In 2002, spurred by the shuttering of A. Magazine, a small group of 20-and-30-something journalists and artists got together to fill the void by envisioning the kind of magazine we always wanted to read: a publication that would go beyond celebrity interviews and essays about discovering our roots, which we found a long time ago, thank-you-very-much.

We began meeting around a kitchen table in San Francisco that spring, and over snacks and beer, a vision slowly emerged. The magazine wouldn’t flinch at covering serious issues, but also wouldn’t take itself too seriously. It would cover Asian Americans in Texas, Kansas, and Minnesota, not just the critical mass living in California and New York. It would feature emerging artists, thinkers, and doers, not only the few established Asian Americans who’d gotten mainstream approval. It would be a magazine that looked beyond identity — we’d explore cultural issues while tackling what is Asian American by accident, by tangent, or by happenstance.