Editor’s Note
During an editorial meeting this spring, several staff members began a serious discussion about the horrible hate crimes against Asians happening in America that we were witnessing on social media, but not really reading much about here in Asia. And yet some of the most visible members of the Asian American and Pacific Islander community who were expressing outrage in the US were the same people we have been writing about in
Tatler since the introduction of our redesign last year— the fashion designers Phillip Lim and Prabal Gurung, the chef Angie Mar, the editor Michelle Lee, and many other friends in New York.
Part of our mission is to document Asia’s evolution from being an influence on global culture, art, style, business, politics and entertainment, to becoming a driver in those fields and more. What we hadn’t realised, until the tragic events of 2020, was that the many recent high-profile achievements of Asians abroad had, to some degree, only masked the shocking amount of racism towards them that remains.
“A few months ago, I was browsing Instagram and I saw the actress Viveca Chow had posted about her experiences in New York City,” says Zabrina Lo, associate features editor. “As her friend and someone coming from Hong Kong, it was really heartbreaking to see. Nobody deserves to be attacked or harassed on the street for no reason at all, and even though we don’t experience that as Asians living in Hong Kong, I thought maybe I could do something as a journalist by inspiring more people to talk about it.”
For this issue, Lo and photo director Gillian Nadel brought together some of the most prominent voices in the #Stopasianhate campaign for a cover shoot in New York City, an ambitious project that would not have been possible without their tenacity, as well as the support of Lim and his team, who helped bring together an impressive cast of participants.
Lim also came up with the slogan that appears on T-shirts worn by several of the subjects on our cover through his collaboration with the creative director Ruba Abu-nimah. Last year, Lim and Abu-nimah launched a campaign to promote the resilience of New Yorkers during the turmoil of Covid-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement with the message “New York. Tougher than ever.” For they wanted to promote a positive message of unity, and since we are bringing so many voices together here in common cause, the words became “We are. Tougher than ever.”
I would like to send enormous thanks to everyone who came together to create this issue, to Lim and Gurung for their continual support (and Jessica Somers as well), to Mar for lending us her new restaurant for our shoot, and especially to Lo for her passion and enthusiasm while pursuing a provocative subject that, during our original meeting, was questioned as perhaps being too political or too far outside the realm of this publication.
As she demonstrates, this is exactly what we should be talking about.