While reading the submissions, I noticed the common theme of public transportation. A lot of transcending between places, but more analysis on how safety, incidents on the way, is especially an issue for diasporic people. How can we find a sense of security? Where is home for us?

It’s having space that matters. Words have space, and to me, visuals are supplemental to words, only making the content more readable. However, it is the interaction between visuals and words that make us us, MTJ. Hannah is a director and actor; they habitually notice people’s display in space, their colors and sounds, always being mindful, and nesting my very strange thoughts, my silence and my hyper-fixation. Ang is a brilliant writer, while playfully encouraging everyone she knows to “write fiction!” she sees the phraseology in each person and curated this wonderful debut issue. Lily—my day-older sister, it’s been almost 8 years knowing you, and each day that we work together I become more certain that I’ve made the right decision: not only because you are good at what I’m not (such as communicating with people), but that we are still learning from each other, 8 years later. The four of us are friends as well as colleagues, and in bringing our forte to the journal, we also give space for one another to shine. As Ang said in one of our meetings, what’s special about MTJ is that we have a lot of heart, and that’s why we have so many opinions and ideas.

Some obstacles we encountered were foreseeable, such as having differences of opinion, arguing if gold is a good color for an Instagram post. Some were on more precarious brinks, such as costing one another’s time, and in heated discussions taking over another’s chance to speak. But we notice those things quickly—we grew up fighting for space, which gives us the privilege of being sensitive to recognize the difference in people. In the beginning I heard a lot of questioning voices, especially from older people in power back home. Those voices didn’t believe in us; sometimes people give you advice because they have failed to get to know you. As filmmaker Hsiaowen Hsu said in her interview with us, people romanticize a certain demographic because they don’t understand them.

Why must we write? Why must we read? What does it mean to read from a digital magazine that insists on launching in an era where literature almost over-saturates and everyone has a podcast? My answer is, there’s never enough content. Sometimes I crave ten essays to help me understand my own sentiments, and those ten essays can all be about the same experience. As I continue to seek resonance, the more I find the closer I get to finding myself. For instance, in her poem “Family Reunion,” Ariel Joy So paints a picture on a windy night where, “Time, coalescing into a mad hairball,” diaspora is as blurred and salient as the sea between life and death. In her essay “Behind Scratched Eyes,” Eliana Alzate questions whether it is safe within her own community while it is not safe anywhere else either—how does one resolve this kind of feeling? Does one belong anywhere? Yiran Wang, in her poignant vignettes, gives slices of her life in misunderstanding, friendship, and loss amidst conversations—on notepads, which all eventually resolve to talking about boobs and falling asleep. Xinyue Huang’s poem and poem in translation, while fragmenting the experiences living in both New York and Shanghai, portraying that sense not only in words but in sound, bring you on the road with her to wonder, where am I? What makes up a city? Sienna Liu… I was bleeding with her protagonist in her short story “Your Own Poems.” Although we didn’t need to go on those bad dates to find out about who we are, we saw the difference in people along the way. No one is entitled to tell me who I should be—I must, slowly and cluelessly, find out on my own. As Batool writes in her poem “Not A Ballad of Urdu Homophones,” she is the one who holds the final verse.

The four of us at MTJ want to give diasporic artists a place to shine while also giving ourselves exactly that. And by artists I mean everyone who carries their sense of self, everywhere they go. I know we will continue to do so in the future, for as long as we live, and I can only be sure of that for the people I work with. This is Ground Zero, the beginning. Thank you for reading.

May 29, 2025