By Aorui Pi

With just a single sheet of paper, three folds, and one cut, you can create an eight-page zine. Handmade and self-published, zines are mini magazines driven by passion, not profit.

Zinemaking is as simple as it sounds and as creative as it gets. A quick Google search for “how to make a zine” brings up over 45 million results. These self-published works are easy to reproduce and are an intriguing tool of expression for communities, fan cults, and political movements. Yet for Asian American creatives, there’s no single definition of what a zine is—its meaning evolves across generations.

nes became holding spots for all sorts of experiments with paper. A world of creativity and imagination,” says Sophie Wang, 32, a second-generation Chinese American zinester. She primarily creates educational zines at the intersection of technology, science, and social justice, weaving in her own Chinese American experience, which she reflects was largely “shaped by the U.S. immigration policies.”

One of Wang’s works, Do You Speak Second Gen?, is a 12-pager that’s stab-bound and printed on transparency paper, and it delves into the complexities of growing up in a Chinese immigrant family. Her parents arrived in the U.S. in the ’80s through the H-1B visa expansion, which brought a wave of highly skilled workers from East Asia and India due to the tech boom. As each generation of immigrants carries distinct perspectives, struggles, and cultural identities, these evolving narratives are reflected in all of Wang’s zines.

Beginning in 1965, the U.S. began to dismantle over a century of exclusionary immigration laws, allowing thousands of Asian families to build new lives in the land of freedom. By the early ‘70s, children of Asian immigrants were still grappling with self-identity and the concept of being “Asian American.” It was a time when calling any East Asian-looking person “oriental” was still common, when orange chicken hadn’t yet made its debut on the West Coast, and students were actively protesting the Vietnam War on campuses.

To read the entire article: https://radii.co/article/the-rise-of-the-asian-american-zine

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