A Sunday at the Library in
Chinatown, Oakland
by Ben Fong-Torres

AsianConnections is proud to present the adventures of Ben Fong-Torres, our Renaissance man: author, broadcaster, and former senior editor and writer at Rolling Stone Magazine. This guy's our hero!

Ben was a featured character in "Almost Famous," the Oscar and Golden Globe-winning film by Cameron Crowe.
                                                                         -  AC Team

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     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 photo by Lisa Blonder

     Still another reason was that Bea, who was organizing the event, a gathering of Friends of the Asian Library to thank donors, acceded to my request that, if I showed up, she'd find another author to share the bill with me.  She found one of the best possible people: Annabel Low, co-author of an extraordinary cookbook, Every Grain of Rice.

     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: The author is the shortie.

     As it turned out, Ellen's slanderous reminisce wasn't the only flashback I experienced. One of the guests was Nancy Fung, who, last time I saw her, was the bride in a wedding in San Francisco in 1951. That's right. Almost 50 years ago. I was six, and because Nancy's fiance, Calvin's mother, Grace Fung, and her family were close to ours, I served as the ring-bearer. The whole story is in my autobiography, The Rice Room. In fact, the cover is a shot of me in a tuxedo. I was dressed to the nines?�if only I knew how to count that high.

     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.

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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.

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Visit Amazon.com for more information on Annabel Low and Ellen Blonder's book
Every Grain of Rice