Asian North American magazines seem to emerge and recede in waves.

At the turn of the century, Asian American magazine A and Yolk, and the short lived Vancouver-based Asian Canadian publication Banana magazine all folded. Aaiyah.

Surprisingly, the following wave of publications pursued an even narrower market: Noodle, for Asian North American gay men, and Jasmine, for Asian Canadian women. Noodle hardly even lasted a year. I’m unclear if Jasmine is still operating but it looks like their Web site was last updated in 2006. Its American sister Jade hasn't had an issue posted on its Web site since Sept./Oct. 2007.

There’s no shortage of online Asian North American webzines like Angry Asian Man and a bunch that I passed on to Dave Watson for a Dot Comment column in 2006.

While the print magazine market is an incredibly challenging one for any type of publication, the Asian North American magazines that do seem to survive tend to be ones that aren’t based on identity politics and more focused on interests.

Because the Asian Canadian population is made up of so many different ethnicities (Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Filipino, Thai, Vietnamese, and more), it can sometimes be difficult to appeal to a cohesive sense of identity that will maintain consistent readership. Can you imagine a Caucasian Canadian or Euro-Canadian magazine? (Well, I guess that's basically every magazine. But imagine a magazine in a country in which Europeans were a minority, which addressed Italians, Finnish, Greeks, Norwegians, Irish, Germans, Dutch, Romanians, Swiss, Austrians, and other European nationalities. That's a lot of ground to cover!)

In comparison, there are numerous South Asian Canadian glossies, some which are focused on weddings. Unlike South Asian communities, the East and South East Asian communities in Canada do not have the uniting forces of religion and arranged marriages to maintain cultural ties. Interracial marriage is particularly high in the Japanese Canadian community, for instance.

Giant Robot, which has been around forever, focuses on Asian pop culture, which extends to a readership beyond just Asians.

While the Vancouver-based arts-oriented magazine Rice Paper has also managed to survive (with the assistance of grants, and volunteer efforts), there are two Asian Canadian magazines that have taken on the market.

Asian Network: The Journal of Asian Canadian Perspectives is an Ottawa-based quarterly that began in 2006. It could pose some competition for Rice Paper as it provides arts coverage with a bit more, such as food and products.

The Toronto-based Asian Wave sets itself from all the previously mentioned publications as it is bilingual, printed in both English and Chinese. Accordingly, most of its content focused on Chinese culture. It’s published six times a year.

It will be interesting to see if these magazines survive, thrive, or fade to black.