LIN, yunjin

YunJin can be painfully shy and uncertain with people at times, and at others he can be rather boisterous and easy to get along with. He gets very frustrated with authority figures, especially ones who he sees as throwing their weight around without any good reason. This attitude tends to make him rather popular with his students because he generally doesn't care if they break a rule that he thinks is pointless, and will even sometimes protest that it is pointless. It takes him a long time to connect to people and trust them, but once he does, he gets really really attached.


Half Chinese, half Korean, YunJin grew up with more influence from the Chinese side because his paternal grandmother took care of him a lot and took him to temple with her. He does speak both Mandarin and Korean fluently though. His parents were both busy professionals in the tech industry in the Bay Area, and his older sister was six years older than him (enough older that she didn't always want much to do with him). He was close to her all the same, and when their grandmother passed away when he was 12 and she was 18, she was the family member that he really leaned on. She was well on track to becoming a professor and the first person in the family with a PhD when she had an accidental pregnancy during a fling when she was 21. Their parents were furious, and threatened to withdraw all support if she decided to keep the child. She did, and they mostly separated themselves from her. While YunJin stayed closer to his parents than his sister did for a while, he was also still very close to her, and he made very sure that she knew that he supported her. (She was 22 and he was 16 when the kid was born.) When he started Uni, he lived with her and her kid for a year before his two best friends, the year behind him in school joined him there, and they got their own apartment, but the three of them still babysat for her a lot as she finished her PhD. When she was 25, the kid was 3, and YunJin was 19, she was in a car crash and died instantly. There was a bit of a custody battle with YunJin's parents, but because of the things that she had left in her will (which she had written just in case when the kid was born), the kid ended up with YunJin as a guardian even though he was only 19. Being in pursuit of a teaching degree at the time probably helped his case. Around the same time, he kind of accidentally came out to his parents, and while they didn't outright disown him for it, between that and the custody battle, it was the beginning of the end of their positive relationship. He still keeps in slightly tense contact with them, but he really misses his sister and considers his two best friends and his nephew to be his most important family. It's been a rough the past three years taking care of his sister's kid, finishing undergrad, working a few different jobs at any given time, and generally being very busy. His friends are basically the only things holding him together in his mind. It's a huge relief for him to be teaching a steady job instead of subbing and working several side jobs with flexible hours like he did for a bit.