Blurb: A modern retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, with the vast majority of major characters cast as persons of color. Koh Su Ying and Jeremiah "J" Robinson were the yin and the yang - she was the eldest daughter of one of Singapore's richest families, while his family owned a grocery store in Brooklyn. She was a quiet, studious girl with a passion for art. He was everybody's friend just like his mom and dad, always happy to build anything for anybody. Yet after they met, their lives would never be the same again. Intro Notes: Because almost all the characters are non-Anglo ethnicities, none of the names will come from canon. Here's a guide to the families: The Koh (Gao) family - this is a mild crossover with Ba Jin's Jia Chun Qiu (Home Spring Autumn) trilogy, with three daughters whose names and personalities come from the Chinese classic. Koh Su Ying (Gao Shuying) is the eldest, and she is brought up in a conservative home but has a modern and independent outlook in her own way. She's the "Anne Elliot" of this story. She has two younger sisters: Su Wah (Shuhua) who is cheerful and easy-going, and Su Chen (Shuzhen) who is quiet and timid. The Koh family are Chinese Singaporeans who became rich through their contract manufacturing business, and they're always on the lookout to diversify into new products to stay relevant to the times. Su Ying ends up working for her family business, whereas Su Wah is an influencer and Su Chen marries young. The Robinson family - an African-American family in Brooklyn, who are proud that they can finance three children to college. Keisha, the eldest, is a Navy wife and serial entrepreneur; Lucas is an idealistic elementary schoolteacher devoting his life to educating underprivileged children; and Jeremiah, the youngest, who goes by "J", is our "Wentworth" character. He meets Su Ying when he goes to Brown University to pursue his PhD. I've deliberately not fully matched the personalities of the Koh family to those of the Elliots from canon, and also given our protagonists stable two-parent families instead of orphaning them like Jane Austen did. After all, people have longer life expectancies now so it's normal for them to have living parents well into adulthood, unlike in Regency times. Not only should this make them more relatable as contemporary people, it should also reduce unnecessary angst. March 2020 – The Nowhere Times Jeremiah “J” Robinson, Columbia University, New York City She was the yin to my yang. I always liked to say “yang” the American way on purpose, just because she was so cute every time she scolded me. “You don’t say it like that!” she’d exclaimed, jumping up and down in agitation. “It’s not pronounced as ‘yeang’, it’s ‘young’! Yin and ‘young’!” Of course, she’s Koh Su Ying. Or Su-Ying Koh, if you want to say it the American way. She’s Singaporean royalty, or just about. Her family lives on the wealthiest street in Singapore, the one that’s lined with embassies. Yet in her sweatshirts and jeans and Converse when she was studying at Brown, she looked just like any Asian American girl I could’ve grown up with in Brooklyn – just about almost. ‘Almost’ is the most important word here because it was all the little things that made her different which attracted me to her. Like how she never tried to colour her jet-black hair, nor to do any fancy perms or chemical straightening; it just hung to her waist, silky and straight and soft. And unlike all the American girls I knew, she never had any use for mascara or eyeliner either; with natural, minimalistic makeup, she was already beautiful. She was just so perfectly charming in a way that was even more perfect because it was so unpretentious, as if she knew she didn’t have to try to look cute to be cute. And of course, she didn’t have to try, at least with me; I thought she was the most adorable human being on earth. The yin to my yang. The Ghibli to my Disney. The breeze to my sunshine. You get the idea, yeah? She was quiet, understated, and introverted, yet she alone stood out from the crowd because there was absolutely nothing shallow or superficial about her. Instead of whiling away her free time shopping, she loved to draw, and the space below her lofted bed in her dorm room was full of her canvases and paints – pastel-hued anime dreamscapes of a utopian world, touched with just that little bit of softness and sadness. Friday and Saturday nights she always preferred staying in to partying, so we’d watch movies and dramas in every conceivable language from every part of the world, on the oversized monitor hooked up to her Mac Pro, the one she drew on when she wasn’t painting on physical canvas. It was our way of exploring the world, since I’d never had the money to travel. The more movies we watched, the more we could see that people were all the same – rich or poor, in Europe or Asia or Latin America, life is made up of childhood dreams, coming of age, love, marriage, and our hopes for the next generation. She believed in doing good by everyone, and even when there were things she didn’t want to do, she’d make herself do them anyway if she believed it was right. Her beliefs and principles were strong, and she’d fight tooth and nail for everything she believed in. Everything, except one thing – that one thing which finally spelled the end of us. With this pandemic coming upon us, I wonder how she’s doing now. Koh Su-Ying, Singapore J always liked building all kinds of things for people. You just had to tell him about a problem you had, and he’d design a gadget to fix it. I used to worry about him, because how could he ever finish his PhD when his mind was scattered across seventeen different problems all at once? But that was J, he never could possibly say “no” to anybody. Not when he grew up with a dad who was the unofficial mayor of his block in Brooklyn. I think I’m inventing a new word here, but J always was a bootstrapper, if you know what I mean. His childhood wasn’t exactly hardscrabble, not when he had two wonderful parents who loved him to bits, but where he was, when I met him, he’d already outgrown and outshone any of his family’s wildest dreams. So, he was there all on his own, the first generation of his family that could cobble together enough money to send three kids to college, and the first (or rather, only) of his siblings to try for a PhD. He was my hero because he did all the things nobody ever expected him to be able to do, without anyone to pave the road for him by pulling strings or introducing him to the right people. Socially, J was a kind of chameleon. He could talk to just about anybody about anything and everything because that’s what he’d been doing ever since he started helping his mom and dad out at the grocery store his family owns. And it wasn’t just bred into him, it was also about the personality he was born with – he’s just the kind of person who fundamentally likes people. So, listening to and solving other people’s problems, that was second nature to him. And multitasking also came naturally to him – he’d done three majors during four years of undergrad at Purdue: industrial design, mechanical engineering, and occupational and environmental health sciences. That was what he needed for his mission in life – to design and build ergonomic solutions for any kind of human-factors problem that anyone could possibly throw at him. If I was like earth, J was like water. His dynamism and confidence already got him halfway towards winning over every single person he met, and his good looks plus his skill of being a natural listener would send him right past the finish line. At least, that was a winning combination with just about everybody, except my parents because they’re traditional. Too traditional to understand someone who’s from a different race, social strata and culture from them. Too bad that even though they’re traditional, often what they say still makes sense. And because I listened to the sensible part of their advice and J couldn’t see beyond their limitations, that became the end of us. With this pandemic coming upon us, I wonder how he’s doing now.https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130218#msg-130218Fri, 01 May 2026 13:05:09 +0100 Phorum 5.2.22 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130225#msg-130225 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130225#msg-130225 Lucy J. Derbyshire Writers' GuildSat, 19 Feb 2022 21:03:26 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130223#msg-130223 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130223#msg-130223 irisusheeh Derbyshire Writers' GuildTue, 15 Feb 2022 10:25:06 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130221#msg-130221 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130221#msg-130221
Lol]]> NN S Derbyshire Writers' GuildTue, 08 Feb 2022 16:16:02 +0000 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130218#msg-130218 https://dwiggie.com/phorum/read.php?5,130218,130218#msg-130218Blurb: A modern retelling of Jane Austen's Persuasion, with the vast majority of major characters cast as persons of color. Koh Su Ying and Jeremiah "J" Robinson were the yin and the yang - she was the eldest daughter of one of Singapore's richest families, while his family owned a grocery store in Brooklyn. She was a quiet, studious girl with a passion for art. He was everybody's friend just like his mom and dad, always happy to build anything for anybody. Yet after they met, their lives would never be the same again.

---

Intro Notes: Because almost all the characters are non-Anglo ethnicities, none of the names will come from canon. Here's a guide to the families:

The Koh (Gao) family - this is a mild crossover with Ba Jin's Jia Chun Qiu (Home Spring Autumn) trilogy, with three daughters whose names and personalities come from the Chinese classic. Koh Su Ying (Gao Shuying) is the eldest, and she is brought up in a conservative home but has a modern and independent outlook in her own way. She's the "Anne Elliot" of this story. She has two younger sisters: Su Wah (Shuhua) who is cheerful and easy-going, and Su Chen (Shuzhen) who is quiet and timid. The Koh family are Chinese Singaporeans who became rich through their contract manufacturing business, and they're always on the lookout to diversify into new products to stay relevant to the times. Su Ying ends up working for her family business, whereas Su Wah is an influencer and Su Chen marries young.

The Robinson family - an African-American family in Brooklyn, who are proud that they can finance three children to college. Keisha, the eldest, is a Navy wife and serial entrepreneur; Lucas is an idealistic elementary schoolteacher devoting his life to educating underprivileged children; and Jeremiah, the youngest, who goes by "J", is our "Wentworth" character. He meets Su Ying when he goes to Brown University to pursue his PhD.

I've deliberately not fully matched the personalities of the Koh family to those of the Elliots from canon, and also given our protagonists stable two-parent families instead of orphaning them like Jane Austen did. After all, people have longer life expectancies now so it's normal for them to have living parents well into adulthood, unlike in Regency times. Not only should this make them more relatable as contemporary people, it should also reduce unnecessary angst.

---

March 2020 – The Nowhere Times

Jeremiah “J” Robinson, Columbia University, New York City

She was the yin to my yang. I always liked to say “yang” the American way on purpose, just because she was so cute every time she scolded me. “You don’t say it like that!” she’d exclaimed, jumping up and down in agitation. “It’s not pronounced as ‘yeang’, it’s ‘young’! Yin and ‘young’!”

Of course, she’s Koh Su Ying. Or Su-Ying Koh, if you want to say it the American way. She’s Singaporean royalty, or just about. Her family lives on the wealthiest street in Singapore, the one that’s lined with embassies. Yet in her sweatshirts and jeans and Converse when she was studying at Brown, she looked just like any Asian American girl I could’ve grown up with in Brooklyn – just about almost. ‘Almost’ is the most important word here because it was all the little things that made her different which attracted me to her. Like how she never tried to colour her jet-black hair, nor to do any fancy perms or chemical straightening; it just hung to her waist, silky and straight and soft. And unlike all the American girls I knew, she never had any use for mascara or eyeliner either; with natural, minimalistic makeup, she was already beautiful. She was just so perfectly charming in a way that was even more perfect because it was so unpretentious, as if she knew she didn’t have to try to look cute to be cute. And of course, she didn’t have to try, at least with me; I thought she was the most adorable human being on earth.

The yin to my yang. The Ghibli to my Disney. The breeze to my sunshine. You get the idea, yeah? She was quiet, understated, and introverted, yet she alone stood out from the crowd because there was absolutely nothing shallow or superficial about her. Instead of whiling away her free time shopping, she loved to draw, and the space below her lofted bed in her dorm room was full of her canvases and paints – pastel-hued anime dreamscapes of a utopian world, touched with just that little bit of softness and sadness. Friday and Saturday nights she always preferred staying in to partying, so we’d watch movies and dramas in every conceivable language from every part of the world, on the oversized monitor hooked up to her Mac Pro, the one she drew on when she wasn’t painting on physical canvas. It was our way of exploring the world, since I’d never had the money to travel. The more movies we watched, the more we could see that people were all the same – rich or poor, in Europe or Asia or Latin America, life is made up of childhood dreams, coming of age, love, marriage, and our hopes for the next generation. She believed in doing good by everyone, and even when there were things she didn’t want to do, she’d make herself do them anyway if she believed it was right. Her beliefs and principles were strong, and she’d fight tooth and nail for everything she believed in. Everything, except one thing – that one thing which finally spelled the end of us.

With this pandemic coming upon us, I wonder how she’s doing now.

---

Koh Su-Ying, Singapore

J always liked building all kinds of things for people. You just had to tell him about a problem you had, and he’d design a gadget to fix it. I used to worry about him, because how could he ever finish his PhD when his mind was scattered across seventeen different problems all at once? But that was J, he never could possibly say “no” to anybody. Not when he grew up with a dad who was the unofficial mayor of his block in Brooklyn.

I think I’m inventing a new word here, but J always was a bootstrapper, if you know what I mean. His childhood wasn’t exactly hardscrabble, not when he had two wonderful parents who loved him to bits, but where he was, when I met him, he’d already outgrown and outshone any of his family’s wildest dreams. So, he was there all on his own, the first generation of his family that could cobble together enough money to send three kids to college, and the first (or rather, only) of his siblings to try for a PhD. He was my hero because he did all the things nobody ever expected him to be able to do, without anyone to pave the road for him by pulling strings or introducing him to the right people.

Socially, J was a kind of chameleon. He could talk to just about anybody about anything and everything because that’s what he’d been doing ever since he started helping his mom and dad out at the grocery store his family owns. And it wasn’t just bred into him, it was also about the personality he was born with – he’s just the kind of person who fundamentally likes people. So, listening to and solving other people’s problems, that was second nature to him. And multitasking also came naturally to him – he’d done three majors during four years of undergrad at Purdue: industrial design, mechanical engineering, and occupational and environmental health sciences. That was what he needed for his mission in life – to design and build ergonomic solutions for any kind of human-factors problem that anyone could possibly throw at him.

If I was like earth, J was like water. His dynamism and confidence already got him halfway towards winning over every single person he met, and his good looks plus his skill of being a natural listener would send him right past the finish line. At least, that was a winning combination with just about everybody, except my parents because they’re traditional. Too traditional to understand someone who’s from a different race, social strata and culture from them. Too bad that even though they’re traditional, often what they say still makes sense. And because I listened to the sensible part of their advice and J couldn’t see beyond their limitations, that became the end of us.

With this pandemic coming upon us, I wonder how he’s doing now.]]> Kalee Derbyshire Writers' GuildSun, 06 Feb 2022 03:00:21 +0000