Magazine Caters to Lifestyles of Young Asian Americans

Ever think about eating a dog? Did you know that Dean Cain, television’s new Superman, is Japanese American? Or that television star Margaret Cho prefers married men?

Such topics are the stuff of Yolk, a quarterly magazine for young Asian Americans that’s 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 is on the minds of a new generation of Asian Americans: Those raised and educated in the United States and coming of age 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 misunderstandings 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.

Yolk was born in 1994 when Yen, a partner in a graphic design firm, and Tommy Tam, 26, assembled a group that included editors Philip Chung and Larry Tazuma, and Amy Lee Tu, a 22-year-old stock market prodigy who co-signed the $50,000 bank loan that got the eager group going.

Despite its upscale 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; writers and photographers, some of whom are highly regarded professionals, often work for no pay.

“They believe in what we’re trying to accomplish,” said Tazuma, Yolk’s 29-year-old editor.

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.

“It has nothing to do with it being surrounded by an outer white shell, or brown shell, if you choose to eat brown eggs,” Tazuma quipped.

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 hungry for glossy images of glamorous Asian Americans, whatever their ethnicity, and tales of how other Asians have dealt with life as a minority 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.

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.

But Yolk has never been about making money alone, its crew insists. “It’s not a business, it’s a project,” Tazuma said.

Even if Yolk doesn’t meet its most ambitious goals of helping to shape American youth culture, there’s 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,” one 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.”