"We're sort of defining Asian-Americans as people who define themselves as Asian-American," says Titania Leung Inglis of Hyphen Magazine, a start-up Asian-American magazine based in San Francisco. Like many ethnic media, Hyphen is faced with the challenge of representing a demographic that is virtually impossible to define.

Hyphen is not alone in this quandary. For post-civil rights Asian-American media trying to corner the coveted Asian-American market, there is a curious contradiction: The necessity of constructing an Asian-American identity without establishing criteria that excludes some segment of the community. That little hyphen located unassumingly between the two words represents many distinct and disparate worlds.

2000 Census Bureau statistics found that over eleven million of the American population identifies as Asian but while the numbers represent the ethnic make-up of the community, they don't account for nationality. In fact, over sixty percent are foreign born and many are legal or illegal aliens or may even have dual citizenship. Not all are technically entitled to the rights of Americans, but because of the legacy of immigration in the United States, they cannot be discounted. They are the friends, the colleagues, the neighbors, the families, the past and the future of Asian-America.

Inevitably, Asian-American media finds itself in the position of focusing on a viable portion of the demographic. Jeff Hsu, director of marketing and business development for Click2Asia, the company that owned A magazine before the magazine’s downfall, says, "The Asian American demographic as we characterize it is an English speaking American of Asian descent." He points out that it is unrealistic to include everybody. A Magazine enjoyed their 14-year run by marketing specifically to students. They distributed the magazine free on college campuses and many of the students became subscribers upon graduation. "You do have to exclude as you are trying to get people in a niche," says Hsu. "It's necessary."

Although the paradox remains unresolved and a concrete definition of Asian-American may not exist, its value as a political identity is indisputable. Asian-American media is still evolving and as more and more Asians in the United States join the continuing push toward equality, the meaning of Asian-American becomes increasingly ambiguous. "On a large scale everyone's American but we're Asian as well," says Hsu.

Stanley Lim, the once co-president and publisher of Yolk Magazine, a magazine devoted to Asian-American entertainment feels that any tension that may exist between Asian-American solidarity and exclusivity is because there is not enough representation. "In the current state of being a minority in America, you have to find some sort of structure, a sense of belonging," he says. "If we had the right media vehicles and resources to get the Asian-American voice out there, it would be a positive experience."