Ever think about eating a dog? Did you know that Dean Cain, television’s new Superman, is Japanese American? Or that sitcom star Margaret Cho prefers married men?
Such topics are the stuff of Yolk, a quarterly magazine for young Asian Americans that is put together in a loft in the old Pabst brewery in Lincoln Heights and reaches nearly 45,000 readers nationwide.
They are also what Yolk’s editors think are on the minds of a new generation of Asian Americans: those raised and educated in the United States as Asia increasingly influences America, both through business and immigration. This generation falls between the cracks, with interests overlooked by both the popular press and the Asian ethnic publications that serve recent immigrants, according to Tin Yen, the 30 year old co-founder of Yolk.
“The media’s like a mirror that reflects our society, but when I was growing up I never saw myself, as an Asian American reflected in that mirror.” Yen said.
Yolk’s reflection of its generation combines sections on fashion, entertainment and music, with occasional in-your-face attacks on our society’s misunderstanding of Asian culture. A recent story on dog-eating, for instance, asks: “Why should fish or rabbits suffer the butcher block? Maybe it’s because rabbits can’t catch a Frisbee as well as a German Shepherd.”
The magazine’s premise is that there is something common to Japanese, Korean and Chinese Americans, as well as Vietnamese, Filipinos, Indians and other Asian American groups.
Finding that common ground is the magazine’s mission, and the staff works with missionary zeal, for worse-than-missionary pay.
Tommy Tam, 26, first thought of starting the magazine as a USC student four years ago. Having grown up isolated in a nearly all-white Florida town, Tam was in awe of the huge Asian American communities of Los Angeles, but was disappointed at the lack of a magazine or newspaper to chronicle Asian American life.
Yolk was born in 1994 when Tam and Yen, a partner in a graphic design firm, assembled a group that included editor Larry Tazuma, contributing editor Philip Chung and Amy Tu. Tu, 22, is the magazine’s chief financial officer and a stock market prodigy who co-signed the $50,000 bank loan that got the eager group going.
Despite its up-market look and contents, with cover stories on the hottest Asian American celebrities and bold graphics. Yolk’s production borders on the back alley. Tam lives in the second-story brewery loft office; computers and other equipment are borrowed from friends, and writers and photographers, some of whom are highly regarded professionals, often work for no pay.
“They do it because they believe in what we’re trying to accomplish,” said Tazuma, 29, who supports himself by writing free-lance stories for other publications
It was Tazuma who hatched the magazine’s name. An egg yolk is yellow, he said, and so is the nominal color of Asian people’s skin, regardless of nationality. It’s a title much like Ebony.
That, Tazuma insisted, is all it means, though others often read more into it. “It has nothing to do with it being surrounded by an outer white shell, or brown shell, if you choose to eat brown eggs.”
The name signifies that elusive Asian American aesthetic that each issue tries to pin down.
If adult Asian immigrants are divided by the different languages, politics and customs of their home countries, Yolk bets that American-reared, English-speaking Asians are all hungry for glossy images of glamorous Asian Americans, whatever their ethnicity, and tales of how other Asians have dealt with life as minorities in the United States.
Asian immigrants may want publications in their native languages that keep them in touch with their home countries, but Yolk asserts that American born-Asians want a magazine that examines their lives in the United States.
At the very least, Yolk thinks younger Asian Americans like the same TV shows. Its three cover subjects have been television stars Margaret Cho, a Korean American, Chinese American Russell Wong, and Dean Cain, a Japanese American.
Charles S. Chun, a 28 year old Korean American actor who reads Yolk, agreed that television stars have broad appeal to Asian Americans. “Whether they’re Japanese American, or Vietnamese or Thai, people like Russell Wong are heroes to Asian American youths,” Chun said.
The magazine’s aim, said Tazuma, is to show its readers that young Asian Americans are beginning to be successful in diverse areas. There are actors, athletes, film directors and singers.
Yolk avoids the biggest stars and most accomplished Asian Americans, favoring those who were recently struggling or were previously overlooked. Tazuma said younger readers are more likely to be inspired rather than intimidated by such subjects.
Thus, Yolk profiles first-times directors like Kayo Hatta, whose low-budget “Picture Bride” was a critical favorite, over “Joy Luck Club” director Wayne Wang. Dr. Tin Liu, the unknown Chinese American inventor of Play-Doh, is celebrated over architect I.M.Pei.
Like the readers they hope to draw, Yolk’s founders have widely different roots. Tazuma is a third-generation Japanese American from Seattle; Tin Yen was born in Taiwan and grew up in Echo Park. Tommy Tam is a Chinese American born in Mississippi and raised in Jacksonville, Fla.; Philip Chung, 25, came from Korea and grew up in South-Central and the San Gabriel Valley.
The staff says their base in Lincoln Heights, in addition to being cheap and near their printer, also balances their perspective. “We’re close to Chinatown, Little Tokyo, Koreatown, but we’re not immersed in a subculture like we might be if we were in predominantly Chinese Monterey Park,” Tam said.
Though short on resources, Yolk’s start was well-timed. Margaret Cho’s “All-American Girl” sitcom was starting on ABC, and “The Joy Luck Club” and “Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story” were recent box office hits. The Asian American entertainment spurt gave the magazine new stars to profile.
The networks and studios were testing the same waters as Yolk, checking the viability of the English-speaking Asian market. Companies such as long-distance phone services and banks have mined lucrative Asian American markets in the past by targeting specific ethnic groups through Asian language media.
The unanswered question remains whether American-raised Asians can be reached through a common medium. If so, they are a prime market, according to Eleanor N. Yu, president of San Francisco-based Adland, one of the largest Asian American advertising firms in the United States.
According to an analysis of Census data by Yu’s firm, 1.5 million of the 7.5 million Asian Americans are U.S.-born. About 350,000 of the former live in Southern California. Their median age is 28, their average annual income is $45,000 and two-thirds are college-educated and/or homeowners.
Yolk’s future depends on business confidence in English-language Asian media. Liane Loui, Yolk’s advertising manager, said many advertisers, even those who have run Asian-language campaigns, remain skeptical. “A lot of them think they’re already reaching our readers through English-language media.”
Beer, cosmetics and clothing companies have, nevertheless, bought ads, and the magazine’s last two issues would have broken even had paper costs not gone up 20% in the last year, according to Tu.
But Yolk has never been about making money. “it’s not a business, it’s a project,” Tazuma said.
Ask staffers why they’re willing to forgo things like pay, and many visions emerge.
For Chung, working for Yolk is part of a personal commitment made in 1992, when he decided to move back to Los Angeles from Santa Cruz after the riots.
“The riots showed me that Asian Americans are still stuck in the middle, without a place,” Chung said. “We’re not black or white and we and the rest of society don’t know where we fit in the spectrum of race.”
Yolk and the plays he is writing, Chung said, can help establish an Asian American cultural foothold. “Unlike African Americans, we’re still asking ourselves: `What have we created? Where is our jazz?'”
Even if Yolk doesn’t meet their most ambitious goals of shapiro American culture, there is evidence that the Lincoln Heights venture has at least touched a few young lives.
“My daughters think their noses are too small, their hair is too thick and they are too short,” a mother wrote to the magazine. “They read Sassy, Huh and Seventeen, and rarely is there an Asian face. Thank you for producing a magazine that addresses young Asian Americans.”