Dear Red Pocket Family,

I should give a disclaimer before you read this. I’m not a very funny person, so if you’re looking to get into laughing right away, you should skip my words. 😪

What I will give you though is insight into why we decided to choose comedy as our theme.

To be honest, y’all are depressing. And it makes sense! This past year has been raging hurricane after hurricane. A continual rise in Asian hate crimes? Growing resentment of lockdowns and restrictions? 2021 has tired us out. Naturally for us creatives, we’ve poured our angst out into notebooks and onto canvases.

But rather than encourage our family of readers to be brooding couch potatoes burnt out and afraid to step into the world, we wanted to encourage you all to do something else. To laugh. To smile. To celebrate our Asianness through snappy sarcasm and hilarious hyperbole. 

To LMAO, or ✨ Laugh My Asian Off ✨

(I obviously thought of that, and definitely not our unawesome team member Jeongmin...)*

In this volume, you can look forward to some amazing pieces:

• Keeping up with the Asians, where you’ll see Nusrat Zahan lament about the life of a South Asian child

• Open Letter to the Black Soup, where you’ll be introduced to Wendie Yeung’s sworn enemy

• How To Be Insanely Productive, a relatable comic by Deon Feng

• The Perfect Asian, a Wikipedia article on the scholarly topic (hint: it’s not you 😔)

• A Pot of Faux Gold: Fried Cheese from Alishba Irfan, a piece about cheese for our most fervent cheese lovers! (Of which I am not 🤢)

• And more!

All in all, I hope you find yourself laughing. I know I sure did.

Kind regards,

Barton Lu (he/him)

Founder and Editor-in-Chief

* Okay, OKAY… credit must be given where credit is due. Jeongmin thought of it, not me 😔