How <em>Giant Robot</em> Captured Asian America

The first issue of the magazine Giant Robot I ever came across featured the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai on the cover—this was enough to stand out on a crowded newsstand in the mid-nineteen-nineties. But what caught my attention were the teasers for a random assortment of other stories, about gangs, surfing, shaved ice, orgies. A small tagline in the top right corner read “A magazine for you.” But who was I? I was a teen-ager and desperate to know. I suspected Giant Robot could help me figure it out.

For anyone under the age of forty, this level of impressionability might sound a bit silly. But this was a time when there were few things as intoxicating as a bountiful magazine rack, with countless interests, ideologies, identities to try on for size. These days styles and reference points float freely; back then the idea that one could bridge silos, admitting an affection for, say, both punk rock and Hello Kitty, felt jarring. There was something about Giant Robot’s affection for Asian culture—and its allergy to dwelling on what that meant—that drew in many young people, like me, who were searching for a context. It was a magazine that was very serious about some things, and not at all serious about others.

Eric Nakamura started Giant Robot in 1994, having recently left his job at Larry Flynt Publications, a Los Angeles media empire that published magazines ranging from VideoGames (where Nakamura had found work right out of college, as an editor) to Rap Pages and Hustler. His experiences at Flynt suggested that making a magazine wasn’t too hard. He put together a sixty-four-page zine, stapled and xeroxed, about the things that fascinated him and his friends: sumo wrestling, the Japanese noise band Boredoms, kung-fu movies, dating. He invited Martin Wong, a kindred spirit he’d seen around at punk shows, to write and to help distribute the two hundred and forty copies of the zine’s initial run.

“We were just writing about stuff we liked,” Wong, who was working as an editor at a textbook company at the time, said. “We weren’t trying to define anything or change anything.” For the second issue, Wong wrote about his experience dressing up as Hello Kitty for a Sanrio festival in Southern California, and the surprisingly vitriolic things passersby said to him (“I hate you,” “Get a life”). Wong soon became Giant Robot’s co-editor, and by the fourth issue they had graduated from D.I.Y. folding and stapling to a standard-size, nationally distributed magazine with a full-color cover, albeit one that was still sustained by volunteer labor. In 1996, Giant Robot became a quarterly, and by the late nineteen-nineties they were publishing up to six times a year, with a circulation that peaked in the early two-thousands at around twenty-seven thousand. What attracted people in from the mid-nineties through 2011, when Giant Robot published its final issue, was its mixture of arrogance—the sense that it was made by people with a strident sense of taste—but also curiosity. This run is the subject of “Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture,” a lavishly designed hardcover book, just published by Drawn & Quarterly, that collects some of the magazine’s most important articles, as well as memories from contributors and readers.

Photograph by Eric Nakamura / Courtesy Drawn & Quarterly

“Giant Robot”—edited by Nakamura, along with Francine Yulo, Tracy Hurren, Megan Tan, and Tom Devlin—reprints a representative cross-section of pieces, arranging them thematically rather than chronologically. Claudine Ko, one of Giant Robot’s most lively contributors in the late nineties and early two-thousands and now an editor for the Times’s T Brand Studio, offers a remarkably comprehensive introduction to the magazine, especially its early days. In Ko’s telling, there was no grand vision, just a constant need to fill pages. In 1996, Wong proposed a piece about Manzanar, the site of one of the concentration camps where people of Japanese descent were imprisoned during the Second World War, which his family often drove past on their ski trips to the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains. Wong and Nakamura—whose father had been incarcerated at the Poston camp, in Arizona—packed their skateboards and decided to take a road trip.

The result was “Return to Manzanar,” a solemn yet rebellious piece of writing. Wong notes the names etched into the reservoir walls by “vandal Manzanar internees” and talks with Sue Embrey, who was imprisoned there as a teen-ager, about whether she believes the site is haunted. His piece tries to restore some nuance to the lives of those who were trapped there. It was, he writes, a place where people “gardened, painted pictures, published newspapers, composed poetry, made babies, and played volleyball and baseball,” making the most out of a horrific situation. Wong and Nakamura skate through the park, doing tricks off a monument, wondering what the people driving by thought “at the sight of skateboarders in the middle of hell.” As Nakamura explains to Ko in the book, “It’s taking ownership of an otherwise fucked-up place.”

A meandering interview style was characteristic of nineties zines, teaching you as much about the interviewers and their whims as whomever they were talking to. There’s a particularly candid and wide-ranging conversation between Nakamura and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. The actor seems to forget that he’s baring his soul about his lowest moments to what was then just an obscure American zine. “At one time, I wanted to commit suicide because I couldn’t get myself out of my character,” he says, recounting an early moment in his career. “You have to pretend you are others at work, then you get so confused within you.” As the conversation continues, you can almost sense Nakamura’s astonishment that Leung is still on the line, as the actor answers increasingly random questions about how he perfected his hair style and whether he’d ever had a nose ring. When Nakamura and Wong interview the actress Maggie Cheung, they somehow end up talking about her teen years, when she identified with the British mod subculture. They ask her point-blank, “Are you weird?” “I don’t know,” she replies. “I’m just me.” In Ko’s interview with the filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, she remarks that Wong makes Asian people “look cool” compared with their portrayal in American films. He simply says, “Asian people are cool.”

Reading Giant Robot, you got the sense that anything was worth reviewing—snacks, books, movies, seven-inch singles, Asian canned coffee drinks—and everyone was worth interviewing, if only so that you could learn a little more about the world around you. One of the odder interviews the magazine published resulted from a letter Nakamura received from an unlikely reader: Wayne Lo, a mass shooter who, in 1992, killed two people and injured four others at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he was a student. The two exchanged letters, and Nakamura eventually visited him in prison. His questions about Lo’s memories of the shooting, and the day-to-day routine in prison, are curious and blunt. (“What’s the prison like?” “Are you friends with any guards?”) Lo seems placid and bemused—until the end, when Nakamura asks him about the T-shirt that he famously wore on the night of the crime, which advertised the New York hardcore band Sick of It All. Lo admits that he merely dabbled in punk, and that the shirt was just a coincidence. “I like glam metal,” he tells Nakamura. “Music died when grunge emerged.”

Although the book is a vital document, it’s hard to convey the power of a single issue of a magazine. The issues marked a small sliver of time, the bound-and-stapled finality of a set of adventures and editorial decisions. (Many of the early issues are still available for relatively cheap on Giant Robot’s Web site, as well as on eBay.) For me as a reader, the articles were just part of the draw; I pored over the ads, the Top Ten lists, the letters, making sense of the wild juxtapositions from page to page. For years, I’ve had a postcard of the cover of the tenth issue hanging next to my desk. The cover star is Jenny Shimizu, the supermodel and queer icon of the nineties. There are articles about graffiti and L.A. dance music. Yet the centerpiece of the issue is a series of pieces about the Yellow Power movement, full of interviews with activists, community leaders, and artists from the sixties and seventies.

Nakamura and Wong maintained a punk detachment from mainstream establishments. The Yellow Power stories open with a preëmptive note to anyone who applies the standards of academic rigor to their work: “We don’t care.” In a 1999 interview with the animator Hayao Miyazaki, Nakamura jokes about the “New York Times maggots” trying to poach all his questions. Nakamura and Wong continued to grow their own small corner of the world. As the readership grew, Nakamura branched out and opened Giant Robot stores in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, which stocked toys, books, and stationery. The first one is still open on Sawtelle Boulevard, in Los Angeles, across the street from GR2, Nakamura’s art gallery.

Even though Giant Robot created a robust online community known as the Robot Lounge, few magazines of its size and scale were prepared for the Internet. Suddenly, arcane knowledge was everywhere. You didn’t need to find an obscure magazine to read about the Cambodian American dominance of Southern California’s doughnut industry or learn the taxonomy of Asian American male haircuts (“fade,” “hedgehog,” “butt cut,” “Republican”). In fact, you could even learn about these pop-culture things in college classes. Around 2011, the debts had piled up, and Nakamura was losing some of the energy to continue publishing. “Being on the cusp of young and old is a difficult place to navigate,” he recalls in “Giant Robot.” “What was GR? A magazine for younger people or a magazine that aged with its audience? Or was it both?”

One of the myths of bygone, fringe subcultures is that they welcomed all, fellow-travellers and the curious alike. But community is as much about exclusion as inclusion, and I remember how acidic even the most modest, self-published zines could be about one another. We weren’t united by some D.I.Y. ethos; you had to show yourself to be more than a sycophant or copycat. I was both these things, and my zines were entry-level approximations of the slightly more prominent ones that I read. I wasn’t as ethical as Bamboo Girl or as romantic as Secret Asian Man. I had no faith in my sense of the esoteric. I carefully gate-kept my influences among my immediate peers in order to seem original.

Eventually, Giant Robot offered a lukewarm review of one of my more coherent efforts, which probably made me feel more validated than the editors intended. I looked up to Nakamura and Wong, in that very specific way a twenty-year-old might look up to someone who is twenty-five. I felt that they had discovered some trick to adult life, orienting their days around hanging out and making things. I was drawn to their sheer force of will. When I was a sophomore in college, I interviewed Nakamura once over the phone when he was promoting a sweet, slacker buddy film he’d shot with his cousin, called “Sunsets.” He said something that I’d probably been told thousands of times before, only this time I heard it. Try something big, he said; after all, it’s not like he was a trained filmmaker. If it works out or not, he continued, the experience will nonetheless change you.

A few months later, some friends at U.C. Davis invited me to speak on a panel about Asian Americans and zine culture alongside Nakamura and Wong, simply because they knew I’d be excited to finally meet them. Nakamura and Wong had brought along their friend David Choe, who’d done some illustrations for them. This was one of those situations where there were just as many people on the panel as in the audience, but it didn’t matter; in fact, it only made the gathering feel all the more special, as though we were in on some secret hidden in plain sight. After dinner at a Japanese restaurant—I ordered the same thing as Nakamura, because I had never heard of chirashi—I suggested that they come hang out in Berkeley on their drive back to Los Angeles.

We drove down the highway in a caravan, reaching the East Bay just as the sun set. For a while, I would remember this as one of the best nights of my life, though it’s not because anything epic happened. So much of that period of life, in your late teens and early twenties, involves cycling through rough drafts on your way to whomever you end up becoming. At one point, they asked me what I did for fun, and I rehashed all the Berkeley spots I’d read about from their magazine. But they wanted to know what I did. Where were my spots? I realized that they weren’t in the business of producing clones of themselves. We were supposed to make our own things, take on our own impossible projects, find our own villains.

I remember taking turns thrashing about on a skateboard in a deserted pool hall in Richmond. I studied the records that Nakamura and Wong flipped through at a store in Berkeley, memorizing some titles to investigate later. We also ended up going to see some bands play at a bar, and, since I was underage, one of them slipped me his expired driver’s license. I remember Choe smiling and assuring me that all Asians look the same.

Nowadays, many people probably know the Giant Robot name because of the store or the gallery, or the art biennials that Nakamura curates for the Japanese American National Museum. Wong and his wife, Wendy Lau, who was the magazine’s designer, spend most of their free time supporting their sixteen-year-old daughter and her all-female punk band, the Linda Lindas, who just finished touring with Green Day and the Smashing Pumpkins. But Giant Robot’s ambitions were always much more modest, simply creating spaces to hang out, in real life or on the page.

There was a time in my life when it felt as though zines were an epidemic, all of us wanting to share some small part of ourselves in a way that felt both fleeting and permanent. We were all so desperate to figure out if we had something significant to say, firing off sentences in every direction, mimicking those who seemed to have it all figured out. Was Giant Robot a vision of what it meant to be Asian American? I was of an age where I wanted definitive answers on such things. But this was a question that the magazine deferred. The editors were too voracious for new encounters, too busy planning the next issue. They offered just one vision of a life among many, not an agenda to be followed. At the heart of youthful admiration, the kind I felt, is a kind of envy—a small sadness that you didn’t think of something first. You are lucky if you ever feel this way, because now you have to do something else—something you will claim as your own. ♦