When I read Salman Rushdie’s essay “Imaginary Homelands” in high school, I was blown away. I had never read someone who handled the themes of a fragmented nostos, displaced identity, and cultural duplexity with more nuance... the first Asian anglophone writers are in fact South Asian, and they are the ones who have shown us an English literature that can not only speak to diasporic communities worldwide, but also to humanity at large.
— Eric Zhou
…especially here at Harvard, many of our Asian clubs and Asian labelled spaces are really only inviting for East Asians. What unifies us and should make us fight stronger for these pan-Asian identities in this magazine is just that - our historical and shared fight against racism and against silence in America.
— Jerrica Li
South Asians are dramatically underrepresented not only in commercially popular Asian/Asian American narratives—think: Fresh off the Boat, Crazy Rich Asians, Always Be My Maybe—but also in Asian/Asian American groups on campus... “Asian” should not merely evoke “East Asian” in the public consciousness. It is so much more complicated—so much more kaleidoscopic—than that.
— Céline Vendler
The Wave is an apt name for a timely publication, reshaping an existing collective consciousness about Asianness at our crucial moment of Asian representation in the arts. Arts and literature seek to express both the particularities and generalities about the human experience, and the unique convergence of cultures particular to the anglophone Asian experience is in fact also broadly representative of globalized modernity.
— May Wang