o u r v i s i o n

The Wave is a literary and arts magazine that seeks to create a platform for artists and readers to express and reflect on Asian anglophone experiences. We publish art, poetry, fiction, and essays by Asians anglophone of all backgrounds. Our mission is to expand prevailing notions of what it means to be an Asian anglophone and to showcase the vast range of talent and energy in our Harvard community and beyond.

why…

*…should an Asian anglophone art and literary magazine exist?*

Why Asian magazine

The Wave is an apt name for a timely publication, reshaping an existing collective consciousness about Asianness at our crucial moment of Asian representation in the arts. Arts and literature seek to express both the particularities and generalities about the human experience, and the unique convergence of cultures particular to the anglophone Asian experience is in fact also broadly representative of globalized modernity.

— May Wang

For me, The Wave is a testament to the dynamism and breadth of Asian/American artistic and cultural production... This… is what excites me the most about The Wave: that our community interprets Asian/American a multitude of ways, each full of excitement and creativity.

— Ria Modak

Voice.

— Elynna Chang

I think that if artists do not create art that matters to their communities, the art itself loses its effectiveness, no matter how skillfully it was crafted. Though race is not the only community to which we belong, I think it is one of them, whether we are aware of it or not.

— Eric Zhou

We, Asians and Asian Americans, are artists. We need no other reason.

— Michael Baick

*…should there be more South Asians in an Asian anglophone magazine?*

Why South Asians

When I read Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” in high school, I was blown away. I had never read someone who handled the themes of a fragmented nostos, displaced identity, and cultural duplexity with more nuance... the first Asian anglophone writers are in fact South Asian, and they are the ones who have shown us an English literature that can not only speak to diasporic communities worldwide, but also to humanity at large.

— Eric Zhou

…especially here at Harvard, many of our Asian clubs and Asian labelled spaces are really only inviting for East Asians. What unifies us and should make us fight stronger for these pan-Asian identities in this magazine is just that - our historical and shared fight against racism and against silence in America.

— Jerrica Li

South Asians are dramatically underrepresented not only in commercially popular Asian/Asian American narratives—think: Fresh off the Boat, Crazy Rich Asians, Always Be My Maybe—but also in Asian/Asian American groups on campus... “Asian” should not merely evoke “East Asian” in the public consciousness. It is so much more complicated—so much more kaleidoscopic—than that.

— Céline Vendler