Chinese Girl

Zhenzhen Yao is a Chinese woman living in early 1st century AD, under the Chinese Han Dynasty. She has red clothes on, with yellow patterns of branches and flowers on it. Her hair is long, black and tied up in a bun, with accessories all around. Her skin is pale white, she has a natural blush, her facial features are delicate and soft, and her lips are red and have a light application of rouge, as to align with Chinese beauty standards. She does feel a certain societal pressure to conform to these standards, and spends a lot of money on on beauty products such as cinnabar to dye her lips, lotus root powder to soften her skin and beautiful silk clothes.

Zhenzhen is a good person, trying to be kind and friendly to her patients and creating her clinic specifically to help people. She likes conversing with her patients beyond the usual medical questions, asking about their lives and how they’re feeling, offering words of empathy and encouragement. However, she also has a kind of no-nonsense attitude, and is not afraid of speaking her mind. She is easily annoyed, but with patients, she still tries to keep a friendly and empathetic attitude towards them even when she gets annoyed at their questions.

She is also smart, creative and resourceful, while also being pragmatic at the same time. However, at times, she can be blinded by emotions and not think straight, especially regarding subjects like her marriage and Chinese gender biases. She is not someone who gives up easily, even when the odds are stacked against her, and she is determined to see her work through to the work. She is very compassionate and altruistic, willing to help and improve the lives of others around her. However, she also values her autonomy, being a quite proud individual which both means that she is more than willing to defy societal norms and expectations for her agency and individual desires, but that she is also very sensitive to criticism and prefers to do things her way, which can make her very resistant to feedback or alternative approaches. She’s also very sensitive to the issue of her lack of patients, something she’s very embarrassed and sad about.

When she was young, her father had arranged for her to be married with an upper class man, despite Zhenzhen not at all loving him. She has grown to greatly dislike her husband, mainly due to his constant attempts at asserting his control over her, his cold demeanor towards her whenever he isn’t trying to butter her up with expensive accessories and clothing and such, and constant attempts to get her pregnant. She hates that her husband sees her as just a baby factory, and out of spite, is very opposed to having children with him specifically, and luckily for her, she hasn’t ended up pregnant yet.

She works as a doctor, specializing in herb treatment, midwifery and acupuncture. From a young age, her family would train her in the art of medicine, wanting her to be a doctor, which is how she acquired her medical knowledge.

Zhenzhen started her own small clinic in Suzhou, with only her working there, as to fulfill her passion for helping people who can’t help themselves. It was hard work getting it off the ground and approved by the Han bureaucracy, enduring lots of sleepless nights and compromises. She would use her status as being married to a nobleman to access connections, and while her husband did initially believe she shouldn’t pursue such independent ventures, she did eventually reach a compromise with him, with her agreeing to give up some of her consensual control in her marriage to him, in exchange for him supporting her project, giving her supplies and protecting her from gender bias. She would repurpose her old childhood house into being her clinic, avoiding the need to purchase new land and encounter all the legal challenges and gender biases that would bring. Zhenzhen would rely on her immense medical knowledge skill to frame her clinic as an extension of her caregiver role. She fell asleep multiple times on her desk, waiting for someone to walk through the door.

Despite her clinic being independently run, with no major supplies or bureaucracy to support or run it, Zhenzhen is still very stressed out, having to constantly play nice to keep her husband onboard, and having to do everything in the clinic herself, from organizing equipment to cleaning up to waiting behind the desk for patients, is also difficult for her. Additionally, the disappointment of not having had any patients yet is weighing hard on her, as she doesn’t wanna feel like her efforts were in vain or have her dream project be a failure.

She will accept Wu Zhu cash, uses Chinese herbs like dang gui, shan yao, and huang qin, and is knowledgeable on the Chinese medical concept of Qi.