5 Lessons From Hot Asian Men For 2018

Guest Post by Ada Tseng, Professor of Hotness


(Clockwise from top left) Saagar Shaikh, Mike Bow, D'Lo, Sean Miura, Yoshi Sudarso, Jake Choi, Peter Sudarso, Chris Pang, Simu Liu, and Ilram Choi. Photo by Sthanlee B. Mirador/Sipa USA.

First, we exchanged Haikus With Hotties. Then we put Haikus On Hotties. It's our third year making hot Asian man calendars to celebrate our favorite talented creative Asian men in the media, and this year, fans wrote Haikus For Hotties, and each spread is designed into a magazine cover, as a nod to the fact that Asian American men (and women, for that matter) are now sometimes featured inside the magazine, but still rarely on the cover.

Get your hands on the Haikus On Hotties 2017 Calendar

From the Makers of
Hotties with Haikus now comes
Hotties ON Haikus.



Look, it's very simple. Hot Asian men. Poetry. Every month. People, it's the Haikus On Hotties 2017 Calendar, now available for purchase! The full-color calendar features thirteen months of attractive Asian men in various states of dress or undress, sharing a little bit of poetry with you. It makes the perfect holiday gift for your friends who need just a little more Asian American male hotness in their lives. Order now!

Created by Ada Tseng, Professor of Hotness, the non-award-winning photo and poetry series Haikus with Hotties was first launched in 2013 for Audrey Magazine, featuring attractive men answering ridiculous questions while counting syllables. Last year, the series inspired the crowd-funded 2016 Haikus With Hotties Calendar. And now, the project has morphed and returned with a twist: Haikus On Hotties.

How I Became a Pretend Expert on Hot Asian American Men

Guest Post by Ada Tseng



A few years ago, I convinced my editors at Audrey Magazine that it'd be funny to ask actor/model Godfrey Gao to exchange mediocre poetry with me about his hotness.

(Hey, hey. Eyes down here, OK? I know you're trying to figure out who that is in the photo above, and where you've seen his muscles before, but stay with me. There will be more pictures of that guy at the end of this post, I promise.)

Back to poetry. I had just been told that my upcoming interview with Godfrey would be conducted through email, and, as a serious journalist, I knew it'd be hard to experience the full extent of his hotness through email. So I was trying to think of a creative way to do the interview in which the answers I received from him through the written word would potentially be better than the verbal responses I'd get from him in person. Haiku seemed to be the most accessible form of poetry for two non-poets. I figured I could also get away with asking him ridiculous questions about his swooning fangirls, beauty regimen, and tips for modeling Louis Vuitton man purses -- inquiries that would be much less charming without the syllable constraints of 5-7-5.

He probably had no idea what he was getting himself into, but he answered in haiku, and the series Haikus With Hotties was born. For each issue after that, I just kept convincing other people that this was a good idea. Folks like Freddie Wong, Dante Basco, Randall Park, and Christopher Dinh. On one hand, these are creatives working in the entertainment industry who have been directly affected by mainstream Hollywood's lack of imagination when it comes to stereotypical portrayals of Asian American men. But on the other hand, they're also just funny people who very quickly made me realize that the fact that they don't take themselves too seriously is actually the hottest quality of all.

At the time, I didn't have a grand vision of what #HaikusWithHotties would become. But last summer, we successfully launched a Kickstarter to turn the series into a 2016 calendar, including a video where I introduced myself as a "Professor of Hotness" presenting my ground-breaking research. And we hopefully gave our supporters a reason to smile at the first of every month, when it was time to turn the calendar page and unveil their next hottie.