Sarah Kuhn on Bringing Herself into Her Fiction

MIXED ASIAN MEDIA - December 17, 2021

By Lauren Lola

What happens when Asian American superheroines and increasingly ridiculous evils — like demonic cupcakes and banderillas — are brought together? You get Sarah Kuhn’s Heroine Complex series! Originally debuting back in 2016, the San Francisco-set contemporary fantasy/romance series follows three Asian American women, Evie Tanaka, her younger sister Bea, and her best friend Aveda Jupiter on their extraordinary adventures, in between other shenanigans like eating bad junk food, singing worse karaoke, developing bonds with one another, and falling in love.

The most recent entry in the series, Hollywood Heroine, follows Evie and Aveda to Hollywood, to see their adventures be transformed into a TV series, when lurking supernatural activity makes itself known onset.

A prolific author, Kuhn doesn't recall when she knew she wanted to be a writer. Even though she grew up a big reader, and was constantly making up stories of her own, she never saw it as a profession that people pursued, despite knowing there were people behind the books she read.

She also didn’t see authors who looked like her. As she elaborated, “There were a few here and there, but there weren't a lot, especially in the genres that I was reading. I was a big sci-fi, fantasy person that I could point to and sort of say, this person is like me, this is what I want to do. And also, I had a pretty traditional Japanese American tiger mom.”

Kuhn recalled creating a zine with her friends in middle school that covered topics ranging from who cheated on their math test to what was happening in the latest Babysitters Club book. This early spark of potentially doing something with her life around writing eventually led her to pursue journalism, in a time prior to multimedia becoming the path forward in that field.

“I always was so interested in telling other people’s stories,” she reflected. “I loved doing in-depth profiles of interesting people, and I don't think I really understood that I could also tell my own stories, make someone like me a main character. That was just not something I really thought of until much, much later. So it also took me a while to really get into writing fiction like I do now.”

Kuhn worked specifically as an entertainment journalist — covering nerd culture, which she was and still is, very embedded in. She ran a website with her friends called Alert Nerd, that covered everything from shows, comics, books, and their lives as nerds. Upon the suggestion of a friend, they created a zine in PDF format that allowed them to write longer pieces than the ones they were posting on the website. Every issue had a theme, and for the first one, it was Pon farr; the famous Vulcan mating ritual in Star Trek.

That’s what inspired Kuhn’s serial romantic comedy, One Con Glory. “It was about a nerd girl journalist who has lost a very important action figure throughout her life,” she explained. “She just keeps losing her favorite character. And so, she goes to this convention to write about it, also with this goal to sort of reclaim this action figure. That was kind of the start of me writing fiction more seriously, even though at the time I wrote it as, ‘Oh, this is like a fun story for my friends.’”

One Con Glory wound up developing a following, mainly made up of nerd girls who never saw themselves as the main character of a story before. “I think a lot of us who are nerd girls did not see ourselves as the drivers of the story, as the main character, as the person who will also get into really passionate fights about X and continuity,” Kuhn added. “I think all of our experiences were a little closer to something like that, rather than just being this kind of prize among nerd boys or whatever. So it got that sort of kind of a following. That was really what started me off, and yeah, that's how I started more seriously writing fiction.”

It’s not just nerd girls who saw themselves in Kuhn’s work, but Asian American readers have as well. Having Asian Americans as the leads in her novels didn’t come easy though, as she would often be told that she can’t have women of color as leads or she can’t have no more than one Asian American character; often from people who didn’t even work in publishing.

“I think there's still sort of this idea that there is a default of a universal relatable main character, and that character is always white and always the kind of character we've already seen a lot of,” she said. “I just kind of thought there had to be more readers like me. I mean, I have so many friends who are also Asian American women who would like to see themselves represented in these kinds of fun, romantic, adventurous, nerdy stories that we all enjoy.”

Kuhn dealt with the internal struggle over having her work provide the representation Asian American readers want and need. It was a lot of pressure for her, as she knows her writing alone cannot speak for the entire community. She overcame this struggle eventually by finding power in showing a realistic experience for an Asian American woman like herself.

“I really just had to kind of come to this conclusion [which] was, well, I think the best way to represent is to make these characters real, to make them real human people with lots of messy emotions,” she stated. “I think there is also kind of a pressure with marginalized characters that is unfair.”

Evie and Bea, much like Kuhn, are mixed-race Japanese Americans. Yet in the Heroine Complex series, more focus is placed on their Asian American identities, rather than their mixed-race identities. Meanwhile, in Kuhn’s recent young adult novel, From Little Tokyo, with Love, her protagonist, Rika Rakuyama, is also mixed-race Japanese American, and her mixed-race identity is explored in-depth in this contemporary Cinderella with a twist.

The characters’ distinct experiences are Kuhn’s way of imagining what their experiences are like, who they are, the circumstances they’re in, how they’ve grown up, and how they experience the world around them.

In the cases of Evie and Bea, their backgrounds draw from Kuhn’s real-life experience of growing up one of very few Asian Americans in her small, white hometown. “With Heroine, a lot of the book's core is really about the relationships between these three women, between Evie, Aveda, and Bea,” she explained, “and with Evie and Aveda, I think they really bonded over being the only Asian American kids in their very white, very suburban first grade class.”

Asian Americans are not a monolith, and so for Kuhn, she really wanted to both show the diversity within the large umbrella identity and explore issues that exist within the community. For her approach to writing Rika’s story, she wanted to focus on the tight-knit, very traditional Japanese American community she was brought up in, and her being mixed-race is one of the several ways she stood out. That feeling of isolation and not fitting in was something Kuhn really wanted to explore.

“That feeling of occasional displacement or alienation was also something that we could all bond about,” she said, “and so for me, as you know, a mixed-race person, I always thought that was really interesting and kind of a revelation to hear from other people who maybe weren't mixed; there was something else that made them feel like they didn't quite fit in or that they wouldn't be accepted. So I was like, you know, it would be great if we can all talk about this. This is something else that, even though it's kind of about us being different from each other, it's also something that can be very bonding.”

Kuhn also has written for IPs such as Star Wars and DC. While she is an avid fan of the franchises she has been privileged to write for, she also has to maintain her perspective as a writer and what would make sense for the story.

For the most part, she’s been given a lot of creative freedom with the IPs and has even been able to write Asian American protagonists in them; such as Cassandra Cain in Shadow of the Batgirl and Doctor Aphra in the self-titled audiobook.

“That's certainly something that I'm always trying to bring some kind of my own experience to or something that I think is interesting to explore with the characters,” Kuhn commented.

An example she gave was Doctor Aphra and the idea of her being afraid of people really getting to know her. This was notably explored through her past relationship with the character, Sauna.

“They definitely had a past relationship, and I was like, oh, I really want to delve into that,” she said. “That became a way for me to sort of bring some of myself to it, where I also feel I'm a lot of times scared to let people truly know me, the real me kind of down to my core.

“So I think with writing IPs and the established characters and playing with other people's toys, you're always trying to find a way to make it, or I'm always trying to find a way to make it, personal and to make it interesting to me and to make it something that, even though it's a Star Wars story or it's a DC story, is still, for me, a very personal story.”

Ever the constant writer, Kuhn is currently working on the sixth Heroine Complex novel, Holiday Heroine, that’s set for release next year. She also has a super, secret comics project in the works.

“I do think it could possibly be the best thing I've done in comics,” she remarked. “We'll see. I feel very special about it. I hope people are excited when it gets announced. And then I have other various secrets, but those are the two main things that I'm kind of working on for the rest of the year.”

Lauren Lola is an author, freelance writer, playwright, and screenwriter from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the author of the novels, An Absolute Mind and A Moment’s Worth. She has written plays that have been produced both virtually and in-person for theatre groups on the West Coast of the United States, and has penned the short films, “Breath of Writing” and “Interview with an Aswang.” Aside from Mixed Asian Media, Lauren has also had writing featured on The Nerds of Color, CAAMedia, PBS, YOMYOMF, and other outlets and publications.

You can find Lauren on Twitter and Instagram @akolaurenlola and on her website, www.lolabythebay.wordpress.com.