: "We decided to create Banana Magazine when we were looking around us and saw that just in our own network of friends in NYC, we had so many amazingly creative writers, photogs, illustrators, and that there wasn’t a singular place for them. There wasn’t really a strong community either. We were looking at Street Etiquette , who is based out in NYC and really rally the Black creative community together, and we thought Asian Americans on the East Coast were participating in that because they didn’t really have a place to go. So we were truly inspired by them, and wanted to make sure that Asian creatives had something similar where we had a platform to showcase these voices, as well as something where we can host them and feel some sort of community — whether it’s through an event or some storytelling."