Kina Listig

NA

13 October

18

Libra

Male

Demisexual

Poor

Scholarship

Cinematography and Film

Photography

NA. He wants to take on a side-job, but his parents want him to focus on his studies. He might go ahead and get himself employed anyway, but he would have to find a place with flexible hours for him to research and hit the books still.

Standing at 179cm (5’10”) and weighing 65kg (143lbs), Kina has brown curls that are almost always ruffled and messy. He is not very tanned but he is several shades darker than deathly pale from standing outdoors in open fields trying to shoot videos under the right lighting or from staying under the sun longer than necessary coaxing a squirrel or some other small woodland creature onto his viewfinder. His eyes are a molten brown and his pupils are large giving him a perpetually wide-eyed look. Tall and lanky, he is thin and looks to be on the scrawny side, with lean muscles rather than a bulky build. He bruises easily.

Jeans, slacks and trousers all work for Kina, as do T-shirts and button-up plaid tees. He enjoys casual clothing, and tends to buy whatever he feels comfortable in and isn’t pricey. His closet selection leans toward the darker colour spectrum, and he doesn’t own many bright threads. As someone who likes to hide behind the camera, and has spent events flitting from wall to wall to snap photos, Kina favours unassuming clothes that allow him to blend into the background, all the better to take shots of unobserving people. Because of his lanky build many of his clothes are baggy and missized.

Cameras
Editing videos and shooting them
Reading
Writing (short stories and storyboards)
Tea
Autumn
Alternative rock
His laptop
Loyalty
Authenticity

Conflict and tension
Not being given a chance to prove his mettle
Being trodden on
Being given overt attention
Intensive social interaction

Ruffles his already unruly hair when frustrated
Has a slow smile – like a flag unfurling in the wind – when he’s been pleasantly surprised
Puts his thumb against his bottom lip when thinking

Taking walks to cafes and living off their Wi-Fi
Locking himself in his room to complete projects
Day-dreaming up video ideas that almost never see the light of day
Holing up somewhere with a hot beverage and reading novels
Watching movies

That he will not make anything out of his life
That he will regret his decisions
That he will be unable to provide for his parents when he enters the real world and they retire from it
That he will truly fade into the background one day and no one will notice

Intensely private and reserved, Kina will not share his life story within the first hour of meeting, or indeed the first year. While he doesn’t actively seek out sociability all the time, he can swallow his introversion to take the first step in meeting someone. But after a long day, he tends to retreat to his room and shan’t emerge until he has been submerged in his own silence long enough to face noise again. If not given the chance to do so, he will withdraw into himself, and won’t say a word unless someone actively tries to rope him back in. Carrying a camera around means he can withdraw whenever he wants and still be considered within the realm of socially acceptable. Highly attached to his gadgets and devices of technology, Kina’s primary purpose in capturing fast moments is in documenting the entire story behind it, which he finds notoriously tricky but impossibly rewarding to get right. He lives on the spot when he’s squinting into his viewfinder, but he plans ahead and gets immensely worried about the future when staring at anything else. He does everything with effort and his best, and burns out easily.

Kina might not seem like he’s got much of a fire burning in him. While he might take jeers and hackling quietly (it’s happened before) it shortens his fuse, and it isn’t of infinite length either. Neither is he afraid to be snippy to get people out of his frame.

His parents give him what they can spare as an allowance, so every month he might receive around $100 as supplement in the post.

Low-Middle class

His living expenses are largely paid for by the scholarship. He is frugal with his money and saves what he can. His clothes might seem faded from too many rounds in the wash, but he can’t bear to throw out shirts and jeans which are still good to wear.

Kina can do without a car. He either walks or takes the bus.

College Dorms

A small town in England

Growing up, Kina was always quiet. He said few words, and even when he did he spoke them with consideration and care. He had a few close friends, and while he loved their company and blossomed next to the right people, he was acutely conscious that everything was temporary and nothing could be taken for granted. Graduations never hit him hard, because even when he was having the time of his life in primary and then secondary school when the moments came, it was never lost on him that the era would not last forever.

He discovered a love for photography and filmography when he was given a video project to do and he scored the top in his class for – as the teacher put it – making the audience feel what he wanted. Looking back Kina now realises she most probably meant he was the only one in the class who could keep a straight face throughout the video, but back when he was ten it seemed the camcorder fit nowhere better than his own hand.

His parents have always been supportive, and loving. His older brothers were more rambunctious than he, and used to rough-house with him constantly. Until one of them realised Kina didn’t enjoy it and wouldn’t be a good sport, and the oldest Colin grew out of it. Still, Kina’s childhood was full of forceful tackles and elbows against the shoulders. He didn’t think of it anything less than affectionate shoving. The Listigs lived in a small dingy neighbourhood with less than spotless repute, and a public school with a suspension list on daily shuffle. Colin and Jacob – the middle child – preceded Kina there, and by the time he himself enrolled in the school he knew all there was to know about the stairways where it was safe to bum a few fags, the corners where girls in their altered uniforms could be found for a quick good time, and the fourth-floor toilets where those who had gotten stoned had a three in five chance of not being discovered by the principal. The first day Kina stepped in the school, his feet were quaking.

Needless to say, the environment in the school was terrifying, where a good track record was impossible because conclusions were often prematurely made to spare the administration from delinquents lying through their teeth. Kina, with his quiet mouth and too-big pupils and slim frame, was easy prey. He was jostled his fair share of times, kicked around another few. The first month his brothers would come running to put an end to it. And then they stopped. Colin – who by age sixteen already had tattoos snaking up his left arm, and a protective ring of burly brothers he had chosen and shared no blood with – told Kina that he would have to learn to put his own fists up, that it would toughen him up, that it was a rite of passage.

Kina could never blame him or Jacob for not coming to his rescue, because two years later Kina punched someone for the first time and Colin beamed at his split knuckles, told him he was proud of Kina, promised with a conspiratorial wink they would go out for a drink out of their parents’ earshot, and left for a party and never came home. He swerved off the road, he would remember the police officer murmuring quietly. The car fell twenty feet. He was rushed to the hospital, but paramedics pronounced him dead upon arrival. And then: They found a bottle of whiskey in the backseat, and a packet with residue confirmed to be drugs, as if it could not hurt any more, as if their father’s face couldn’t be any more ashen, as if their mother couldn’t sob any harder.

When Kina was fifteen, his family moved. His father said the branch in Dublin paid better. Kina thought everyone was running away from the quiet house and the second bedroom shared by two sons instead of three. But he didn’t say a word, and learnt to settle into a new school, where the toilets were graffiti-clean; students wore crisp uniforms and buttoned-up shirts; and Jacob began the steady climb to bring his grades from Ds to Bs, and came sprinting once more to protect his little brother from those who dared to pick on him.

The year Jacob began to work at the local car-repair shop, Kina sent in applications for scholarships. His parents pushed him for medicine, law, and engineering. He spent twice as long filling in those forms as he should have, because even though he could not imagine himself in a dry gray business office, he saw his parents’ own hopes and dreams of their third son in a suit, with a house twice as big as their cramped apartment, and a life that would never be as difficult as theirs had been. And he could not bare to dash those wishes so early. On an impulse, he plucked out the brochure from the career-guidance counsellor’s office for the Hollywood University too, deciding he would spend his summer making the best video he possibly could, and justify the time and resources with a whimsical university application. He mailed many envelopes in a week, but only received one reply back. Remarkably the short film he had sent in with it had been enough to impress the school, but it did not seem he was destined for law and doctoring. While his parents frowned at the prospects of a photographer, they let him go, because it was an education nonetheless even if they did not think he would find a valid occupation. Two suitcases, and one airplane ride later, and Kina found himself in Hollywood.

My favourite class? English, I think. And Kina’s too, because that gave him creativity and a platform for creative expression.