Don't miss the documentary: 'Like A Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres'

NETFLIX

Rolling Stone journalist Ben Fong-Torres, became a cultural icon himself.

OPINION

I never met Ben Fong-Torres and I'm certain he's never heard of me, but for me, like so many of my peers of a certain age, he was one of my role models as a journalist and as a stereotype-buster.

I'm pretty sure he would be uncomfortable being labeled as a "role model," but after viewing the excellent documentary, Like A Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres, age has a way of mellowing one out. The doc is available on Netflix, just in time for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Heritage Mont.

Fong-Torres began writing for Rolling Stone in 1969, about the same time I was awakening as a student at UC Berkeley. 

There were not many Asian Americans in media at that time. Just seeing his byline, opened up my eyes to the other career options beyond that was (unwittingly) mapped out by my parents.

Before social media, Rolling Stone,  a music magazine born in San Francisco, which at the time, was the center of the '60's counter culture, was one of the voices of the baby-boomer generation and Fong-Torres was at the center of the whirlwind. 

A lot of things were happening then: the anti-war movement, the beginnings of the feminists movement, people were connecting the dots on climate-change and corporate greed, and the civil rights movement and the budding awareness of being Asian American, were churning American society.

With no internet, no Google, I had to fill in the blanks. In my imagination, I conjured up a belilef that Fong-Torres was a fellow Filipino American. As I found out later, his father got around the Chinese Exclusion Act limiting immigrants from China by obtaining a Filipino passport, which was still a colony of the U.S.

Like many Asian Americans, Fong Torres grew up in a White environment, finally settling in Oakland, CA, which helped shape his multi-cultural outlook and put him at ease interviewing music artists of all races and economic roots. Likewise, being Asian American, artists of color were confident the inner thoughts that they entrusted to him would be interpreted and written about from their perspective.

“It strikes me that probably more than a few times, musicians, especially those of color, in some way connected to me as a kind of a fellow outsider,” Fong-Torres says in our new episode. “I think they saw me as a sort of a fellow marginalized person, doing something extraordinary, just as they were.”

As depicted in the hour and a half documentary, directed by Suzanne Joe Kai, Fong-Torres’ era-defining articles of all the major music artists of the 70s — and the music magazine's ever-growing influence — helped him raise his own profile to become a cultural icon in his own right in the Seventies. 

Beyond his skill as a journalist and just as impactful, Fong-Torres was cool - countering the nerd and servile image foisted upon Asian American men.

While I was going through the process of self-discovery, Ben Fong-Torres was one of few guiding lights available for Asian Americans. Together with martial artist Bruce Lee, Fong-Torres opened 

Like A Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres is available on Netflix. It is also making the rounds in the Asian American film festivals so check local

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