Viet Nguyen’s Sympathizer on HBO

One of the things that has been occuring as of late is the increase in representation of AAPI in films and on TV. In the past, we only got the Joy Luck Club, but nothing happened afterwards. Things have drastically changed in the past 10 years. During the 1990s, we had very little in terms of exposure for AAPI in film, and AAPI writers were also not given the opportunities which were locked down by both the combination of mainstream writers and the New York Publishing Houses.

Today, we have Viet Nguyen’s The Sympathizer on HBO. Consider this thought: HBO brought us Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, and other series. Given this context, having an AAPI centric show on HBO is a big win.

Congrats to Viet, who was part of the Editorial Board of dISorient Journalzine during the early days.

Will try to go to print???

After some thoughts about the nature of the Internet, and the growth of Generative Artificial Intelligence, I’ve decided to go to a traditional hard copy version of dISorient Journalzine. Again, everything is still in the formative stage, but I believe in hard copy zines can have a more safer situation given how things like ChapGPT scavenges across the net to generate its content.

When the zine was first created, this was before we had 5g on iPhones, and we used desktop publishing programs and print houses with runs of about 500 copies. The costs were about $2000 per run, which also included a designer for the zine. The editorial work was entirely voluntary, and we had several editorial boards rotate over time. Towards the end of the run, I had specific demographics run dedicated versions of the zine, which essentially became almost mini-anthologies. I intend to do much of the same with the revamp.

I am picking up a fancy book scanner, and I intend to scan the old editions of the zine for people to read. All of them are out of print, and therefore only accessible at UCLA’s Asian American Studies Center library.

I had received a number of submissions when I was trying to go online. One of them was from Amy Uyematsu. She had always supported the zine, and she was instrumental in its success.

Much love to Amy Uyematsu.

So it begins

dISorient Journalzine has been under hibernation for several decades. When the California Arts Council was defunded in the early 2000s, and the grants that supported various community-based arts organizations vanished, so did dISorient Journalzine.

This website is a resurrection of the zine, but it will also feature a section for overall literary events in the Southern California basin. I hope this website will become a resource for AAPI-related arts.