i walk the plank, not a tear in my eye / i won't go down, your blushing bride / under the water, I'll be sharpening my knife
NAME: Yinmei Zhang (张银妹 / Zhāng yín mèi). Name lit. translates to “silver girl”, or “silver sister”. ‘Grandmother Zhang’ as a joke, with Ysa.
ACTUAL AGE: 2251 (born in 231 BCE)
BIRTHPLACE: Changsha, China, in a rural area that is now a textile factory. She hasn’t been back in centuries - or perhaps, millennia? - and she doesn’t intend on visiting anytime soon.
CREATOR/CREATRIX: Jinyang Chen (陈金阳 / Chén jīn yáng); his name lit. translates to “golden sun”. Ironic, considering that he was a vampire.
FC AND FEATURES: Rowena Xi Kang. Wears a glass eye with a ruby iris in the socket of what once was her left eye.
LIKES: pretty, delicate things of all sorts!, flowers, scaring people with her glass eye >:)
DISLIKES: people who insult her fashion choices, dealing with mortals, her Creator (that stupid-ass motherfucker!!!)
GOALS: To enjoy the rest of her long, long life in any way possible, and to help Ysa protect the rest of the Coven. Oh, and she still hasn’t found a perfect perfume yet. Hmm.
FEARS: Losing Ysa and the rest of the Coven, whom Yinmei has grown attached to, through the centuries. And though she won’t admit it to anyone, she is lowkey terrified of facing her Creator again.
RUMORS: That she’s immune to religious iconography (in reality, having literally been born - as well as Created - before Christianity existed, Yinmei finds that Christian crosses and such have no effect on her, but ancient Indian and East Asian religions are a different story. Buddhist mantras make her nauseous). That her glass eye is ~magical~ in some capacity (it’s not. But Yinmei’s certainly not denying the rumors, at least not openly ;D).
WARDROBE: Very lacy and delicate, and a bit frilly, sometimes. Yinmei has a penchant for reds and whites (black is also fine, if the occasion calls for it), and likes billowy gowns with sheer, wispy pieces of fabric that float prettily around her when the breeze picks up, or when she levitates. Yinmei doesn’t like things that pinch her feet too tightly, so when she wears heels, they’re usually a size or two too big - in fact, she’s not too fond of showing her feet at all, so she wears a lot of floor-length skirts (unlike her dear friend Ysabelle). She’s also very fond of jewelry, and all the pretty sparkly things that one can wear. Yinmei frequently accessorizes with dangly earrings and bejeweled hairpins, to hold up her waterfall of black hair (she’s very proud of her hair, really). Recently, she has taken to wearing razor-sharp sterling silver hairpins.
PLACES MOST LIKELY TO BE FOUND: In her rooms, perusing her extensive closet(s). Or out shopping for yet another set of pretty but useless trinkets or tchotchkes for either the house itself, or to decorate her own rooms. And, of course, hanging out with Ysa.
PEOPLE MOST LIKELY TO BE WITH: Her beloved friend Ysa, of course, as well as all the other vampires in the Coven. She has one enthralled mortal - a teenage boy who had no future beyond the violent street gangs in a city half a world over - that she uses for sustenance purposes, and for sustenance purposes only.
STRONGEST CHARACTER TRAIT: Frivolous (or, guarded. Hmm.)
MANNERISMS: Throughout her extensive lifetime, Yinmei has played the blushing bride, the dainty doll, the coy seductress, the enigmatic beauty...but now that she’s over 2,000 years old (and as safe as she’ll ever get, she thinks), she doesn’t have the patience for such games. Yinmei has always been quick to anger, and these days, she doesn’t bother to control or hide it, the way she had done for the past centuries. She walks with her head held high, her steps brisk and purposeful, and although she's not particularly tall - about five feet and three inches, or 160 cm - her curt, clipped voice is enough to get the entire room to pay attention to her. She’s blunt and unapologetic, despite her very obvious frivolity. Yinmei also has a bit of a flair for the dramatic, and when she decides that walking is too much work (or when she wants to make a particularly attention-grabbing entrance), she’ll usually opt for levitating a few inches off the ground, letting the flowy skirts she’s so fond of flare out around her.
[BLOOD GETS IN YOUR EYE - if the rumours are true, her origins are in ancient china. she claims that her small, porcelain doll-like features garnered her much attention in her day, but after her creator tied her up by her ankles to drain her and then took her lovely left eye “as a prize”, she considered herself irredeemably marred- cursed and so enraged she could swallow her own tongue. however, a short but gory reign over her old hometown followed by a good piking of her much-loathed creator did much to lift her self-image. (besides, the glass eye with the ruby iris isn’t so bad- it’s fearsome.) but, recently, it seems she may not have finished the job all those years ago.]
Yinmei was once the daughter of a wealthy provincial official in Qin Dynasty China. Polite, pristine, and perfect, commoners and lords alike compared her to a delicate porcelain doll. And for a time, Yinmei was flattered.
Yinmei was rather sickly as a child, and having her feet bound - standard practice for highborn daughters, at the time - certainly didn’t help.
Yinmei’s demure beauty meant that her parents had plenty of suitors to choose from, and when she was seventeen, she married a regional governor ten years older than she was. As his first wife - and from a rich and powerful family at that - Yinmei was treated well enough, all things considered.
Yinmei bore him many children, which did nothing for her already delicate constitution. Her last pregnancy was when she was thirty-five, and she would have died in the process of birthing the child, had it not been for her Creator.
Jinyang Chen was a moderately powerful politician working with Yinmei’s husband, at the time. He somehow managed to keep his true nature secret, and as Yinmei lay dying, one of the nurses taking the stillborn child away, Jinyang managed to turn her, just in the nick of time.
Jinyang took Yinmei with him back to the town that Yinmei had grown up in, strung her up by her ankles (so that he could better admire her dainty, perfect feet, he said), and gouged her left eye out of its socket, keeping it as a twisted trophy of some sort.
Understandably, Yinmei was angry. As her vampiric powers set in, Yinmei shapeshifted into a bat and escaped. She managed to integrate herself into the powerful vampire circles within China, even with the rise and fall of multiple dynasties, and a century later, she - along with some of her newfound allies - hunted down Jinyang, drove a pike through his heart, and cut him to pieces, burning what was left. Yinmei went on to reign over her old hometown (at least until the armies of the Han emperor decided to investigate the bloodbath the normally peaceful town had turned into), resolving to forget everything from her human life.
Yinmei then spent some time traveling around Asia, flitting aimlessly from place to place. In her mind, she’d suffered enough, as a human. She was going to do what she wanted, now, and that mostly meant killing shitty men, robbing wealthy landlords, and buying the most beautiful things, all for herself.
She left East Asia for Europe around six or seven centuries ago, and hasn’t been back since. With the spread of Buddhism into the continent, the spiritual and the secular had become too tightly intertwined, you see. It was annoying when even architectural features and natural landscapes had some sort of symbolic and quasi-religious importance; even now, Yinmei is loathe to return to East Asia. Pop culture is saturated with all kinds of ancient Daoist and Buddhist influences - what’s up with a fictional monk chanting his mantras all day when the TV adaptation of a Tang Dynasty novel comes on daily at 1 PM?!
In Europe, she found someone to help her finally, finally, fix her feet. Yinmei hates exposing her feet or wearing shoes that pinch them too tightly, to this day.
She also met Ysabelle Vavassour, who would eventually become her best friend. In truth, they got off to a bit of a rocky start because of a slight miscommunication (Yinmei takes perceived slights very seriously, you see - she’s petty like that), but once they cleared it up, it wasn’t long before Yinmei began to appreciate Ysa’s iconic aesthetic. And, if she’s going to be honest, it was nice to have a friend again.
Ysa and Yinmei fell into bed together, for a brief period of time, but that was centuries ago.
Yinmei moved to the States with Ysa and the rest of the Coven. She has stayed there ever since, the only things bringing her pleasure being 1) Ysa and the Coven, and 2) pretty things (with the third being shopping for pretty things).
Yinmei has never let herself think too much about the past. But recently, she’s been feeling a stirring in her consciousness, a niggling at the back of her mind - slight enough to ignore, for now, but she can’t help but to wonder. She can’t remember everything clearly, of course, because it was two thousand years ago, but she thinks that maybe, just maybe, she didn’t finish the job completely when she killed her Creator.
R E L A T I O N S H I P S .
with THE BLOODMOTHER aka YSABELLE VAVASSOUR - Yinmei and Ysa met quite some time ago; it’s hard to say exactly when, with lives as long as theirs. They jokingly bicker about the two-centuries difference in ages (’Grandmother Zhang’ has become an inside joke in between the two of them), and Yinmei is basically Ysa’s second-in-command (though she’d never want to be the leader of the house, herself; do you know how much work that’d be?!).
with A COLLAR OF SPIKES - text
with FUNERAL FEAST - text
with SLEEPING EVIL - text
gangsta’s paradise // coolio ft. lv
praise the lord // a$ap rocky
