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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     There are plenty of books about growing up Asian American, and it's impossible to read them all. (And isn't it amazing to be able to say that, given that, just a few years ago, there were no such books?)

     But if I could recommend just one, for now, it'd be Helen Zia's Asian American Dreams: The Emergence of an American People. It's two books in one, and both are knockouts. Zia, a native of New Jersey, tells her growing-up story, and tells it well, candidly chronicling the pressures she had as a kid, wanting to fit in as an American, but finding it impossible because of how she looked.

     She weaves her story with that of Asian America itself.  With a mix of diligent research and her personal activism, in college (at Princeton) and as a director of the Asian American Journalists Association, she chronicles the ups and many downs of yellow-skinned people, from the very first Asian Americans in the 1500s to recent times. Those times, of course, include the murder of Vincent Chin in 1982, the "yellowface" casting of Jonathan Pryce in Miss Saigon, the struggles between Korean merchants and African American communities in New York in 1990, and the Wen Ho Lee case. (This just in: Helen has been contracted to work with Lee on his book, to be published by Hyperion.)

     Some of the stories may be familiar, but the journalist Zia finds and adds telling details and voices. Conversely, in relating her personal story, she weaves her life into the larger fabric that is Asian America, and that is America herself.

     Reading Helen's Asian American Dreams, I couldn't help flashing back to an incident involving a Los Angeles radio show and Asian Americans, and a column I wrote about it in 1996, for a radio industry magazine, Gavin, and for an online zine, Channel A. It went something like this:

Winners and Losers on the Radio

     Theo won big at the recent Billboard Radio Awards in New York. The afternoon DJ and master mixer at KKBT (The Beat), the hip-hop-dance-Top 40 station in Los Angeles, got the trophy for Local Air Personality of the Year in the Major Market R&B category.

     The triumph of Theo--full name Theo Mizuhara--is a nice bit of good news; a break for an industry that has historically not hired Asian Americans as disc jockeys and that has used them as big, fat punching bags on the air.

     Think I'm exaggerating?

     * October '94: KFRC, an oldies station in San Francisco, apologizes for its morning show after DJ Gary Bryan produces and plays a song satire, "Ito Ito," in which the judge in the O.J. Simpson case talks in fractured, heavily-accented English, mixing his l's and r's, and singing gruffly about eating sushi in his judge's chambers. The apology follows previous public mea culpas for a Bryan remark about gays and lesbians and for derogatory comment by his news commentator, J. Paul Emerson, about Chinese people.

     Slam!

     * December '94: After using the phrase, "dirty, stinking Jap," saying he'd hate Japanese people till the day he dies, and that America would eventually go to war again with Japan, Emerson is fired--on Pearl Harbor Day, ironically--but almost immediately emerges with his own morning-drive show on conservative talk station KSFO.

     Pow!

     * April '95: New York Senator Alfonse D'Amato, on the syndicated Don Imus show, talks about Ito and puts on a Japanese accent. (Excuse me, but didn't most everyone see and hear Ito at some point during the Simpson trial?)

     Oomph!

     * September '95: KKBT (Yes, Theo Mizuhara's station) feels the heat of protests after more than a year of morning show offenses to Asians, greeting Asian American callers with a gong sound and talking with them with fake accents. Whenever they used Asian American personalities and newsmakers in skits--whether Judge Ito or local TV news anchor Tritia Toyota--they automatically had thick accents.

     Groan...

     Want more? Just keep listening. Morning shows, both talk and music, have found that shock works. Just ask Howard Stern, or watch as his roster of stations and his earnings continue to climb. The problem is, Stern is singular. Most of the imitators are punching in the dark, and it is out of the darkness that we get jokes devoid of context and shading. It's humor based on differences, but it's no mere acknowledgment of differences; it's a mockery of differences, and, intended or not, it places distances between groups of people.

     Confronted, they'll say their critics are overly sensitive; that Asians/gays/lesbians/Hispanics/African Americans (choose one) aren't their only targets, that they're "equal opportunity offenders."

     Well, now, that makes it OK, doesn't it?

     Equally stupid are some of the executives, anxious to excuse their high-priced talent. Oh, they're just putting the personality back into radio, they say. They're just joking. It's an isolated incident. Most of them will issue apologies or discipline the offenders when forced to, by organizations like Media Action Network for Asian Americans (MANAA) in Los Angeles, which got The Beat to promise to stop beating on minorities.

     But most of the DJs and talkers are unrepentant. They're like people caught shoplifting or spraying graffiti. They move on to the next store, the wall, the next victim.

     John London, the KKBT DJ targeted by MANAA, was offended by the complaints he and his crew drew. "You know what really gets me about this Asian group?" he said on the air. "They're trying to put themselves on a list of oppressed people. And it's like, 'What are you talking about? If anybody's made it in this country, it's Asians! You don't know what oppression is!"

     To which, in the radio industry trade magazine, Gavin, I wrote:

     "Well, John, tell that to the friends and family of Vincent Chin, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat by fellow Americans who thought he was Japanese and blamed him for taking jobs away from Detroit auto workers."

     Where did those killers get that notion? Maybe not from some hot-collared right-wing commentator raging against "dirty, stinking Japs."

     Or maybe so.

     There are no easy answers. For now, be grateful for the vigilance of organizations like MANAA. And the occasional flashes of good news from the too-rare likes of Theo.

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RANDOM NOTES:
Congrats to Cameron Crowe, whose film, Almost Famous, got four Golden Globe nominations. That, of course, is the coming-of-age rock movie that includes me as a real-life character. Cameron is up for Best Movie/Comedy and Best Screenplay, while Kate Hudson and Frances McDormand have to battle it out for Best Supporting Actress. Hey, how come no nom for Terry Chen, who played that AsianConnections.com guy?

Sydnie Kohara & Ben Fong-Torres Photo courtesy of Robert Altman

Speaking of films, my pal, the singer-songwriter Jackie DeShannon (www.jackiedeshannon.com) saw Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and was beside herself. "It's the best movie I've ever seen," she said. "I cried. Bruce Lee must be so proud."

It's getting near to Chinese New Year again, and, for the fourth year, I'll be co-anchoring KTVU (Fox 2)'s coverage of the parade in San Francisco. Sydnie Kohara, who went from KGO-TV to Singapore and to CNBC in London, is back in the Bay Area, on CNET TV (seen on CNBC). And she's getting married, to another Bay Area resident who was in London a year or so ago, computer executive George LaPlante. They'll wed in New Orleans, Sydnie's home area. I'll be officiating the ceremony, and a bunch of their pals are making the trip from the Bay to the Bayou. Watch out, N'awlins!??/font>