The Rice Room: Growing Up Chinese-American from Number Two Son to Rock 'n'Roll - Softcover

Fong-Torres, Ben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0452274125 ISBN 13: 9780452274129

Publisher: Plume, 1995

Synopsis

Autobiographical reminiscences describe the author's childhood of obligation as the son of first-generation Chinese Americans, his career with Rolling Stone magazine, and his brother's murder by Chinatown teen gangs. Reprint.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews

A tender, sometimes funny memoir by a son of Chinese immigrants who became a writer and Rolling Stone editor. Fong-Torres (Hickory Wind, 1991) got his unusual name--``the greatest by-line in the world,'' one colleague said--from his father, who bought a Filipino birth certificate to circumvent immigration laws. Growing up in Oakland's Chinatown in the 1950s, the author and his siblings worked in the family restaurant (hence the title) and were sent to learn Chinese culture after school, ``but my heart was elsewhere.'' Mad magazine and Elvis Americanized him, and he became a high school writer and stage cut-up. At San Francisco State, he was a DJ and newspaperman, and found himself, in the midst of mid-60's turmoil. In between tales of his siblings and their attempts to leave the nest, Fong-Torres tells amusing, if somewhat overwrought, stories of his romantic struggles with Asian and non-Asian women. He got his Rolling Stone ``dream job'' shortly after it began in 1967 and also moonlighted on a Chinatown paper. Though Fong-Torres tells a few anecdotes about the likes of Janis Joplin and Ray Charles, he mostly skates over his rock experiences. Rather, he recounts the tragedy of older brother Barry, a youth worker killed in a 1972 Chinatown gang war, and his own effort to grow close to his reticent parents, interviewing them before his 1982 trip to China to work on a documentary. Fong-Torres concludes that his parents' Chinese ways actually produced hard-working, decent children. An enjoyable, thought-provoking tale of family ties and cultural identity, but rock 'n' roll fans may be frustrated by the author's emphases. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Fong-Torres' coming-of-age story traces his cross-cultural heritage as an Asian American desperately seeking hot dogs, chili, and assimilation. After beginning with his parents, who entered this country using false papers, his bittersweet book recalls a childhood often spent in the rice room behind his family's Chinese restaurant or in the restaurant itself, working--as did his siblings--in the family business while attending public school and also Chinese school, where the ancient art of calligraphy was painstakingly taught to children actually yearning for all things American. Although expected to earn high grades in all classes, assist his father in opening a new restaurant, and date Chinese girls rather than "foreign devils," second son Ben was drawn instead to Elvis Presley and the rock 'n' roll culture. Eventually, he passed high school, endured the untimely shooting death at 29 of his older brother, and went to work for Rolling Stone, chronicling rock culture. By his adroit account of it, his young life was full of hard work, cultural contradictions, and familial devotion as well as sadness, rebellion, and laughter. Whitney Scott

Edition details

• Publisher: Plume
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0452274125
• ISBN 13: 9780452274129
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272