It would be nice to write about how The Blaaag only culminated into a reality when David and I corresponded from different ends of the world, exchanging ideas while sipping cheap alcohol and reading books about race politics. But that's only a hip, summery spin on reality. The true inspiration happened when ignorance pushed us to our last limit.

Whose ignorance? That of our collective peers towards Asian American issues. In a society that swears by a slew of racial stereotypes (twenty of which have popped into your mind already), people don’t know that there is an ongoing crop of activism and protest pitted against such poor actions. Campaigns dealing with Saigon Grill and Lafayette High School pass over people’s heads like nothing, and even when racism screams in our faces we tend to care more about the new ID card’s swipe access, who got CAVA-ed at EC, or the impressionable freshmen that don’t know to hide their plastic badges.

If the ignorance thing did not happen on a daily basis and if the social/political differences that some people made carried through with a bigger bang, we would just write commentary on how Swish and Ollie’s are not the epitome of great Pan-Asian cuisine and so not worth your money (*cough* go here instead).

But that’s not really how it is right now; sometimes, sitting in 212 at 3 am isn’t enough to contain our squeamish discontent and frequent outcries, followed by many unwritten papers and extra coffee. We’d like to give people a more comfortable space—the internet—to explore the so-called other world that they are so afraid to venture into, to advise them to pay attention to things that have gone unnoticed for too long.

The Last Note: Granted, anything wearing the heavy scent of an Ivy League education (and some of you scoff because Barnard supposedly doesn’t count) sounds obnoxious and dismissible, even more so when coming from a group of people whose food is deemed a health hazard. (Not that all Asians are Chinese, but would you have told them apart anyway?)