I HOTEL
by karen tei yamashita;
art by leland wong and sina grace
Coffee house press; 619 pages; $19.95 paperback)
The International Hotel, perched on the edge of San Francisco’s Chinatown at Kearny and Jackson streets, became the center of the burgeoning Asian American civil rights movement in the 1960s after its tenants were threatened with eviction. For nearly a decade, activists fought to halt the redevelopment – including a dramatic standoff when thousands of protesters formed a human barricade around the building. Although they lost the battle, the community came into its own.
Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel “I Hotel” is a dazzling depiction of those exhilarating, turbulent days, told through the multiple perspectives of a sprawling cast: a Chinese American poet, a Filipino American farmworker organizer and a Japanese-Russian American disability activist, among many others.
Just as diverse are the inventive forms in which Yamashita, who teaches at UC Santa Cruz, shapes her narrative. The 10 novellas include poems, myth, a dossier on the UC Berkeley criminology professor who sponsored the first Asian American studies course in the country, a dance script depicting Asian American memory, recipes for roast pig, and scores of hilarious quotations from Imelda Marcos, wife of the deposed president of the Philippines. That’s in addition to delightful illustrations by Leland Wong and Sina Grace.
As in her previous works, Yamashita incorporates satire and the surreal in prose that is playful yet knowing, fierce yet mournful, in a wildly multicultural landscape. The novel reveals how the civil rights movement intertwines the Black Panthers, Yellow Power, the Indian takeover of Alcatraz, the formation of the United Farm Workers, protests against nuclear proliferation, and the rights of the disabled – and the fascinating contributions of Asian Americans in each.
You may find yourself putting down the book and going online to find out more about this compelling history, and guessing whom the fictional characters are based on. Mo Akagi appears to be Richard Aoki, field marshal for the Black Panthers. Edmund Yat Min Lee bears a resemblance to Ling-chi Wang, activist and retired UC Berkeley professor of ethnic studies. Arthur Hama might be Takeo “Edward” Terada, a Japanese immigrant who painted Coit Tower murals.
Yamashita wasn’t living in San Francisco in those years, but her extensive research and interviews with more than 150 sources enabled her to uncover history that might have been lost. In the afterword, she explains the difficulty of coalescing her research “into any one storyline or historic chronology. … Their choices took different trajectories, but everyone was there, really there.”
With so much ground to cover, and the frequent shifts in point of view, some characters seem sketchy – defined in shorthand by educational degree and political activities. A few abruptly die (terminal illness, motorcycle accident, a shooting), without much discussion among their family and friends, and so their passing lacks full emotional resonance. The author sacrifices sustained narrative momentum in the interest of telling a broad range of stories. Some readers may wish Yamashita had gone deeper into the lives so tantalizingly glimpsed.
In the final pages, Yamashita assumes the voice of the community – the “we” who ask, “But why save an old hotel?” In lyrical, elegant prose, she explains how the hotel became a symbol, a rallying cry for people putting aside their differences to unite for a cause.
“Each room was a tiny home, a place of final refuge for a lifetime of work … when we saw the elderly tenants thrown out on the streets, maybe we saw ourselves, our own stories of struggle and sacrifice connected to their stories, and we knew that whatever our kids had been trying to do, we could agree on this one thing – the honor due to those who’ve gone before.”
In this passionate, bighearted novel, Yamashita has paid just such a tribute.
Southern California writer Vanessa Hua formerly covered Asian American issues at The Chronicle. E-mail her at books@sfchronicle.com.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/05/16/RV6E1D4T5E.DTL&type=printable
4 comments
Comments feed for this article
June 30, 2010 at 7:31 am
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita « The Organic Word Garden
[...] or if you are looking for a challenging and incredible read. For a more comprehensive review, see East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines [...]
June 30, 2010 at 7:35 am
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita « Just Desserts Reviews
[...] I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita I have about 7 books half read at the moment (but I’m cheating because a lot of them are children’s and YA titles), but the one that’s really capturing my attention is ‘I Hotel’. It’s not by any means a light read, as its form is experimental, and its themes range from politics to human rights to poverty in the Asian population in America. At the novel’s centre is the International Hotel, or the I Hotel, which becomes the center of the Asian Human Rights Movement in the 60s. The ‘chapters’ are more like interlinking stories, told from different perspectives. (My favourite so far includes the postcards and letters between professor and student, each beginning with a fantastic quote from Chinese authors of the Revolution). Yamashita is a master of letting the reader figure out what’s going on by themselves – there’s one section that seems to be written by the community of dead Chinese immigrants, but it is never made explicit. This is a book worth checking out if you are a student of literature, of Asian history, of American history, or if you are looking for a challenging and incredible read. For a more comprehensive review, see East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines [...]
November 13, 2010 at 7:01 pm
Congratulations to Karen Tei Yamashita, Makes It to National Book Award Shortlist « Kanlaon
[...] writer on the National Book Award fiction shortlist this year is Karen Tei Yamashita. Her book, I-Hotel, published by Coffee House Press, is going to duke it out [...]
December 13, 2010 at 7:30 am
sesshu
I Hotel
by Karen Tei Yamashita
Panorama of Life
A Review by Scott Bryan Wilson
Post a comment about this review on the Powells.com blog
One of those mammoth (over 600 pages) “kitchen sink” novels, Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel is ridiculously ambitious — and, happily, quite successful. Yamashita writes about the decade from 1968 to 1978 in San Francisco, from the perspective of the Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, and other Asians who were living there. Beginning with the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and ending with a protest/demonstration to save the I-Hotel, which housed hundreds of single Chinese and Filipino men, her tale is populated by poets, scholars, laborers, musicians, factory workers, left-wingers, Communists, foodies, revolutionaries, painters, filmmakers, and others: there’s the poet Paul Wallace Lin, his classmate Lee Yat Min, and their professor Chen Wen-guang (a “Li P-poet type teaching at SF State”); Arthur Ma, a painter who is “the only male heir to a Confucian scholar”; Huo Lian, an artist “working on a film using cuts from Hollywood films that stereotype Orientals with that yellow peril shit”; and, among dozens of others, “radical activist revolutionaries . . . all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed. ”
Formally, the work comprises ten novellas, one for each year of the decade covered, with most written in differing styles. The narrative is related not only through traditional prose — exposition and dialogue — but through a three-ring circus of genres: comics (about Suzie and Anna May Wong, Siamese twin daughters of Chiquita Banana), analects (“to see oneself in another is to learn both fate and possibility”; “one man’s history is another man’s imagination”), and poetry (which depicts fights between various Chinese martial arts masters: “108 points of attack / 36 are secret (lethal) / 72 will not kill or cripple // 5 monkey types: / drunken / stone / lost / standing / wooden,” as well as screenplay, theater, songs, study guides, epigraphs, fables, drawings, and an approximation of a prose version of free jazz sax which defies excerpting but makes an intuitive sense on the page and appears to have a minimum of three or four different ways to be read. It’s quite a performance, with Yamashita fluidly moving through each style, and testing what can be conveyed through each one.
While there’s a notable focus on the social unrest of the times, as the characters struggle to unionize, save their homes, and start their own businesses, it’s through the stories of the artists that the narrative is held together, and Yamashita weaves in as much as she can about them and their relations to their heritage. For instance, in one section we learn that “Chairman Mao declares that there is no such thing as art for art’s sake — that all literature and art are for the masses of the people, for the workers, peasants, and soldiers,” and then, a few pages later we hear of “a factory worker . . . [who] bicycled a hundred li to tell him what needed to be changed in his novel. â??The people have a stake in our literature, and we must learn from them.’” Art and books are all treated with the highest respect; when a young scholar borrows a book from a woman and adds his marginalia to hers, it gives rise to the exquisite reflection, “Where else may there be a true meeting of minds but within a book?”
There’s a lot going on in the novel, and the overwhelming number of characters and their at times interchangeable characterizations make certain sections a little hard to follow, but Yamashita weaves in many moments of riveting humanity. For example:
But still the human sounds are invasive. Joe’s housing a dingbat prostitute next door to keep the men occupied. The insipid trill of her throat and the heavy groaning saturate the porous walls. . . . he grabs his hard penis and pumps it to the rhythms of the squeaking springs and the pounding bed, passes out. Then wakes to the slamming door, sits up high in his loft to greet his flaccid member in a slimy pool, demoralized again. A copy of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason lies open on his chest.
Or, in a section following a burgeoning, semi-antagonistic relationship:
9.1 Benny, she said from her bed, you’re a lousy revolutionary, and only I know it. I should bring it up before the central committee and have your ass blasted.
9.2 He laughed, looked up from his book. You know I’m only in this because I like to read.
Or there’s this one, in which a young man is changing an old woman’s tire for her:
“Are you one of those young people who want to change the world?” Wayne stuttered, “Well, maybe.” He sat down next to her.
“I knew an old lady way back when who was a suffragette. And she told me that she was sure that all wars would end when women could vote because women were the only ones who would vote war out of existence.” She paused and shook her head. “Didn’t happen that way, but that’s O.K. dear.” She patted Wayne’s knee. “You keep on trying.”
Huge, messy, and frantically fun, I Hotel offers a very believable panorama of life at this time. It’s apparent that Yamashita did an incredible amount of research for the book. The portraits of these early generation Asian Americans, some of whom were or knew people who had been imprisoned in internment camps, denied a humane wage, got fucked with by the cops and the government, fought losing battles for citizenship, and lived in deplorable conditions, are quite moving and conveyed without sentimentality. It’s an impressive accomplishment from an author who continues to push the boundaries of innovative fiction.
read more about this book
Get a year of Rain Taxi for only $15!
Rain Taxi, a winner of the Alternative Press Award for Best Arts & Literature Coverage, is a quarterly publication that publishes reviews of literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with an emphasis on works that push the boundaries of language, narrative, and genre. Essays, interviews, and in-depth reviews reflect Rain Taxi’s commitment to innovative publishing.