Outsider on the Inside : A Rolling Stone editor melds his family’s immigrant history with a memoir of the 1960s : THE RICE ROOM: Growing Up Chinese-American From Number Two Son to Rock ‘n’ Roll, <i> By Ben Fong-Torres (Hyperion: $22.95; 260 pp.)</i>

The eponymous “rice room” in Ben Fong-Torres’ memoir is a storage area in his father’s 1945 Oakland Chinatown restaurant. It doubles as a “home away from home” for young Ben and his siblings while the grown-ups work. Here the children nap, study, and listen to radio shows among shelves laden with “jars of fermented bean cakes and tins of salted fish.”

In constructing his life, Fong-Torres, a former editor at Rolling Stone, introduces himself with this image. The rice room, he seems to say, is where his life begins; it is the metaphorical womb. His genetic makeup consists of weird Chinese food, foreign words, the “mysterious” kitchen, the “big Chinese cleaver”-wielding father, and a Mitchell table radio with its sane, familiar dramas.

The author’s intentions are spelled out in the subtitle, “Growing Up Chinese-American--From Number Two Son to Rock ‘n’ Roll.” The hyphen that separates Chinese and American suggests the notion of a dual identity, a split personality with distinct Chinese and American halves. This is the memoir’s thematic arc--Fong-Torres’ evolution away “from” his Chinese half (the echoes of Charlie Chan’s Number One Son are obvious and unfortunate; why evoke and claim that racist stereotype?) to his Rolling Stone American self.

By second-generation Chinese American standards, especially in the ‘40s and ‘50s, his is not a particularly unique experience. But since his intention here is to relate his triumphant journey from immigrant ghetto to pop mainstream, he aggressively asserts his difference, making his eventual assimilation that much more impressive. From the beginning he drives home the message that his was not a normal childhood: his parents work in Chinese restaurants; his father cooks Chinese food; the family eats Chinese food; they live in Chinatown; they speak a strange language.

Unfortunately, Fong-Torres writes his life as if his material were as foreign to him as it is meant to be for his readers. All too often he is an alien observer of his world. When he introduces the rice room, he does so as a tour guide, directing us through a bank where his father’s restaurant once stood. The mundane becomes exoticized for non-Chinese eyes. For instance, barbecued pork, commonplace in his restaurant days, is “glowing bright red, with black at the tips,” “magical,” “succulent, sweet.” He does the same with the Chinese spoken at home, littering his prose with romanizations of Cantonese, followed by translations into English; while this technique initially imparts a taste of the bilingual household, he does this to such excess that the language seems like a prop, linguistic paper lanterns.

Among the book’s best moments are recountings of how his parents came to America. Especially rewarding is the section on the origins of their wonderful surname: While in the Philippines (at that time a U.S. possession), his father buys the birth certificate of “Ricardo Torres,” a necessary step, since anti-Chinese exclusion laws of the time prohibited immigration of Chinese laborers.

But Fong-Torres adopts a troubling attitude, calling his family “connivers” and “outlaws.” What peculiar and problematic diction! After all, was it not this country’s exclusion laws that necessitated the use of a paper name? Dropping his tour-guide posture, he might have interpreted his parents more sympathetically, not as criminals, but as resourceful, determined, heroic.

Another example of the author as alien observer of his life is his sketchy yet still laborious accounts of Chinese and Chinese American history. Their purpose is to further prove his difference, but Fong-Torres’ renditions sound lifted from textbooks. None of the historical facts feel internalized by the author; he seems to have come upon these histories and claimed them, in the same way his dad claimed the Torres name.

In college Fong-Torres begins his long association with Rolling Stone, first as writer, then as editor. He suddenly enters the pop-culture mainstream, but his being a “Chinese-American” is neither a help nor a hindrance. Jann Wenner hires him because he is good at what he does: He’s a lifelong “print junkie” who stole comics and Mad magazine, produced his own homemade publications, wrote for the college newspaper. The impact of the preceding 150 pages of “Chinese-American” material has no apparent bearing on how he gets to the magazine or how he does his job there.

We read memoirs because they promise an insider’s perspective on famous times, events, and people. They are like a film that purports to be “based on a true story”--regardless of the film’s merits, we stay with it, drawn to the truth. Fong-Torres certainly knows famous times: His coming of age, professionally and sexually, coincides with the 1960s; he ducks the draft, reports on peace protests in Berkeley and the hippie scene in San Francisco, experiments with drugs and free love. He signs on with Rolling Stone (it was almost called the Electric Newspaper, we learn), deejays at FM stations, parties with Hunter Thompson, interviews just about every rock band that ever stepped on the Fillmore stage. And he knows famous people. Grace Slick, Steve Martin and Janis Joplin, among others, make cameo appearances; scores of names are dropped.

A wealth of material, indeed! Fong-Torres is in the thick of things. The ‘60s section is easily the memoir’s highlight. But he leaves this reader wanting more. While he captures the excitement, the sense of expectancy, the frenetic mutability of the times, Fong-Torres skimps on details. Too much space has been devoted to the “Chinese-American” Ben, too little is left for the “print junkie.” So we are teased by his ubiquitous name dropping, but there are no gossipy tidbits, no insights, just a bunch of names; Fong-Torres reveals nothing about these rock stars, and his encounters with them reveal nothing about him. Instead we get Ray Charles for a page and learn he is egotistical and wears beaded Chinese slippers; we learn that songwriter Dino Valente is served tea and pie by “three--three!--beautiful chicks.” This is as close as we get to the rock ‘n’ rollers.

As much as he is at the center of events though, he is never a central figure in them; he seems strangely detached. His is the journalist’s gaze, reporting on situations as an outsider rather than as a participant. The reportorial “I” never quite emerges as a character, an actor in this story.

This book is filled with potentially moving material. But the pity is Fong-Torres’s strategy to tell all, rather than to focus on and develop certain aspects of his story. Sometimes the book reads as if the author has decided to include everything he can remember, as if his memory were the rice room, and he was taking inventory.