‘Hyphen’ Magazine to Fill Gap in APA Media

By M.S. Deshmukh
Special to AsianWeek

When A. Magazine folded earlier this year — a victim of the dotcom bust — the Asian Pacific American media landscape was left with a gaping hole: no national, pan-APA, multigenerational magazine.

But the ink on A’s death certificate was barely dry when the wheels began turning to start something new. A group of young Bay Area activists, artists, writers and organizers came together to make their own mark, and it’s called Hyphen.

The magazine is committed to combining hard-hitting reporting with quirky content, interviews, essays, photography and artwork by or concerning APAs. Their mission statement states that they want “to illuminate Asian America through informative, engaging investigation of lives, culture and politics.” The San Francisco-based magazine hopes to premiere its first issue in March 2003.

In fact, the Hyphen team is pushing ahead full-steam, trying to raise funds and produce content right now. On Dec. 5, Hyphen will hold its fledgling fundraising event. The night will feature performances by slam poet Ishle Park, jazz saxophonist Jeff Chan and a screening of Mahesh Pailoor’s award-winning short, Little India. The festivities will take place at APA arts space Locus, at 1640 Post Ave.

Last Friday, AsianWeek caught up with Hyphen editor-in-chief Annie Koh at a coffee shop at 12th and Howard and talked about the birth of a new APA magazine. Dylan’s Desire was playing, Annie sipped tea and — as we began the interview — she received word that her car had just got booted.

Annie Koh: [@*#$!]. I was doing this program where I did community service to pay off my parking tickets, but I stopped half way through. I figured I was good for a couple, but I guess not.

AsianWeek: That sucks.

Koh: Yeah, and I was just laughing at someone in my neighborhood that got the boot. Anyway.

AW: How did Hyphen get started?

Koh: The way this started was, Bernice Yeung, who is a staff writer at SF Weekly, sent an email out to a bunch of her friends when A. Magazine folded earlier this year, and said, “A. Magazine folded, maybe we should start a magazine.” I think our first meeting was over dinner at my house in April. And word got out. Over the summer, a whole bunch of people at Mother Jones got involved. People started bringing their friends, and by the end of the summer there was a feeling that we needed more structure and that’s when we did elections to decide who would lead the three main areas: business, editorial and design. That’s when Yuki [Tessitore — Hyphen publisher], Hatty [Lee — Hyphen art director] and I stepped up.

But it’s really kind of explosively grown in the last two months. Finalizing content, sending out the call for queries, working with freelance writers and artists, getting our advisory board in place, and starting to think about the fundraiser. Talking to the Independent Press Association, the publisher at Mother Jones, talking to Bitch magazine, just figuring out the basics of what it takes to get a magazine off the ground. And then we moved onto the nitty-gritty details, like choosing a name. And of course that’s a hundred times worse than picking a band name because there are 25 people involved.

AW: Looking at your call for queries on your website, it looks like you’ve got a pretty good idea of how you want the magazine to read.

Koh: Yeah, we spent a lot of time with the editorial staff thinking of how to balance serious investigative reporting with kind of more fun cultural pieces. People had different models for magazines already out there that they wanted to base it on. People mentioned Bitch magazine. I was thinking about The New York Times Magazine, just in that mix of sort of highbrow and lowbrow, serious reporting and fun fluff. We’re going to be a young magazine just in terms of who is mostly involved, but we’re not planning on being a hip urban magazine. We’re not going to be Giant Robot, which is more pop culture-oriented.

We want to go beyond pop culture to look at something that’s a broader perspective on the Asian American community. Sort of expand and explode internal and external stereotypes. So, from that person from Southern California who goes clubbing every night at an Asian club to that person who was the only Asian American in their hometown and is all angry about it, we want to challenge what they think about Asian America.

For our first issue, we have a couple feature articles, and one of them is, “Who speaks for Asian America,” looking at leadership and political participation and activism in Asian America. We’re also doing a piece on how deportations are affecting the community, from the new Cambodian repatriation agreement to post-Sept. 11 stuff.

We’re also having fun stuff, like there is this local, kind of, punk/noise/rock musician and promoter, George Chen, and there was, back in the ‘90s, this guy George Chen who wound up being the inadvertent poster-boy for the dot-conomy. His photo was used on at least three or four ads for dot-com companies, this Chinese dude with spiky hair and a surprised look on his face, wearing headphones. So there’s a George Chen on George Chen interview. So we’re trying to entice the reader with quirkiness and wry humor and also give them some solid facts and reporting.

AW: You’re having your first fund-raising event for Hyphen at Locus, what’s that going to be like?

Koh: We’re looking to get about 150 to 200 people in the door throughout the night. It’ll be a packed house. We’re trying to reach out to already active members of the community. People who have been searching for a magazine like this, who’ll be especially excited and can support us, whether it’s with their experiences and their skills, or financially.

AW: And after that?

Koh: We’re going to be doing a series of fundraisers, broadening our reach out to other members of the community who maybe haven’t been dreaming of a progressive Asian American magazine, but who would read it and would find it really interesting. That’ll probably be in a club, with DJs. So we’ll try and diversify whom we do outreach to, but we’ll start with our core: artists, journalists, community activists, people strongly involved in the community.

AW: Right now everyone’s working for free?

Koh: Yeah. Obviously journalists will always want to get paid. We all want to get paid in the long run, but right now, that ‘labor of love’ beginning is pretty familiar. It’s a start-up. We’re doing this because we think there’s an incredible need in the community and people have been very supportive. Folks who can’t come to the fundraiser are saying, “Hey just tell me where I can send the check.”

AW: How much money do you need to put out the first issue?

Koh: Well, we’re looking to be extremely realistic. We’re only aiming for several thousand dollars to make a 5,000 copy print run for the first issue and grow from there. You know, glossy cover, glossy paper, but not necessarily full color everywhere.

AW: What’s distribution going to look like the first time around?

Koh: We’re going to target the West Coast first, because that’s what we know and it’s closer. But, the content of our first issue is not going to be West Coast only. We’ve got stories about people from the Midwest and the East Coast, so editorially, it’s national in scope, but distribution-wise it’ll be West Coast for the first issue and then we’ll make the effort to push east.

AW: Is it possible that this is the most opportune moment for an Asian American magazine to get off the ground?

Koh: Possibly. But I still think that advertisers and corporations don’t know what to make of the Asian American market. Four percent doesn’t sound like a lot. But we’re still one of the fastest growing minorities in the country, and I think that the 2000 Census really did a lot to wake some people up and say, “Hello, we’re still here, we’re not sojourners anymore, and we’re not going to go away.”

So in that sense, maybe this is a more opportune time. The second generation has really grown up and we’ve really had time to see where our connections lie and what this community means. And so people whose parents immigrated post-65, which is my parents, maybe a sixth generation Chinese American, the English speaking generation, I think there’s a critical mass. We’re growing older and more wealthy and wiser, and so maybe we’re further along and we’ll be able to tap into the maturing of the Asian American community.

The Hyphen fundraiser will be held on Thursday, Dec. 5 at Locus, 1640 Post St., San Francisco. Admission is $10 – 50 sliding scale. The reception starts at 7 p.m. and performances begin at 8 p.m. For more information, call 415-806-3069 or go to www.hyphenmagazine.com.