The story begins primarily with my association with the Philippines

Social Murder was a story that bounced around in my head for some time with no form or substance. The story begins primarily with my association with the Philippines, a country in which I had many friends initially met as professional contacts but that circle widened more and more, ending up with me choosing to spend some time there, “some time” eventually becoming five years.

The Philippines is one of a number of developing countries in which internet access began much later for the largest part of the populace than it did for the general public of the typical western country, but which exploded beyond imaginable proportions, in no small part thanks to an initiative by Facebook to provide free online access. Mobile data was expensive, and many Filipinos had only their mobile phones as a means of accessing the online world, so when Facebook did deals with the major mobile networks in a number of developing countries to provide free data for accessing the main parts of its service, social media use mushroomed.

With many people in developing countries suddenly gaining access to what the rest of the world had taken for granted, even the poorest could get online, create their social media profiles, and watch the digital world expand before them; but as a more seasoned internet user, it was easy to see in many people a casual disregard of the potential dangers of this exciting new world.

I wanted to tell a story that would subtly warn of the perils that lurk around certain online corners, but as a significant consumer of social media myself, I certainly didn’t want to scare people away. Early in 2016, having previously done a little casual online teaching, I began working as a full-time English tutor with a well-known online English school, my students were Chinese, and there I saw a very different attitude to online life from my students than I saw from my friends in the Philippines and elsewhere in South-East Asia.

The Chinese have long been heavy internet and social media users, just as we have in the west; but the internet in China is a very different animal than the internet that the rest of the world knows – it is completely government controlled, and many of the web sites and social media services that we know and love are blocked. The Chinese combine being big consumers of all manner of online services with a cautious attitude not then seen in the rest of Asia and other parts of the developing world.

It was from this that the character of Ronni Wong was born, but it would still take some time for the story of Social Murder to coalesce around her. Ronni was the perfect vehicle to carry forward the story I wanted to tell, a wise young lady who knows how to enjoy life without falling foul of its everyday dangers. Ronni’s Chinese way of thinking would be a sharp contrast to the South East Asian world in which the story would unfold; but what would a young Chinese woman be doing in Metro Manila? Many of the Chinese people in the Philippine capital, and there are a very large number, are working for Chinese online companies such as casinos, low-paid workers often there because they could not find opportunities in their homeland, but wealthier than the Filipinos they live amongst because they have a language skill to leverage. Gambling is illegal in China, but many Chinese casinos operate in places like Macau, Laos, the Philippines, et cetera. This didn’t seem the ideal lifestyle to carry the story of Social Murder.

One of my closest friends in the Philippines was a colleague who had been born there, but he and his sister were adopted as babies by a couple in Australia. I met him because he had decided to spend some time in the country of his birth but which he barely knew, and hey presto! Simply by borrowing a little of my friend’s history, Ronni finally came to life. Her cross-cultural character comes from being raised by a Chinese couple in Australia, where her father’s family have lived for several generations but where he mother is a first-generation immigrant. Other jobs I did while living in the Philippines brought me into contact with many Australians, so at the time it felt natural to me that Ronni, as part of my own life in Asia, got her western perspectives from Down Under. Indeed, when I left teaching to take a development role in a growing Australian firm, my professional clock was on Queensland time, meaning early starts every morning. I was more aware of what was going on along Australia’s east coast than events in my own country!

Whilst Social Murder began as a short story, it turned out that there was far too much I wanted to say and it soon ballooned into a novella. I felt that the story shouldn’t get too big, though, because many of those I hoped would form the target audience would perhaps not be avid readers, and many would have English as a second or maybe third language, and so wouldn’t likely pick up something as compendious as War and Peace or The Lord of the Rings.

The novella format also game me the chance to focus entirely on the story from Ronni’s perspective as she negotiates her unfamiliar environment, as the reader you ride on her shoulder and learn of what is happening when she does rather than seeing the plots unfolding beyond her sight. I believe that by not having a sub-plot in which you see the baddies up to no good, you (and Ronni) come to the story much as a police officer or a detective would, and you have to make sense of the clues that are presented when they are presented.

Aside from stealing my own friend’s back-story, Ronni is based largely on several of my former students who made a big impression upon me through their characteristically Chinese blend of curiosity and caution. Some of those students, who I knew as Veronica, Carina, Mia and Perla, even helped with writing the story by providing insights into the Chinese way of thinking and even some snippets of Chinese language that crops up in the story as Ronni investigates the whereabouts of her missing friend.

As you will know if you have any association with Chinese people, either in China itself or elsewhere, an important part of learning English is to adopt an “English name”, which confusingly is not always actually an English name – it can be a name from any western culture, and sometimes even a seemingly random word. Many children who attend school in China are given their “English names” by their schoolteachers who, being older, don’t always choose the most modern of names for their pupils which, as one of my Chinese contacts observed, “Is all fine until you reach high school and find yourself in a class with five Jasons!”, to which another retorted, “And three of those are Jason Li!”

Ronni’s real name, that used when speaking Mandarin with her family, is Wong Mei-Lin. Her “English name” is Veronica Wong, or Ronni to her friends. There is part of the story in which Ronni exchanges online messages with another Chinese woman living in Metro Manila, these messages are presented in Chinese with accompanying English translations. My student Veronica wrote the Chinese text for Ronni’s message, and my student Carina wrote the reply from the character called Carina – and yes, naming my characters after these two of my student friends is deliberate, a “thank you” for their kind help.

My student, Mia, was fairly new to learning English and so was not of a level to provide a lot of help, but she was keen to take part and so she gave me the Chinese characters for “Wong Mei Lin”; and yes, I do know that she craftily gave me the character for her own surname, the similar-sounding Huang, rather than Wong. You can have that one, Mia!

The name Mei-Lin comes from another student who didn’t study with us for too long, and I only met her a small number of times. When I first saw the name “Merlin” in my schedules one morning, I had imagined a wizened old man, perhaps with a long, grey beard; so meeting a woman in her early twenties was quite surprising. It turned out that she chose the name for its similarity to her real, Chinese name. She had bowed to the tradition of adopting an English name, but she was determined to stay true to her real name – and that’s something I love about Chinese people; they have a great natural curiosity about everything in the world around them and beyond, but they remain fiercely proud of their own culture, much of which pre-dates those of the west.

Now you know a little of how Social Murder and the character of Ronni Wong came into being, in future posts I will tell more about the thought processes that went into the book, and how my own experience as a former manager of online services with global reach is also relevant to how the story unfolds for Ronni – but for now, I’m keen not to put out any spoilers before you have read the book for yourself!

Please do enjoy the book, and I look forward to hearing your comments!

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