Birth of a Nation: Asian America Residency by A. Robert Lee

Karen Tei Yamashita, I Hotel, Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2010

Asian American fiction, modern and contemporary, affords good reason to celebrate its plenty: nowhere more so than in how it has remembered the 1960s in scale, heft, great leaps and flights of narrative. Maxine Hong Kingston’s Trickmaster Monkey (1989) famously and reflexively put Chinese America from San Francisco to Berkeley under Sun Wu Kong trickster rules. Frank Chin’s Gunga Din Highway (1994) created a compendious, battling China-genealogy even as he laid siege to Charlie Chan and related stereotype. Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker (1995), set in multi-ethnic Queens, tracked as though existential detective-story the very language as much as the politics of Korean and Asian American “ethnic” identity. With I Hotel Karen Tei Yamashita joins the roster, a dazzling 600-page Big Tent novel which both builds upon the literary career launched with her eco-fantastical Through The Arc of the Rain Forest (1990) and quite in its own right maps 1968-77 through a variorum of both actual and imagined overlapping histories as indeed landmark Asian American decade.

Yellow Power. Mao. Marxism. Berkeley and San Francisco State. The Vietnam War. Interethnic yellow-black, yellow-brown worker and student alliances. The West and not just the East as Red. Ethnic Studies Departments. Debate and dialectic. Splits. Drugs. Loves. Theatre. Was not this California inside and beyond Chinatown, Japantown, Koreatown or Filipinotown, as embattled generational nurture-grounds, street and ideology, sweat-shop and campus, family and foodways? And what more resonant emblem than the I-Hotel, built in 1907 (actually the third on the site after others built in 1854 and 1873) on Kearny and Jackson Street in San Francisco’s Manilatown, home to Pinoy Manong and Chinese oldsters, slated for demolition in 1968, and the very epicenter of radical protest against Asian tenant eviction that would last through the next ten years? Over that decade, as Yamashita’s novel refracts each surge and contra-flow, the activism involved became the very groundswell of Asian America as self-aware signature and movement. The hotel, in her compendious but greatly dexterous fashioning, serves as Asian America’s house of memory, room for room stories, basement to rooftop metaphors of each contributing and cross-plied ethnicity – Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Filipino, and to be sure, at intervals African American and white.

The effect is a massive work of ventriloquy, a ten-part necklace of story-sequences at once those of the era’s California lives and collectives yet full of persuasive, lightly worn historical excavation and to include cartoon and manga. Even as the stories unpeel, modernly, whether this demonstration (anti-Vietnam, Delano, labor abuse, 9066 and Japanese American reparation) or that organizational radicalism and love-affair, you hardly want for heavy-duty political citation – Lenin, Mao, Stalin, Fidel, Che, Malcolm, Martin. Each feeds the debates, the sectarian party lines and dissidence. A formidable array of Asian classics are likewise brought to bear, be it Confucius’s Analects, Shi Nai An’s The Water Margin: or the 108 Heroes, Murasaki’s The Tale of Genji, Basho’s haiku and The Narrow Road to the Interior, or closer to time and place, Carlos Bulosan’s  America Is in the Heart (1943). Add to these snippets from soul and blues, rock and pop, and one has both literal and figurative orchestration. 

Insiders will have no difficulty recognizing key 1960s players – Al Robles as Filipino activist, S.I. Hayakawa as San Francisco State President and US Senator, or Sheriff Richard Hongisto detained in his own jail for refusing to execute the eviction orders at the I-Hotel. To these can be added Chin and his fellow-editors of the Aiiieeeee! anthologies (1974, 1991), the Kingston of The Woman Warrior (1977), or the Jessica Hagedorn of Chiquita Banana (1972). All of these, however, take their place behind or alongside the main fictional creations. Yamashita keeps her cast-list as differentiated as it is busy, whether Paul Wallace Lin, student radical in the opening “1968: Eye Hotel” sequence,  Professor Tom Takabayashi as onetime Tule Lake internee and FBI-dossiered faculty member of the Berkeley School of Criminology in “1969: I Spy Hotel,” Jack “Turtle” Denny as Native activist in the Alcatraz occupation in “1972: Inter-National Hotel,”  Ria Ishii as Japanese American “seasoned activist” who heads up the I-Hotel Cooperative Garment Factory” in “1973: In’l  Hotel,” or Estelle Hama as painter-wife to a husband whose canvases are to be found as WPA murals in Coit Tower and witness to 9066 internment in  “1975: Internationale Hotel.” Given all the other assorted activists (Felix Allos as Filipino labor figure, Mo Agaki as Chinese American feminist Panther, Sandy Hu as choreographer, or the various paired lovers in “1976: Ai Hotel”) there is hardly a want of “live” participants.

“But why save an old hotel” asks the text as the novel moves towards its close. Every line and riff, story and colloquy, helps supply the answer. For those in the fight against eviction, and whose lives weave into its very corridors and girders, it acts as “a fortress and a beacon.” Felix Allos’s comrade, Macario Amado, calls it “my brick roots.” On seeking to blow up the eventually emptied building, the novel’s voice give witness: “And the center of our great uproar was a gigantic voice box of our own making; it is our I-Hotel.” Analogies, no doubt more consequential, come to mind – The French Revolution’s storming of the Bastille, the Russian Revolution’s taking of the Winter Palace. This, after all, is California. The Bay and Golden Gate Bridge offer coordinates, as do City Lights Bookstore, Market Street, the Embarcadero, each lived-in Asian American community enclave, Oakland and Berkeley, and even figures like Herb Caen, the journalist of the San Francisco Chronicle responsible for coining the term beatnik and popularization (amid the 1967 Summer of Love) of hippie. Yamashita’s sense of place is acute, the I-Hotel as radial compass point, “home” in a profoundly iconographical as much as geographic sense.

The novel, inevitably almost, has caused murmurings about size. Is there too much recreation of Marxist-Maoist-Leninist activist debate? Are the workings of the groups, “alphabet soup” as they are called, and with the International Hotel Tenants Association (IHTA) prime among them, too busy or in-house? These recall the objections raised against John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy, Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again, and latterly Leon Forrest’s Divine Days. In fact the novel is rigorously sequenced, its “multiple perspectives” as the Afterword says elegantly “divided into ten novellas or ten ‘hotels.’” If Yamashita has given sight and sound to Asian-America’s “great layered and labyrinthine…hotel of many rooms” she has done so in her own wholly singular house of fiction. Both kinds of edifice, I-Hotel and the novel I Hotel, deserve to echo in the memory.