Andi Mao Macdougal Zizhen served as the Charms professor at Hogwarts from 2058 to 2060.
Physical Description[]
Andi Mao Macdougal Zizhen was not overly tall, but the way she stood definitely cut a few inches off her height. She seemed incapable of standing up straight, not like an amoeba exactly, but more like a snake with bones along every inch. She didn't stand when she could lounge, didn't sit if she could drape herself on the chair.
Her black hair had been yanked back into a bun, but a heavy fringe dangled to her eyebrows. Perhaps overburdened by too much black mascara, Andi Mao Macdougal Zizhen's eyelashes swooped up slowly when she raised her eyes to fix hapless objects with a long tired look that nevertheless was not too tired to look scornful, cynical or even...sympathetic at rare intervals.
Personality[]
Despite her general swaying air of moving in syrup, Andi Mao Macdougal is not quite as disinterested as she looks. Mildly dysfunctional, she doesn't suffer fools gladly, but does her considerable best to ensure everyone passes. Despite this, she has a limited amount of patience; fools she can stand, but rude, lazy people she cannot. She doesn't get chummy with people easily, but does things competently and well (she is concerned about this, almost maniacally so) with a carefully cultivated air of boredom.
Practical but vain, appearances do matter to her, and she'd rather gnaw her arm off without a change of expression than cry and spoil her makeup in front of other people. Severely dependent on tea. She doesn't pass out smiles like a Cheshire cat, can allow a bad mood to spill over into her work, and is most certainly not perfect - but always endeavours to be interesting and creative, almost worryingly so, because she simply couldn't stand it if someone thought her lessons boring.
History[]
Andi Mao Macdougal Zizhen was a singularly flighty creature (not in a butterfly sense of 'flightiness', but more like a bat) in what she is pleased to call her youth. The product of a serious, immigrant father, and a depressed red-headed mother, her childhood was never particularly happy till she learnt that you can do more with a wand than smack someone on the head, especially when you have magic in the blood. A few decent years at school, uneasily looking for a job once out... then a rather dubious inheritance from the Macdougal side (when Great Grandmama finally condescended to die) reassured her that she would never have to work, and she settled down in the Disintergrating Family Pile to build a singular library of every book pertaining to Charms she could find and the blackest, dourest, clingiest clothes to fill her wardrobe. Every lipstick in her bourdoir was plum.
She desired, in an aesthetic, entirely useless way, to be the very best at Charms. Not unlike the main character in the anime series Pokemon - but she'll shoot you down before she wears a cap.
And then a fire happened and the Disintergrating Family Pile finally disintergrated, precisely because the 'dubious' in 'dubious inheritance' was the condition that she, in her thirty-first year, would have to renounce all wordly frivolities, such as books and plum lipstick and too much mascara.
Thus did her dour great-grandmother attempt to chain her great-grandchild down. Failing that, the charms on the will simply snapped, and the house, held together for years by magic, fell about Andi Mao Macdougal Zizhen's ears.
Relinquishing privacy, and some charmingly Gothic ruins in favor of decent food; Andi Mao MacDougal Zizhen applied to become a Charms teacher.