But alas, it was not completely Hyphen-free because I called my sister from my hotel room with instructions on representing Hyphen at the Asian Pacific American Medical Students Association,
which takes place Nov 12-13 in my hometown of Houston, The Republic of Texas. What can you do when the stereotype is true? There’s mad Asians in med school and my sister is one of them. So I am sending her off to shove Hyphen in their faces, ever so nicely. But I doubt med students have time to do things like read.

In fact, it seems to me that most people don’t read at all, which makes me a little sad. I realize, as a former English major and one-time bookworm, that most people are not like me. They do not feel bad if they skip that day’s newspaper. They do not read magazines from cover to cover. They are way cooler than I am.

Sometimes I wonder if we are wasting our time at these kinds of professional events. I know it’s impossible to get every APA to pick up our magazine because some people just don’t give a damn. But it seems that there’s a whole hell of a lot of them, these people who seem too caught up in themselves, in their careers and social status. You know who I’m talking about, you see them shopping at Banana Republic and driving their BMWs. All their friends are Asian American, but you know, they just happen to be Asian American, whatever that means, and they go to those parties thrown by Asian American party promoters to impress each other with their law degrees and six-figure investment banking salaries and their tiny teeny size zero Bebe pants.

It’s easy to forget about them here in the Bay Area because we also have a community of hearty activist and artistic types who have endured countless spoken word shows and open mics, who think nothing of joining a protest in progress down Market Street, who send flurries of emails with news stories to each other all day long, who wear vintage thrift-store sweaters and knee-high boots and are dorky yet cool in that way that people who are too self-aware carry themselves.

Yes, I am reducing all of you to stereotypes today, you med students and Bebe Girls and bleeding heart artists whose intentions are right, but whose art may actually be bad.

We talk about this from time to time, the types of people out there and whether or not those people read Hyphenand if we want them to. And if so, how we’re going to get to them. Will we get to them by sitting at a table, passing out copies of the latest issue? Really, will we?