything she had experienced prior to that, because she had witnessed the death of her own husband—her beloved Aloysius—who had been targeted by the Chinese Ministry of Magic on allegations that he had criticized one of its policies on the grounds that it would negatively affect some of the charity work in which he had been engaged. What began as an attempt to arrest him peaceably became a duel, and Aloysius Lau was murdered instead.
Xiulan knew that she couldn’t remain anywhere near the Chinese Ministry’s control and immediately arranged to seek asylum in London, where she has been residing since. From a lavish flat in Belgravia, she limits her contact to only pre-arranged fortune-telling clients, Healers, and the occasional visitor. She leaves only sparingly, mostly for the essentials that she can’t have delivered to her and to provide prophecies to the British Ministry.
site events reaction:
Having lived in London since the summer of 2022, Xiulan has been aware of the happenings in magical Britain, which have gotten increasingly worse. She isn’t sure how many—if any—have been related to her own visions or prophecies. While she knows that she probably could handle her own in a duel, what she reads in the newspaper is even more of an incentive for her not to leave the safety of her flat. Xiulan is particularly wary of the mixture of the magical and non-magical worlds, knowing how much more easily she could become a target for the Chinese Ministry of Magic or those who wish to exploit her Inner Eye, as had been done at her alma mater.
As concerns her alma mater, she became aware of the incident with the Witch-Hunters and The Lin Sòng months after it had actually occurred. She felt horrible for the students affected, but she knew that there was little that she could do about it without putting herself in an even worse position.
alias
name:
mod audrey
pronouns:
She/her
age:
23
time zone:
US Central Time
reference:
Current member!
other characters:
@ezekiel , @chrissy , monday meadow weekly , @clarence , parvati patil macmillan , brody christopher dubois , @oliwia , penelope raisa bainbridge , kaylee māhealani mahi'ai , maxima ruqayyah greyback , @muffet , @dasha , samira ali warsame , felix valentin fortescue , @priscilla , @blair , camila calderón , @claricia , honey satheesh varma , @tamatha , sadhbh wormwood , emmanuelle antoinette picquery
