Origin story: June
Beneath every chord June rips out on that beat-up guitar…every sneer she throws at the powers-that-be…and every soft, secret glance she gives when she thinks no one’s watching.
The first rebellion was her name.
Not the one on her L.A. County-issued birth certificate—Jiawen Chen, crisp and dutiful, chosen by some Chinese fortune-teller guy who was supposedly well-versed in zibei and shengchen bazi and yin-yang wuxing and what-have-you. (Yawn.) But somewhere between age ten and twelve, she started signing her school papers Juniper Chen, just to see how it felt. Soft, odd, and a little dreamy.
At home, it was a quiet (and occasionally not so quiet) war.
“Jiawen,” her mother would call up the stairs in Mandarin—a language June never had much interest in—voice always sharp with expectation, as rigid as you’d expect from a Xinwen Lianbo newscaster.
“June,” she’d mutter under her breath, eyes fixed on the ceiling, fists clenched around a forbidden guitar pick.
June’s parents were immigrants in the classic first-gen mold.
Her dad, having memorized his way through the GRE and every schematic in the world, was an electrical engineer who measured love in study schedules and upgraded calculators.
Her mom, a former bank clerk in a small town in Hebei province (though she’d proudly tell everyone she’s from Beijing, the same way a native of Aberdeen or Kelso might say they’re from Seattle), had since become a full-time stay-at-home disciplinarian who made dumplings from scratch and disapproval from thin air.
For June, straight A’s weren’t the goal; they were the floor.
No sleepovers. No birthday parties. No tattoos, no piercings, no hair dyes. No “weird White people food.” No boys. (No girls either—though they never said that part aloud.) …etc. etc.
Just: “Don’t embarrass us” (where the word “embarrass” is always arbitrarily defined).
At the age 14, she found her first guitar at the Goodwill in Pasadena. A shitty, chipped Fender knockoff—$25, with two strings missing.
June didn’t know what a power chord was. But when she strummed that crooked thing in the backyard, hidden behind the compost bin, it sang like freedom.
She learned late at night, fingers bleeding into her shirt sleeves. She whispered lyrics into her pillow like prayers: angry, queer, loud, hers.
No one heard. Until they did.
She was 16, caught sneaking back in from an open mic where she’d shouted her song—which she cheekily titled “AP Calculus BC is Killing Me”—into a crusty amp while wearing her dad’s old tie as a belt.
Her mother didn’t speak to her for a week. Or maybe two.
Her father unstrung the guitar and locked it in the garage.
She started sneaking out more after that. Not in defiance—in survival.
She got her first tattoo on her 18th birthday.
A tiny, trembling treble clef on her back, inked in a friend’s bathroom. She cried—not from pain, but from how right it felt. Like branding the truth she could no longer erase.
She didn’t bother hiding it. Dinner that night ended in shouting and silence, along with other unpleasantness she’d rather forget.
They didn’t say goodbye when she left for college.
College lasted one semester.
Too many lectures, not enough amps. Too many binary boxes. She tried joining the school’s LGBTQ+ club but it felt… Sanitized. Polite. Not angry enough. Not hers.
So she packed her bags, hopped on the Coast Starlight till it reached its northernmost terminal, and couch-surfed her way into the Emerald City’s music scene.
Basements, backyards, and bars she wasn’t legally allowed in, she played at all sorts of places. Sometimes she got stiffed. Sometimes she got heckled. Once, a drunk girl in a Nirvana tee grabbed her after a show and whispered, “You made me feel like I wasn’t disgusting.”
June never forgot that.
Now June wears her rebellion like armor— Neon-dyed hair that changes with her mood. Old band shirts turned crop tops. More half-finished tattoo on her back like vines of thorns and lyrics. Combat boots she’s slept in more times than she’ll admit.
But underneath it all, there is still a softness that flinches at rejection. A hunger for a chosen family. And a heart that quietly breaks when someone calls her brave—because most days, she doesn’t feel it.
She has every postcard the harem ever sent her pinned up like wallpaper. She secretly loves when Sofia scolds her gently. She clings to Kaori at night like a girl who never got tucked in properly. And when Riley cries during one of her sets, she always looks away—afraid that if she acknowledges it, she might cry too.