A Place for Their Own Heroes
As a teen growing up in Los Angeles, South Korean-born Tom Kagy would run to the newsstand every week and flip through Time and Newsweek with one objective: to find articles about other Asians. “I was desperately looking for some sign that it’s OK to be an Asian American,” Kagy says. “And that you can be successful, you can be accepted.”
Rarely did Kagy see any confirmation in the mainstream media that Asians even existed in the U.S., let alone that they did anything laudable.
That 25-year-old memory permeates Kagy’s bimonthly Transpacific, which he started in 1986 to chronicle Asian American success stories and business issues, along with three other subsequent magazines devoted to Asians. As if reassuring himself along with his upscale readers that Asian Americans have found a place in American business and society, Kagy hammers at one consistent theme: “Meet the Asian Americans who have made it--do you know who they are?”
By answering that question, Kagy has established himself over the years in a market that’s largely untouched, but he faces the paradox of many ethnic publishers: The readers are out there, but capturing them is no simple thing. In fact, Transpacific has beaten back a dozen competitors in the last four years. The only one left standing is the New York-based A.
“I don’t think anybody could have stuck it out as he has,” says Kagy’s wife, Shi, who edits their 4-year-old fashion magazine, Face.
And the struggle continues with Kagy employing a low-budget strategy that isn’t always evident to the casual reader. He and his wife alone handle most of the editorial and layout duties (a four-person sales staff sells about 10 pages of ads per issue), with some articles written under pseudonyms so the Kagy byline doesn’t repeat itself too often. The same file photos show up in both Transpacific and Face. He’s gone from dating each issue to simply numbering them, which helps mask how he and his wife are sometimes too busy to meet their deadlines.
One reason survival requires all these measures is that advertisers don’t always recognize Transpacific and Face as pipelines to the $150-billion Asian American market. Vaughn Benjamin of the Magazine Publishers of America, a trade group, believes ethnic magazines in general get little respect from advertisers. “I’m not sure they’re convinced that they can’t reach those people through other means.”
“[The magazine] fills a need,” argues actor George Takei (“Star Trek’s” Mr. Sulu), a longtime Transpacific columnist and investor in Kagy’s publishing company, Transpacific Media. “There are Asian press in all the ethnic communities, but some of the global thrusts of certain issues don’t get addressed. . . . Some issues that do get addressed by the larger media--they see it from the vantage point of the larger community, which I think is not necessarily a balanced view.”
Transpacific sports mammoth articles detailing “100 Asian American Entrepreneurs,” “40 Professionals Worth Knowing” and “Top 10 Asian American Entrepreneurs Under 40.” Amid a profusion of photos and color, we learn how China-born Bill Mow built Bugle Boy Industries into America’s fourth-largest sportswear company, and that Korean American C.W. Kim designed many of San Diego’s more spectacular high-rises.
“When we first started,” Kagy says, “we were criticized for emphasizing the success aspect. People would say that there are all these Asians suffering in ghettos that aren’t being treated fairly . . . but now we don’t really see that criticism. I think Asians’ self-image is quite different.”
“A lot of the people they interview, I didn’t know they exist,” says Oi Lin Chen, president of Sunrider International, a herbal product company profiled recently in both Transpacific and Face. She views the stories as inspiration to other Asians who may feel dragged down by their minority status. “It makes them feel like they are equal because this is a freedom country and we have equal opportunity for everybody.”
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Four years ago, Kagy wrote about persistent stereotypes in the mainstream media: “Asians are seen as being standouts at being quiet sidekicks, making sushi, studying . . . [but] we are seen as constitutionally incapable of excelling at basketball, lawyering . . . or fighting with cool resourcefulness against astronomical odds.”
That was the angry Tom Kagy. But now at 41 with a little gray hair, he appears content during an interview. A runner and vegetarian, he’s trim and mellow, conceding that he’s trimmed back his social critiques. The country has become more enlightened, he believes, and, besides, advertisers aren’t always willing to buy space in a journal of diatribes. “I’m no longer inexperienced enough to confuse every annoyance that I feel,” he says, “with the mission of the magazine.”
And the 11-year-old Transpacific has evolved. Kagy describes it as once being an undefined blend of “anything from just out-and-out cheesecake with absolutely no other pretension to redeeming value to extremely intellectual, almost academic dissertations on the future of Korea.” That was too broad a mix, he says now; so four years ago, he split off the distracting fashion and lifestyle subjects into three other publications: Face and two Internet offerings, Tea, devoted to entertainment subjects, and XO, which has been described as “Playboy without the centerfold” (https://www.tmiweb.com).
Face is the most popular offshoot. Shi Kagy says that most fashion magazines, if they include Asians at all, make them look like geishas or “some white person’s image of what an Asian woman should look like. It’s exactly the style that Asian women just detest.”
This small publishing empire based in Malibu has brought the Kagys a combined circulation of about 50,000 in subscription and newsstand sales, and 1.5 million monthly hits at their Web site. Two-thirds of the print magazines are sold on the West Coast.
The potential for higher circulation is unmistakable. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the percentage of Asians in the U.S. will grow from 3.3% to 8.2% over the next 50 years. And while most of that increase will come from immigrants who aren’t Kagy’s target audience, the census predicts that about 150,000 Asians a year will be American-born.
Statistics like those have already driven other markets. “There have been an explosion in Hispanic and black magazines,” says Samir Husni, who puts out a guide to new magazines for the University of Mississippi’s journalism department. “And I think Asian Americans are the next logical group.”
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Kagy discovered this market niche in law school after Newsweek published his bluntly titled essay, “Stop Stereotyping Me,” in 1979. He received about 250 letters from mostly Asian writers who also felt pigeonholed.
“That’s when I realized I wasn’t the only one that felt like that,” he says. “And then my head started turning and thinking about what could address that.”
It took several years before Kagy combined this insight with his childhood experience at the newsstand and launched Transpacific. The venture required his savings from his law practice and several investors. Unfortunately, the theoretically ripe Asian market didn’t appear and, after 18 months, “We put in well over a million [dollars] in that initial wave of stupid--I mean, in retrospect, stupid--pointless spending,” Kagy says.
That was the last time he’s acted like a publishing tycoon. The eight-person staff is gone, along with the fancy office. Just the same, the magazines are still glossy, colorful and thick, with articles patterned after Vanity Fair’s in-depth style of rapid-fire details while skewed to celebrate Asian American’s achievements. By clobbering his readers with that theme, Kagy is convinced Asians can now run to their newsstands and get that hit of self-esteem he wanted so badly as a kid.
