The first issue of the magazine Giant Robot I ever came across featured the Hong Kong actor Tony Leung Chiu-wai on the cover—this was enough to stand out on a crowded newsstand in the mid-nineteen-nineties. But what caught my attention were the teasers for a random assortment of other stories, about gangs, surfing, shaved ice, orgies. A small tagline in the top right corner read “A magazine for you.” But who was I? I was a teen-ager and desperate to know. I suspected Giant Robot could help me figure it out.
For anyone under the age of forty, this level of impressionability might sound a bit silly. But this was a time when there were few things as intoxicating as a bountiful magazine rack, with countless interests, ideologies, identities to try on for size. These days styles and reference points float freely; back then the idea that one could bridge silos, admitting an affection for, say, both punk rock and Hello Kitty, felt jarring. There was something about Giant Robot’s affection for Asian culture—and its allergy to dwelling on what that meant—that drew in many young people, like me, who were searching for a context. It was a magazine that was very serious about some things, and not at all serious about others.
Eric Nakamura started Giant Robot in 1994, having recently left his job at Larry Flynt Publications, a Los Angeles media empire that published magazines ranging from VideoGames (where Nakamura had found work right out of college, as an editor) to Rap Pages and Hustler. His experiences at Flynt suggested that making a magazine wasn’t too hard. He put together a sixty-four-page zine, stapled and xeroxed, about the things that fascinated him and his friends: sumo wrestling, the Japanese noise band Boredoms, kung-fu movies, dating. He invited Martin Wong, a kindred spirit he’d seen around at punk shows, to write and to help distribute the two hundred and forty copies of the zine’s initial run.
“We were just writing about stuff we liked,” Wong, who was working as an editor at a textbook company at the time, said. “We weren’t trying to define anything or change anything.” For the second issue, Wong wrote about his experience dressing up as Hello Kitty for a Sanrio festival in Southern California, and the surprisingly vitriolic things passersby said to him (“I hate you,” “Get a life”). Wong soon became Giant Robot’s co-editor, and by the fourth issue they had graduated from D.I.Y. folding and stapling to a standard-size, nationally distributed magazine with a full-color cover, albeit one that was still sustained by volunteer labor. In 1996, Giant Robot became a quarterly, and by the late nineteen-nineties they were publishing up to six times a year, with a circulation that peaked in the early two-thousands at around twenty-seven thousand. What attracted people in from the mid-nineties through 2011, when Giant Robot published its final issue, was its mixture of arrogance—the sense that it was made by people with a strident sense of taste—but also curiosity. This run is the subject of “Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture,” a lavishly designed hardcover book, just published by Drawn & Quarterly, that collects some of the magazine’s most important articles, as well as memories from contributors and readers.
Photograph by Eric Nakamura / Courtesy Drawn & Quarterly
“Giant Robot”—edited by Nakamura, along with Francine Yulo, Tracy Hurren, Megan Tan, and Tom Devlin—reprints a representative cross-section of pieces, arranging them thematically rather than chronologically. Claudine Ko, one of Giant Robot’s most lively contributors in the late nineties and early two-thousands and now an editor for the Times’s T Brand Studio, offers a remarkably comprehensive introduction to the magazine, especially its early days. In Ko’s telling, there was no grand vision, just a constant need to fill pages. In 1996, Wong proposed a piece about Manzanar, the site of one of the concentration camps where people of Japanese descent were imprisoned during the Second World War, which his family often drove past on their ski trips to the nearby Sierra Nevada mountains. Wong and Nakamura—whose father had been incarcerated at the Poston camp, in Arizona—packed their skateboards and decided to take a road trip.
The result was “Return to Manzanar,” a solemn yet rebellious piece of writing. Wong notes the names etched into the reservoir walls by “vandal Manzanar internees” and talks with Sue Embrey, who was imprisoned there as a teen-ager, about whether she believes the site is haunted. His piece tries to restore some nuance to the lives of those who were trapped there. It was, he writes, a place where people “gardened, painted pictures, published newspapers, composed poetry, made babies, and played volleyball and baseball,” making the most out of a horrific situation. Wong and Nakamura skate through the park, doing tricks off a monument, wondering what the people driving by thought “at the sight of skateboarders in the middle of hell.” As Nakamura explains to Ko in the book, “It’s taking ownership of an otherwise fucked-up place.”
A meandering interview style was characteristic of nineties zines, teaching you as much about the interviewers and their whims as whomever they were talking to. There’s a particularly candid and wide-ranging conversation between Nakamura and Tony Leung Chiu-wai. The actor seems to forget that he’s baring his soul about his lowest moments to what was then just an obscure American zine. “At one time, I wanted to commit suicide because I couldn’t get myself out of my character,” he says, recounting an early moment in his career. “You have to pretend you are others at work, then you get so confused within you.” As the conversation continues, you can almost sense Nakamura’s astonishment that Leung is still on the line, as the actor answers increasingly random questions about how he perfected his hair style and whether he’d ever had a nose ring. When Nakamura and Wong interview the actress Maggie Cheung, they somehow end up talking about her teen years, when she identified with the British mod subculture. They ask her point-blank, “Are you weird?” “I don’t know,” she replies. “I’m just me.” In Ko’s interview with the filmmaker Wong Kar Wai, she remarks that Wong makes Asian people “look cool” compared with their portrayal in American films. He simply says, “Asian people are cool.”
Reading Giant Robot, you got the sense that anything was worth reviewing—snacks, books, movies, seven-inch singles, Asian canned coffee drinks—and everyone was worth interviewing, if only so that you could learn a little more about the world around you. One of the odder interviews the magazine published resulted from a letter Nakamura received from an unlikely reader: Wayne Lo, a mass shooter who, in 1992, killed two people and injured four others at Bard College at Simon’s Rock, where he was a student. The two exchanged letters, and Nakamura eventually visited him in prison. His questions about Lo’s memories of the shooting, and the day-to-day routine in prison, are curious and blunt. (“What’s the prison like?” “Are you friends with any guards?”) Lo seems placid and bemused—until the end, when Nakamura asks him about the T-shirt that he famously wore on the night of the crime, which advertised the New York hardcore band Sick of It All. Lo admits that he merely dabbled in punk, and that the shirt was just a coincidence. “I like glam metal,” he tells Nakamura. “Music died when grunge emerged.”
