Writing the Sanctum serial this year has been a new kind of challenge. Collin was writing on home turf. Chicago was a city I knew. Kink was a world in which I had experience. Polyamory came from my own life. Damian & Jun led me a little further afield, but still in realms where I had deep knowledge or at least familiarity. The park along the Han River where Damian chases Jun was a place I myself had run. Seattle where Jun was born were streets I’d walked. While K-Pop required some research, it had been on my radar since 2010 when one of my coworkers in South Korea confided in us that she’d turned down a talent hunter from an agency. Music itself and performances were experiences I understood. Yoihei, Jun’s fellow group member, comes from a prefecture in Japan where I lived. The story of the butterfly was a tale I’d learned in university and remunerated on often.
When Ellisandre, Sevastyan, and Rei made it clear that their story was next, I knew Sanctum would be partially new territory. I’ve never taken a class on the Russian language. I went in knowing that my cultural literacy on Sevastyan’s backstory was lighter than what I’d started with for Damian, Collin, or Jun. I started, as I always do, by hitting up the Chicago Public Library website, knowing that my searches would be too esoteric for the books to just be sitting on the shelves of my local branch. I filled my podcast playlists with relevant episodes and speakers and listened while scrubbing dishes and cooking. And I kept dozens of research tabs open on my computer, sometimes walking up and down the streets of one Russian city or another via Google maps to make sure the building descriptions were accurate.
One thing that gets forgotten in the English-speaking world is that Russia and China share a long border. I knew from the beginning that this was a region in which Sevastyan was well versed. Even with my degree in East Asia Studies, focused on China, this area was rarely mentioned. Despite sitting atop East Asia, Russia largely only appeared in my studies during the Soviet era when Stalin was friend and foe by turn to Mao Zedong and Communist China. When I lived in mainland China, you could still see Soviet-inspired architecture and Soviet-influenced art. The eras are built into the landscape.
There’s always a danger in representing any culture, even one’s own, because every single person in that culture has their own perspective and their own words. No single individual carries the entire heritage in their own person. A long time ago, I made a commitment to myself and my characters to never force them to become a stereotype to carry an entire identity. The world is a vast place. One of my Chinese students had red hair and blue eyes. One of my Japanese friends was deeply involved in hula dancing from Hawai’i. There are concentrations of Korean populations in Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. When a new character shows up, I sit down and ask them for their story, because that, in the end, matters more than labels I could quickly derive for them. They, like us, are human before they are anything else.
Ciara Darren 