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But PTM was a good experience. I had a great boss who sent me around the state, who taught me about magazine writing, editing, and color photography. He let me do those freelance assignments for Rolling Stone. And I was also working part-time, on a volunteer basis, at a bilingual weekly newspaper out of Chinatown, called East West. Without thinking about it, then, I was mixing my community, my culture, and my career. In a way, choosing media work pretty much set me onto that road, where the three C's would come together. I have to admit, however, that I wasn't thinking about community and culture - or, for that matter, about career - as much as I was going for whatever turned me on the most. As a kid growing up in Chinatown, Oakland, and working in the family restaurant - and in a string of other restaurants into my college years - I needed escape, and found it in the radio, the newspapers, and in books.
Ultimately, through a mix of work, passion, and luck - being in the right place at the right time, with instruction and encouragement from the right people--I was able to turn some of those childhood interests and ambitions into a pretty reasonable facsimile of a career. At first, I was mainly a rock journalist at Rolling Stone. People hardly knew I was Chinese. The name Fong-Torres threw them. From having heard my name on the phone, they thought I might be Latino - Torres - or perhaps Scandinavian: Von Taurus, maybe? But Rolling Stone was never strictly about music. One time, I wrote a column about a visit by the People's Republic of China's table tennis team to Stanford. When we began publishing books, I did the foreword to one of first, called Chink! A Documentary History of Anti-Chinese Prejudice in America. My piece was based in part on information I'd picked up at East-West. As I said, convergence happens easily--and in many ways.
"Tom Hanks comes off as what he likes to consider himself: a serious, theatrically trained actor who happens to be able to handle comedy roles. Yet, when you're meeting him for the first time and you're curious about just what makes him tick, it helps to have common ground. With Hanks I get lucky. Within minutes of our being introduced, he's regaling me with a song: Where did everybody go when 'Frisco burned? Visit Ben Fong-Torres Official Site
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