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By Richard Wang Searching for Asian Pacific American Student Publications on the Net A simple search on the internet will yield a lot of things. Plug in the words "Asian" and "American" and gigacoulombs of electrons will translate into approximately 10,000 results before the search engine decides to avoid a hernia and retire. 90 percent of all this electronic garbage advertises for various forms of "meeting clubs" and pornography. The other 10 percent hold everything from a history of tea making to Asian American activism. Oddly, after sifting through all these pebbles of information, only a handful of Asian student publications show up. What's even more strange is that schools that I know have Asian publications either publish intermittently, are defunct, or have no web links. In many cases, these publications have gone through all three. For instance, UC Irvine's Rice Paper is nowhere to be found. USC's Bamboo Offshoots appears to be something of a mystery. And Berkeley's Slant and new publication Hard Boiled are unlisted on the Cal server. Two publication web pages found through searches on Yahoo! and Altavista using some variation of the words "Asian," "publication," "newspaper," and/or "student" yielded Asian Voices, produced by New York University and Southeast Asian Review made by students at Georgetown University. Both, while advertising views, opinions and stories of relevance to Asians, are essentially literary journals online. Asian Voices (last published in 1996) lists a series poems, illustrations, photos, and short stories of varying degrees of interest and talent. Southeast Asian Review contains personal stories about revelations of one's identity, battles with religious beliefs, and commentaries on other people's writings, as well as illustrations and artwork. From the standpoint of Pacific Ties, these publications are more about giving writers and artists an outlet than about the goings on of everyday life as Asian Americans. All are alike in giving a place for voice, but I've always considered Pacific Ties as a place more for stories about events and happenings, not soul-searching, deep literary pieces. And while Pac Ties has run poetry and short stories before, I think them more befitting of a literary journal than a biquarterly magazine. I believe Pac Ties is about people -- people other than the writer; good writing reflects the humanity and conditions of other people and sometimes in that, it reflects ourselves. That's my hope for the magazine. And while journals and other publications tout artistry and literary merit, I hope Pac Ties shows honesty and reality. (Richard Wang is a Senior majoring in Biology and editor-in-chief of Pacific Ties at UCLA.)