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A Sunday at the Library in
AsianConnections is proud to present the adventures of Ben Fong-Torres, our Renaissance man, author, broadcaster, and longtime writer and senior editor at legendary Rolling Stone Magazine. This guy's our hero! There's even a major motion picture coming out this Fall 2000 featuring a character about Ben, written and directed by Cameron Crowe. (Cameron wrote and directed Tom Cruise in "Jerry Maguire.") - AC Team
You like to read, right? So you know that a library is a wondrous thing. That's one reason I was at the Asian branch of the Oakland (Calif.) Public Library the other Sunday, doing a reading from Not Fade Away. Another reason was that my mother lives only a block away, and she likes to see her son goofing off in public, even if it's in that foreign language called "English." Annabel (Left) & Ellen In fact, Bea found two of the best. Annabel invited her aunt with her. In this case, auntie is Ellen Blonder, who looks like her sister and, in fact, is only 16 days older than Annabel. The two grew up in Northern California like two sugar peas in a pod, and Ellen is an artist whose watercolor renderings of Chinese dishes and ingredients add a wondrous luster to the book. Beyond the illustrations and recipes, there are the stories, by both Annabel and Ellen, that put Every Grain of Rice on a loftier level than most cookbooks. They are memories of meals, of the place of food in the Chinese-American (emphasis on Chinese) family, and of the importance of food to a family's survival. As Annabel read, from the book's introduction: "Eat every grain of rice," Mother used to say when I was a child. "Every grain counts." When Father married Mother in China, he proudly gave her gold and jade jewelry for a wedding gift. Though she seldom wore it, she treasured that jewelry. She wrapped it carefully in fine cloth and looked at it often. Years later, China was at war. Father was in America, unable to get money through to Mother and my siblings in China. Food was scarce, but Mother vowed the family would survive. She took out her jewelry, gazed at it one last time, and made her decision: she traded the jewelry for five pounds of rice. Those five pounds of rice kept the family from starving. Every grain counted. You get moments like that on top of recipes for down-home dishes like Sticky Rice with Sausage and Taro Root, and Ellen's beautiful artwork. Every Grain of Rice is jewelry on paper pages. No wonder, really, that it won the Julia Child Book Award for best American cookbook last year. At the Asian Library in Chinatown, I brought Annabel and Ellen on with me to open the program, to chat about our many common grounds. Annabel and I are both from restaurant families, and many of her and Ellen's recollections echoed my own. After I did my bit, I turned the program over to the two women, and I learned of one more link. Ellen told the gathering that when she was working in an advertising office at San Francisco State in the mid-Sixties, I used to bounce into the office and do my imitation of a Top 40 disc jockey. "Here was this big voice, yelling all this stuff, and I'd look, and it was this little Chinese guy!" I have no recollection of doing such a ridiculous thing. Right here, on K! F! R! C! A wedding in 1951: Anyway, I'd heard, while researching that book in the early Nineties, that Nancy and Calvin had lost their photos in a fire. Now, moments before the event, she said that a family friend had found a copy of the photo of the entire wedding party, and she'd brought it to show me. As if the photograph, which hurtled me back a half-century to an event I could barely remember, wasn't enough, with its gallery of uniformly dressed and tuxedoed young ladies and gentlemen, a dozen maids of honor and groomsmen, two of them were there at the library event. Fortunately, I was able to pick them out. Whew! I hadn't wanted to make this appearance. Having done a dozen or two events for Not Fade Away, on radio, television, the Internet, and in bookstores and other events around the Bay Area and in Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York, I was all hyped out. But I'm glad I did. A library, whether the Library of Congress of a little branch in Oakland's Chinatown, is a wondrous thing. ____________________ Ben Fong-Torres, long-time writer and editor at Rolling Stone magazine, is the author of four books, including his memoirs, The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese-American, and his latest, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll. He is Editorial Director of myplay.com, an Internet music site that offers free Web space, where users can grab, store, mix, play, and share music of all kinds. Click to Ben
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