'I Hotel' by Karen Tei Yamashita
'Where will you live when you get old?' — Review #139
The thing that excites me most about ‘I Hotel’ is how unusual it is: The novel has no protagonists, and there is seemingly no plot. It also has no consistent storytelling format. The book offers an immersion into San Francisco’s Asian communities during the social unrest and student activism of the 1970s with an ever-expanding mix of characters, settings and stories smelted into 10 novellas, which are what the author calls the chapters. These novellas are themselves a mosaic of forms, combining straightforward narrative with comic strips, drawings, choreography directions, script excerpts, and aphorisms from political figures like Karl Marx, Ho Chi Minh and Imelda Marcos. Rather than follow a character or series of events linearly, the reader instead must go by feel to make sense of an often disorienting clash of ideas, history, events and people. But don’t worry, that’s the point, and the book becomes more clear as it unfolds, like:
Here’s the cover:
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Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel, which was a finalist for a National Book Award in 2010, taught me more than just how to take risks with narrative form and pull them off. I also learned about life in the U.S. government’s internment camps for Japanese Americans during World War II. I learned about Angel Island, a San Francisco corollary to Ellis Island for primarily Asian immigrants, which I had never heard of before. I learned other things I didn’t know, too, like that there was an Asian member of the Black Panthers, and about how a student uprising came to the defense of Japanese farmers who were being displaced to make way for Narita International Airport. This book has so many interesting historic tidbits, it had me going to the internet like:
But the most important thing I learned about was the International Hotel, also known as the I Hotel, which was a real place in what used to be San Francisco’s Manillatown neighborhood. It was a single-room occupancy hotel that housed primarily older, lower-income men who had been laborers and farm hands during the postwar years and who were violently evicted in 1977 to make way for something like:
The hotel was also home to artists, poets, musicians, students, Marxists and Communists, as well as activist groups engaged in various causes from ending the Vietnam War, to labor organizing for sweatshop workers, to boosting Asian American political visibility, to expanding ethnic studies at local colleges, to battling the city to preserve the I Hotel. (The one cause that seemed to be missing from the hotel’s array was gay rights, which struck me as odd given that Harvey Milk was active at the same time. I was puzzled why there wasn’t more of a nod to the LGBTQ community here.) But these leftist groups, though well intentioned, are often bogged down in philosophy, focusing on debate and ensuring everyone is thinking the correct Marxist interpretations. Meanwhile, the forces of capitalism are moving to buy the hotel’s property, to craft an ‘urban renewal’ plan with the city and to force the tenants out. It’s not giving anything away to say that near the end of the book hundreds of riot police come to evict the elderly men because that’s what really happened 43 years ago when they used horses and truncheons to battle through a ring of protesters to reach the hotel. I was struck by how similar the police/protest dynamic is in 2020 as it was in 1977, and by the questions the book seems to pose by telling the hotel’s story. As I read, I asked myself: What good are correct thoughts against a nightstick? Is philosophy useless? Where will I live when I get old? Is activism useless? How vital are ethnic communities to the life and vibrancy of a city? How poisonous is ‘urban renewal’ to the character of a city? And, whether:
I’ll be thinking about this book for a while. It’s an important contribution to Asian visibility, to history and to literature. ‘I Hotel’ is not the easiest read, but if you’re up for a challenge, I think you’ll end up learning from and enjoying this book. I recommend it.
How it begins:
So I’m Walter Cronkite, dig? And it’s February 27, 1968, and I’m saying, the U.S. is mired in a stalemate in Vietnam, and you are there.
But whoa, let’s back up twenty-nine days to the Lunar New Year. Now we know the Vietnamese call it Tet, but the Chinese own it: New Year, they call it. This year it’s significant for Paul because on this night his dad grabs his heart like it’s been antipersonnel-mined with a BLU-43, what you call dragontooth, like it was waiting there in one of those jungle paths, waiting for someone to put his toe on the de-toe-nator, and boom! There’s firecrackers busting all up and down Grant Avenue, so Paul can’t hear his dad cry out, but he’s walking behind through a narrow in the crowded festivities and the spitting lights glittering overhead only to stumble across his dad, crumpling into a laundry heap on the sidewalk.
“Ba! What is it?”
Ba has a vision as he passes: his big mistake and no atonement. “When your mother died,” he’s gasping, “for your sake, I should have married again.”
“What are you talking about? Help! We need help. An ambulance!”
“Just the two of us from that time on”—gasp—“Good son. Only child.”
“Move away! Give him air!”
“Now, my son … I’m sorry … in the world all alone…”
My rating:
‘I Hotel’ by Karen Tei Yamashita was published by Coffee House Press in 2010 and in 2019. 605 pages. $20.19 at Bookshop.org.
Up next:
Review #138: ‘Mean’ by Myriam Gurba
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Before you go:
Read this: August is Women in Translation month and Words Without Borders has this interesting list of ‘9 Translated Books by Black Women Writers to Read this #WITMonth.’ One of the books that jumped out at me is ‘La Bastarda’ by Trifonia Melibea Obono (translated from the Spanish by Lawrence Schimel), which WWB says is the first book by a woman from Equatorial Guinea to be published in English. I’m putting it and a few others onto my reading list.
Read this, too: Here is Malcolm Gladwell in Crime Reads writing about Jack Reacher, hero of Lee Child’s novels: ‘Jack Reacher and The Grand Unified Theory of Thrillers.’ I’ve never read any of the Reacher books, but my mother likes them. I like how Gladwell unifies his theory by categorizing thrillers into one of four types: Western, Eastern, Southern and Northern. Read the piece to see if you agree.
Watch this: This tweet is like the annual dance club reunion in Chicago Donna and I used to attend before the virus.
Remember this: Saturday, Aug. 29, is Independent Bookstore Day. You can find many related events here. As you know, BoG is a big proponent of independent bookstores, and this past week during our vacation we supported Bruised Apple Books in Peekskill, and Mercer Street Books & Records, Strand Book Store and Three Lives & Company in Manhattan. Be sure to support your local independent bookstore!
Thanks for reading, and thanks especially to Donna for editing this newsletter!
Until next time,
MPV
Review #139 used GIFs by @alimac @docclub @peekasso and @mushisca via Giphy.com.
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This sounds so interesting and thought-provoking. I like your questions in re: thoughts vs. action and the value of activism and philosophy. Thanks for a lively and informative review.