Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Alyssa Chiang & Alexis Constantino Of Lotus Magazine Are Helping To Change Our World
An Interview With Maria Angelova
Passion is not an ongoing fire that burns bright all day, every day; there will be days when the fire seems dim, but those are the days when it’s most important to stay strong.
As part of my series about “individuals and organizations making an important social impact”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alyssa Chiang and Alexis Constantino.
Alyssa Chiang and Alexis Constantino are the co-founders of Lotus Magazine, a bimonthly digital lifestyle magazine that serves as a platform for self-identifying Asian American womxn to share their stories/perspectives with each other and the community. They hope that it will lead Asian American womxn to be able to empower and inspire one another, and to create a sense of community. Their goal is to be proactive in bringing forth stories that are often overlooked or forgotten, and to work with other groups in the Asian American media space to shed light on the diverse Asian American experiences.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path and point in your life?
Alyssa: During the height of the pandemic, I was working on my Master’s degree in bioengineering, when my lab shut down and with the end of my lease in San Diego, I moved back home to Los Angeles. Finding myself in a state of ennui, I cleaned my bedroom, which led me to the magazines I used to collect. I collected a variety of lifestyle magazines for women: Cosmopolitan, Glamour, Vogue, etc. Flipping through them, I came to realize that few of the stories and people represented in these magazines reflected my own life and story–although my story is a relatively common one that many Asian Americans with immigrant parents may be able to relate to. So, with the time and energy on my hands, with the addition of passion into the mix, I decided to start my own.
Alexis: When Alyssa moved back to San Diego, we were able to meet up and spend more time together in person. At the time, I was working as the artistic liaison and administrator assistant of Mainly Mozart, a non-profit organization, and as a private piano teacher independently. Once Alyssa pitched her idea to me at one of our hangouts, I was on board immediately because I loved the idea of connecting with others through shared stories/experiences and empowering other Asian American girls and womxn, especially as someone who works with kids. Shortly after deciding to bring this idea to life, we held a meeting with just the two of us to roughly plan out everything, from the name to the kind of content we wanted to feature to how we would publish the magazine.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company or organization?
Alexis: We did a section once on podcasts hosted by Asian American folks, and one of the podcasts we covered was Eat Your Crust. One of our team members listened in on a few of the episodes and learned that it was hosted by two girls who are best friends from college and were close in age to ourselves…as we read up on the girls, Crystal and Jeesoo, we found out that they also graduated from UC San Diego, the university that we had met each other and graduated from! We felt like Eat Your Crust was Lotus Magazine’s soul sister. We reached out to them and they invited us to be guests on their podcast! The episode was called #GIRLTALK: Time Management & Relationships (ft. Lotus Mag), and we are so thankful to Crystal and Jeesoo for allowing us the opportunity; since it was early on in Lotus Magazine’s journey, we learned a lot from them both.
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Alyssa: Thinking back to our inception, I can’t help but chuckle at our naivety as we hit the ground running. Our first meeting was just between Alexis and myself. We held the meeting in my living room and I had made a formal slide deck for brainstorming. We were ready to make this a monthly thing. We came up with all sorts of ideas and were brimming with excitement, and it felt like we were going to make all of this happen tomorrow. Little did we know how naive we were about the workload. Goals and dreams can take a very long time to reach and happen through a stepwise process. We ended up choosing a bimonthly release schedule rather than a monthly one to allow us the space to grow without burning out too soon, and while we are still slowly working toward our bright ideas, we are extremely proud of where we are and are definitely humbled about the road ahead. But all that said, we are full of excitement for our journey forward.
Can you describe how you or your organization is making a significant social impact?
Alexis: The more we have worked on Lotus Magazine, the more we are realizing how diverse the “Asian American narrative” actually is. There are so many different backgrounds and different pathways that can feed into identifying as “Asian American”. And we often find that, underlying the diversity, there are always similarities and those similarities can lay the groundwork for building community. By highlighting the different Asian American experiences through the lens of a lifestyle magazine, we bring awareness to the stories that make up what it means to be Asian American.
Can you tell us a story about a particular individual who was impacted or helped by your cause?
Alyssa: We reached out to Soup du Jour, a local family-owned restaurant in San Diego that was owned by a Taiwanese family. They had opened their restaurant right before the pandemic hit and they found ways to stay afloat by adapting to the ever-changing situation. We interviewed them and shared their story in Lotus Magazine and encouraged our readers to support them. Our hope is that some readers are now aware of Soup du Jour where they otherwise had not been before. We even had a friend who lived close by to the restaurant that began to make an effort to support them once a week!
Are there three things the community/society/politicians can do to help you address the root of the problem you are trying to solve?
The first thing that society and politicians can do is to be an active ally of the AAPI community by addressing the lack of representation in certain spaces, such as in leadership roles, and to acknowledge and question that. Oftentimes, the lack of representation comes from longstanding patterns that we don’t even consciously notice, so the first step is just to become actively aware.
Second, is getting to know Asian American history. AAPI history is, at best, skimmed over in our grade school history courses, even though Asian Americans have played a large role over the course of U.S. history.
Lastly, and perhaps the most important and one that everyone can do: listen with an open mind. Withhold judgments and assumptions and be open to learning and asking questions.
Are you working on any new or exciting projects now? How do you think this might help people?
Alexis: We are working to bring in-person events to our audiences, now that things have opened up so much more since the height of the pandemic. We think it is important for us to engage with our readers, because we are all in the same shoes! We are just human beings out here who want to build community with our peers. Building community requires extending beyond the screen from which our readers are receiving Lotus Magazine, and we want to get to know the stories of the readers behind that screen.
What you are doing is not easy. What inspires you to keep moving forward?
Alexis: Besides the internal rewards of putting out quality content resulting from hard work and discipline as well as a true love for what we are doing, the feedback from our readers and supporters has been immensely motivational. It’s beautiful for us to hear about how readers, no matter who they are, relate to our content in some way or another. The support and validation helps keep us pushing forward even on the days when things feel slow. Furthermore, having a team who has our backs every step of the way and continuously generates brilliant ideas always inspires us every day and reminds us of how important it is to amplify Asian American voices.
What are your “5 things I wish someone told me when I first started” and why? Please share a story or example for each.
- The start will feel overwhelming and chaotic and you will probably be tempted to tap out, but you will find a workflow that feels natural–trust yourself.
At the beginning, the more that we planned for the first issue, the more we realized we needed to hash out, and it seemed like instead of ticking things off our to-do list, we were adding five more items for every thing we ticked off. From choosing the design of our cover to choosing the cover girl to picking fonts and font sizes…the list never seemed to end! But in the end, the list does become much more stable and predictable and feels less overwhelming.
2. Passion is not an ongoing fire that burns bright all day, every day; there will be days when the fire seems dim, but those are the days when it’s most important to stay strong.
It’s easy to assume from the outset that it’s always going to be full steam ahead. For us, we had passion and energy and were prepared to pour our heart and soul into Lotus Magazine. But the reality is that life isn’t like that and it isn’t sustainable to expect the fire to burn brightly on every single day. There are days when we feel the weight of the grind or life gets in the way and we find ourselves sleep-deprived, stressed, tired, and anxious. But at the end of the day, so long as the fire is still burning, regardless of how brightly on a given day, that’s what matters. Take a moment to breathe and be grateful to your team and for how far you’ve come.
3. Having a team does not necessarily equate to less work.
When we began to recruit team members for Lotus Magazine, we thought it would take a large amount of the workload off of our shoulders if we could distribute the work among team members. To some extent, this was true–it has been incredibly helpful to split up the sections and have team members work on different things. But what we were not prepared for was the work behind team management. Coordinating people besides ourselves and keeping motivation strong in team members is something we think about every single day and this takes some creativity and thought in itself.
4. Don’t let the need to have everything “just right” stop you from taking any action at all.
The reality is that things will never be “just right”. When we were picking out fonts, we spent so much time choosing the “perfect” font and the “perfect” size for the different pages, but the reality was that we could have spent days staring at fonts and there would never be a perfect one. However, there are many that would be well suited to us, and at the end of the day, few decisions are truly “set in stone” (see point 5).
5. Few decisions are truly course-changing beyond remedy.
Yes, there are “bad” decisions or decisions you might wish you could take back and choose an alternate course of action. But few choices on the day to day are truly catastrophic and impossible to bounce back from. We’ve had a lot of what we thought were tough calls to make in the moment. One thing we could not decide on was our subscription model–did we want people to sign up via email to receive Lotus Magazine in their inboxes? Or should we release it to the masses? In the end, we decided in our first year on the former, but after feeling out that first year, we realized we could do better by releasing it via our social media channels instead. Though we’d made a mistake, we realized it, and we changed our course of action moving forward.
You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Alyssa: Definitely some movement about finding similarities in our individual stories–there are so many movements that focus on a particular group, and though each group is important and special in its own right, it can also be empowering to know that underneath all the diversity, we can find that we have a lot in common. There are many commonalities in the human experience (i.e. growing pains, a drive to survive, etc.). It would be nice to have some movement that focuses on these similarities–perhaps an allyship campaign or a restructuring of the way history is taught to students to be more candid and multi-sided.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
Alyssa: “Life is a marathon, not a sprint”. I grew up with this mindset while growing up–this is what my dad told me in response to making mistakes. It made setbacks okay and taught me to pick up and keep going if things didn’t work out and that if progress was slower than expected, that that was okay. The most important thing was to prevent burning out and to prioritize quality over quantity along each step of the way. This is something that is important for both of us as we build Lotus Magazine. Things don’t happen overnight; they take time and work and immense discipline to get there.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Alexis: Constance Wu–she is so candid and thoughtful in her work and isn’t afraid to reflect on her own mistakes and call them out. Sometimes, we aim for a perfectionistic image of ourselves and we shy away from looking inwards and admitting to ourselves the things that may not fit into that image. But I really think being willing to be candid with ourselves is a big step toward self-improvement and also encouraging others to be okay with being vulnerable.
Alyssa: Lisa Ling! I look up to her so much! The way she approaches people that you wouldn’t imagine have anything in common with her…she always finds a way to bring out their common humanity and find common ground. She is humble and open-minded in her conversations. Her work in the AAPI space is also incredible; she is brave and insightful, and I really hope to be able to learn from the way she thinks about and processes her experiences and shares them with the world around her.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
Readers can subscribe (for free) on our website, lotus-mag.com. They can also follow us on our Instagram @lotus_mag for additional content and engagement.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About The Interviewer: Maria Angelova, MBA is a disruptor, author, motivational speaker, body-mind expert, Pilates teacher and founder and CEO of Rebellious Intl. As a disruptor, Maria is on a mission to change the face of the wellness industry by shifting the self-care mindset for consumers and providers alike. As a mind-body coach, Maria’s superpower is alignment which helps clients create a strong body and a calm mind so they can live a life of freedom, happiness and fulfillment. Prior to founding Rebellious Intl, Maria was a Finance Director and a professional with 17+ years of progressive corporate experience in the Telecommunications, Finance, and Insurance industries. Born in Bulgaria, Maria moved to the United States in 1992. She graduated summa cum laude from both Georgia State University (MBA, Finance) and the University of Georgia (BBA, Finance). Maria’s favorite job is being a mom. Maria enjoys learning, coaching, creating authentic connections, working out, Latin dancing, traveling, and spending time with her tribe. To contact Maria, email her at angelova@rebellious-intl.com. To schedule a free consultation, click here.
Social Impact Heroes: Why & How Alyssa Chiang & Alexis Constantino Of Lotus Magazine Are Helping To… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.