For Tommy Tam, the lead visionary behind Yolk, the publication started as a way to “discover my own identity,” he tells It’s Nice That. “Growing up in Mississippi and Florida, I had a lot of identity issues.” Tommy shares this experience with many of his Yolk colleagues, not to mention millions of other ethnic minorities, assimilating into another culture as a way to feel less alone. “But when I had the chance to go to college in California in 1987, that really opened my eyes,” he continues. “I saw there was a Chinatown and a Koreatown and I started to accumulate more Asian friends.” With these new friends – including Yolk’s other co-founder-come-creative director Tin Yen – a group of passion-filled creatives attempted to find a way of catapulting Asian faces into the mainstream.

“I was magazine junkie,” says Tommy. “I would go to the newsstand and stare at tens of thousands of covers and I’d never see any Asian faces on any of them. Maybe only on stereotypical martial arts magazines, but everything in the mainstream like Rolling Stone or Vanity Fair never had Asians on their covers.” With this in mind, Tommy and Tin called a gathering, meeting their future colleagues that would become core members of Yolk’s team over the next ten years.

One of the first things decided was the magazine’s name. It was Larry Tazuma, Yolk’s managing editor, who had the lightbulb moment. He recalls: “I was thinking about the colour yellow and how we could use it to empower ourselves. I wanted to turn it around into something that doesn’t sound so negative.” Yolk’s name plays on the racial slurs that allegorise non-white people to food. There is a schoolyard slander of likening East Asian people to an egg – white on the outside and yellow on the inside – but Larry’s idea emerged from forgetting the white part completely in light of its vibrantly yellow yolk.