Meantime, I’m telling my story to Jack, who’s taking it all down on his typewriter. He’s always arguing, “We can’t say you cooked in the Great Hall for Nixon. It never happened.”
“So what? In my mind, it happened.”
“What about this story about you and Ho Chi Minh in Paris?”
“That’s one of the best stories.”
“And this one, cooking for Imelda?”
“She goes wild for my pancit. She goes so wild, she worked it into her love cosmology.”
“When were you in Yokohama?”
“That’s really true. I docked there with the merchant marines. I got a girlfriend there. Wanna see her picture? Yoko like Yoko Ono.”
“Like Yoko-hama.”
“Hey, I forget to tell you all my girlfriends. We got to put them in.”
“You got a girl at every port, right?”
“You know it.”
“I give up.”
“In my long life, there’s no work I don’t do. I do everything. I been everywhere. If I don’t do it with my own two hands and my back, stooping with my legs, walking with these old feet, I do it with my head. I fish up in Alaska. I do canning work. I do stoop labor and cut asparagus, artichokes. Pick tomatoes, strawberries, grapes. I carry a gun for the U.S. military. I build houses. I plant flowers. I build bridges. I sell grocery. I’m a bartender. I work the dock. I organize for the union. I gamble. I bust some butts in my time. Short time I do acting jobs in Hollywood. Dance with Fred Astaire. I play the ukulele in Honolulu with Don Ho. And all the time, I got the women. You write that down.”
“Where’s Paul? Let him do this. Hey, Chen, I got a postcard from Paul. He’s in Taiwan. When’s he coming back?”
Wen shrugs. “Haven’t heard.”
“The Okada book came out and he left. I think we worked him too hard.” He shakes his head, then looks at me. “Is this a cookbook or a fake autobiography?”
“Nothing fake here. I’m for real. I’m your real Makoi.”
“What?”
“Makoi. Makoi. You don’t know?”
“I’m not ghostwriting no imaginary autobiography, McCoy or not.”
“Why not? All the recipes I give you: authentic. This one goes back to Song Dynasty, original recipe with original poem. Taste travels to you from eight centuries.”
Wen says, “He’s right. Anyway, you’ve been doing the research. You should know. A whole history of civilization in a single dish. In time, everything else vanishes, but the dish can be recreated.”
“Food is made in America, but the recipe is guaranteed authentic, put your mark of good housekeeping. O.K., sometimes I change something here and there. Working to perfection, but I’m like the artist. Add my signature. But my life? My life is a dream. It’s what I got. What you want? Take it away?”
Wen’s got his brush out, splashing color. Dark red plump chunks of lady’s buttocks. Almost feel the quiver. Then the poem. Brush goes in quick flashes. Swish. Swish. Poem’s like cuisine. Makes the world sensible. Ingredients in the head, then apply fire. Have you eaten today?
10: All the Things You Are
What thoughts I have for you tonight, for I walked down Kearny under the shadow of an invisible hotel with a piano improvisation: all the things you are. Sweet poet. Sweet lover. Monk of the Tenderloin. Master Konnyaku. Fillmore Pilipino priest of ten thousand pianos. Play a song for former lovers meeting in the howling rain.
A drenched, unshaven man disappears in a steamy cloud behind the glass of a telephone booth.
Paul?
Wen-guang? It’s been a long time.
Yes. I need a favor.
Where are you? Bad connection.
It’s the rain. Did you hear that? Thunder. I’m at the gas station. Bottom of the hill. You know the one?
Car trouble?
No. They’ve condemned my house.
What?
All this rain. The foundation is slipping. They’ve cordoned it off.
Shit.
I’ve removed your things. What you left. And there’s more. Could you come? I borrowed a truck. I’ve been filling it up.
Shit! I heard that one.
That was close.
I’ll be there.
Sitting in your teahouse made from the refuse of the demolished Fillmore, the rain is softer, drenching the hydrangea along the bamboo wall. The spirits of those old Victorians seep through the wood and curl around your tea. Some are raucous spirits, dark panels pulled from dance floors and smoky bars, titillating tunes of blues and bebop. Some are cloistered spirits set in dark hardwood cherry, hoarding precious leathered first editions. What of those books? The music and the words now silent. Konnyaku, the three-legged, one-eyed cat, curled in a disheveled ball next to a warm teapot.
Meanwhile, the rain crashes in great waves across the Golden Gate. Cars slither precariously, headlights groping forward. Up the winding hill, two small rivers of mud and debris rush past on either side of the traffic parade. At the top of the hill, the cypress point to the ocean in the direction of the windswept storm.
A drenched man is running from his house with an armful of books.
Your stuff. It’s all in the Siata. There’s more. I threw in what I could. I filled the trunk, the backseat. Car’s too small. It’s a mess, but they didn’t give me any time.
I don’t need my stuff. I haven’t needed it all year.
I need to tell you something.
It doesn’t matter.
Your mother and I met at Stanford. She was a brilliant student of English literature.
Can’t this wait? You’re soaked!
We were great friends, so we got married, but I could never be faithful. We were married only a year, and she left. But we were always friends. It’s really true I introduced her to your father. They were very happy together.
Why didn’t you tell me before?
When your father died it didn’t seem appropriate, and later, it felt very strange. I thought you would be repulsed, and you were.
I thought you might be my father.
No! That’s not true! That could never be true. Is that why you left? Why didn’t you tell me?
Why didn’t you tell me?”
I’ve missed you.
It hurts, Wen-guang. It hurts badly.
Konnyaku, with a dingy spotted coat the color of konnyaku, a tail hairless in spots, a dark socket for the lost eye. That must have been some fierce fighting, screeching yowling dissonance, claws and teeth ripping and tearing. Two crazy cats in a fight to the finish. How did you come by this ugly old soldier, this war-torn survivor?
The relentless rain washes across their faces, dribbles from nose to chin to chest to stomach to crotch. The clothing has to be peeled off, layer by layer, abandoned with boots in sloppy piles in the dark entry-way. Naked, shivering.
They’ve turned off the gas and electricity.
What did they say? Can they save the house?
Too precarious to know. They told me to leave immediately.
Immediately. Then—
You’re shivering.
Get under. Hurry.
Hurry.
Whip me up some frothy tea from boiled rainwater and tell me about all the women you have ever loved, all the serenading and sweet-talking, all the tender tunes you played. Or better yet, toss a fish head in the boiling rainwater and tend the roiling pot, replay the minor keys along the spine, the major keys across the hips, the soft and frantic melodies that brush the lips. Or better yet, throw in bulbs and tubers, roots and leaves, seeds and bark, algae and fungus, and stir the moaning moaning in the pot.
It was as if the thunder of the ocean’s waves engulfed the house, crested in white sheets against the windows, pounded the roof.
Wait. Listen. Hear that?
Rain. Never stops.
No. Get up.
I can feel it. Do you feel that?
Here. Put this on. Quickly.
Like a small earthquake.
Hur
ry! Get out!
Take the Siata. I’ll follow in the truck.
Where are you going?
One last thing. I just remembered.
Forget it. We can come back later.
It’s too valuable.
It’s too dangerous.
You’re getting wet again. Get in the car.
Fuck it! Just hurry.
I’ll meet you at the bottom.
The hot pot sits between us, steam and fragrance curling up to the dark underbelly of your Fillmore roof. We fish with long chopsticks for the tender and shared sustenance. You pick out a bulb. I pick out a tuber. You pick out a root. I a leaf. You a seed. I a piece of bark. You algae. Me fungus. The fish head cools in a bowl for Konnyaku.
The Siata pulls away, its wipers flapping, wildly banging at the splatter. Headlights search the road, chasing the water to the bottom. She pulls herself around the hairpin curve, tires slipping, skimming a slick skin of water. She skids to a stop, backing away from a torrent of mud and uprooted trees. Within, she holds a small treasure and the unrequited future: a pink slip; two unfinished manuscripts, one of translated poems, songs of Gold Mountain, and another, an illustrated cookbook; a tin can of old photographs.
Light flashes a sudden blast, illuminating the falling house, but the thunder that follows is the thunder of its crashing: groan and slippage of parting concrete, shattering glass, crossbeams of weighted timber caving in on three tiered floors of gracious elegance, living room falling into library falling into studio, falling.
I HOTEL
Afterword
In the 1990s, Amy Ling, then professor of English and Asian American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sent me a questionnaire she hoped would turn into an essay that would be part of a collection of essays by Asian American writers. The answers I returned disappointed Amy—she sent me a more full-bodied response written by another author. Comparing my work to the other author’s, it seemed to me that we both had answered everything with the same ideas, except my answers were in shorthand. I decided to answer Amy with something she really didn’t want at all, something she could reject outright. So I wrote an article about a book I’d never written. That led to thinking about that unwritten work. It was about the Asian American movement, mostly as I knew it in Los Angeles. But by 1997, I had come to live in Santa Cruz, and I thought I should explore the San Francisco/East Bay area where my parents grew up and where I was born. I shifted to a new center for this now real project: the International Hotel in San Francisco Manilatown/Chinatown, the site of political activism and community service for almost a decade until 1977, when residents of the hotel were forcibly evicted.
The I-Hotel, as it was known to its residents and the greater city, housed mostly elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrant bachelors, men who had come to work and make their fortunes prior to World War II and who, because of antimiscegenation laws, exclusion acts prohibiting Asian immigration, and a life of constantly mobile migrant labor, were unable to find spouses, have children, and to settle in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, the I-Hotel was sold to force the eviction of the residents and to redevelop the site as the extension of a West Coast Wall Street. In an effort to save the hotel and the surrounding Chinatown and Filipino communities, Asian American activists staged dramatic protests with thousands of participants and made the hotel a center for political activities and community service. The I-Hotel became a magnet for a multitude of political action groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, a center and symbol for the Asian American movement.
Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the political and social changes of this period, Asian American students and community activists, influenced by the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, and international revolutionary movements, gathered to create what became the Asian American, or Yellow Power movement. From this came Asian American studies, with departments in colleges and universities across the country, communes and cooperatives, drug rehabilitation programs, bookstores, newspapers and journals, theaters, filmmakers, cultural centers, artists, musicians, politicians, law cooperatives, educators, historians, underground Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collectives, and literary and political movements. For the Asian American community, this was a flourishing time of new creative energy and political empowerment.
Since beginning this project, I have spent countless hours in Asian American archives, wandered around the old brick-and-mortar sites, read books, viewed films, listened to music, speeches, and rallies, and had both long and short conversations with over 150 individuals from that time. Researching a period in this way is passionately involving, so much so that you begin to live it and to forget why you began the project in the first place. At some point, I realized that I was supposed to be writing a novel, and the research had to stop.
I began to create a structure for the project. I found my research was scattered, scattered across political affinities, ethnicities, artistic pursuits—difficult to coalesce into any one storyline or historic chronology. The people I spoke with had definitely been in the movement, but often times had no idea what others had been doing. Their ideas and lives often intersected, but their ideologies were cast in diverse directions. Their choices took different trajectories, but everyone was there, really there. Thus the structure I chose for the book is based on such multiple perspectives, divided into ten novellas or ten “hotels.” Multiple novellas allowed me to tell parallel stories, to experiment with various resonant narrative voices, and to honor the complex architecture of a time, a movement, a hotel, and its people. While the book has become inevitably big, it yet seems to me to be a small offering, a rendering to be continued and completed by others.
Author’s Acknowledgments
In the way of institutional support to accomplish research for this project, I would like to acknowledge: faculty research grants awarded by the Committee on Research and the Institute for Humanities Research at UC Santa Cruz; Amerasia Journal at UCLA and Russell Leong and Mary Kao; Asian American Studies Collection at UC Irvine and Dan Tsang; Asian American Studies Collection at UC Santa Barbara and Gary Colmenar; Asian American Studies Department at San Francisco State University and Malcolm Collier and Marlon Hom; Asian American Studies Library at UCLA and Marjorie Lee; The Car Show, KFPK Pacifica Radio, and John Retsek; Chonk Moonhunter Productions and Curtis Choy; City Lights Books and Paul Yamazaki; Eastwind Bookstore and Harvey Dong; Ethnic Studies Library at UC Berkeley and Wei Chi Poon; Filipino American National Historical Society and Fred and Dorothy Cordova; Fine Arts Gallery at San Francisco State University and Mark Johnson; Freedom Archives and Claude Marks; Hokubai Mainichi Archives and J.K. Yamamoto; Hon-Kun Yuen Archives and Eddie Yuen; Japanese American National Library and Karl Matsushita; Kearny Street Workshop and Nancy Hom; Manilatown Heritage Foundation and Emil de Guzman; McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz and Frank Gravier, Martha Ramirez, and Beth Remak-Honnef; National Japanese American Historical Society and Francis Wong and Peter Yamamoto; Philip Vera Cruz Audio Archive and Sid Valledor; San Francisco State University Special Collections and Helene Whitson; Steve Louie Archives and Steve Louie; Urban Voice and Boku Kodama; Yuri Kochiyama Archives and Yuri Kochiyama. Also, I’d like to recognize the work of Sudarat Musikawong, who worked for the project as a research assistant through UCSC, creating a database and copying many hours of audiotapes from the H. K. Yuen audio archives. Also, a special nod and thanks to Warren Furutani and Jessica Hagedorn for shared material, to Sina Grace and Leland Wong for their graphic renderings, to Linda Koutsky for art design, to Anitra Budd, Allan Kornblum, and Kristin Thiel for editing, and to Claire Light, Molly Mikolowski, and Patricia Wakida for grant and publicity consulting support. Many thanks to the remarkable staff at Coffee House Press and the staff in Literature and Humanities at UC Santa Cruz for their careful and meticulous work, to Lourdes Echazabel-Martinez and Ronaldo Lopes de Oliveira for translations, to Jane Tomi Boltz and Fred Courtright for their legal expertise, to Craig Gilmore and the Facebook Fan
Club for making me feel famous, and to Micah Perks for being my colleague in the crime of fiction. For Richard Sakai, there are no words to express my humble heart. And finally, a wave to Amy Ling, in the heavens, whose prodding gave rise to an article about an unwritten book; now that book is written.
Along the way, generous readers have agreed to read and comment on early drafts of some or all “hotels”: George Abe, Shoshana Arai, Anjali Arondekar, Chris Connery, Eddie Fung, Emil de Guzman, Estella Habal, Alex Hing, Ted Hopes, Makoto Horiuchi, Ruth Hsu, Betty Kano, John and Mary Kao, Allan Kornblum, Lelia Krache, Russell Leong, Jinqi Ling, Zack Linmark, Steve Louie, Roshni Rustomji-Kerns, Stephen Sohn, Andy Chih-ming Wang, Rob Wilson, Paul Yamazaki, Judy Yung. I mention their names to thank them for their critical contributions, care, and time. Many more people have joined this journey, but I have decided not to name names. I have been humbled by so many stories, some revealed with bravura, others insinuated obliquely, but much also silenced from pain, fear, or loss. If this fictional representation seems larger than life, perhaps it is because the work and lives of these activists have been largely invisible. In part, I came to know a kind of collective invisibility of folks in the movement who, in this labor for social-political change and revolution, gave up their youth, personal aspirations, and predictable family and social lives. My thanks and gratitude for the stories recuperated from this great labor cannot be conveyed except through this fiction, but it’s still entirely my fault.
—Karen Tei Yamashita
KAREN TEI YAMASHITA, the author of four previous books and an American Book Award and Janet Heidinger Kafka Award recipient, has been heralded as a “big talent” by the Los Angeles Times, extolled by the New York Times for her “mordant wit,” and praised by Newsday for “wrestl[ing] with profound philosophical and social issues” while delivering an “immensely entertaining story.” A California native who has also lived in Brazil and Japan, she is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she received the Chancellor’s Award for Diversity in 2009.
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