I turned up the volume. “I hated the Philippines,” Ringo said bluntly. George and John agreed, smoking before the cameras, but Paul was more introspective. “It was one of those places where you knew they were waiting for a fight,” he said. Uncle Willie nodded, confirming its truth. I stared at the Beatles’ faces, and I wondered if they remembered mine, if they would know who I was if they saw me now.
“If I had become an American, like you,” Uncle Willie said, “I would have been knighted.” I didn’t tell him that they do that only in England. In America, you might get a compliment in the papers, maybe a medal for bravery, but nothing that big. You would be the same person as when you started, long before the fight. That much I’d come to know. Still, I told him yes, that most certainly he would have been knighted, and I proceeded to create for him a picture of the ceremony, of Uncle Willie on his knee and Imelda on her throne, a sword in her hand, its blade gentle on his shoulder.
Save the I-Hotel
The human barricade surrounding the International Hotel was six deep, two thousand arm-linked protestors chanting, We won’t go! Save the I-Hotel! Inside, dozens more crammed the halls, blocking the stairwell with mattresses, desks, their own bodies. But it was past midnight now, fire engines blocked both ends of Kearny Street, and police in riot gear were closing in, armed with batons and shields.
“I hate this street,” Vicente said.
“It’s nothing,” Fortunado said. He stood at the window watching the protest below, his fingers between the slats of the blinds. “Just traffic.”
“I’m telling you, it’s the Chinese again. Their parade always clogging the city.” He sat on the edge of his bed, folding a thin gray sweater over his lap. They were in his room on the third floor of the I-Hotel, next door to Fortunado’s. “Don’t worry, Nado. We’ll make it through.”
Fortunado closed the blinds, wiped the dust from his fingers. “We will,” he said.
The threat of eviction had loomed for more than a decade, and now it was happening. The mayor of San Francisco had approved the hotel’s demolition and ordered the removal of its final tenants, the elderly Filipino men who had lived in the I-Hotel for more than forty years. Earlier that day, protest organizers had gathered the tenants in the lobby to prepare them for the fight, and told them to stay in their rooms until the very end. “But pack a bag,” they said, “just in case.” After, Fortunado hurried upstairs, woke Vicente from a nap, and though he meant to tell him about the eviction, he told him they were taking a weekend trip instead, just the two of them. He hadn’t named a specific place, but Vicente was easy to persuade. These days, he barely recognized the world as it was: he never knew the day or time, his oldest friends were strangers, and just three weeks before, Fortunado found him on the corner of Kearny Street and Columbus, only a block from the entrance of the I-Hotel, asking strangers to help him find his way home. Now, the shouting in the halls and the sirens on the street were simply the ruckus of a Chinese New Year in his mind. He knew nothing of an eviction, had no sense of a coming end.
Vicente’s hands shook as he folded another sweater. Distant sirens drew closer. Fortunado thought, This is what it means to be old. Now, he wished youth back, and if granted, he would offer it up to Vicente, who would make better use of it. He imagined Vicente springing to his feet and running down the stairs to claim his place in the barricade, his fists raised and ready to defend their right to stay. He was, Fortunado always knew, the stronger one.
It was August 4, 1977. They had lived in the I-Hotel for forty-three years.
They never meant to stay so long.
They met on a September night in 1934. Fortunado had been in the States for five months, working fifteen-hour days in the asparagus fields just outside Stockton; this trip to San Francisco was his first chance to get away. He stepped off a Greyhound bus at the end of Market Street and wandered the grid of downtown, unable to distinguish the places that welcomed Filipinos from those that refused them. It was dark when he finally spotted a trio of Filipino men smoking cigarettes outside a barely lit doorway, and though no one said hello, they stepped aside to let him through.
He entered a long, narrow dance hall filled with mixed couples, Filipino men with white women. A gray-bearded man with a cane circled the room, calling out, “Dime a ticket, ticket a dance,” and in the corner, a half dozen women sat in metal chairs, waiting for the next customer. A banner that read Welcome to the Dreamland Saloon sagged on the wall above them.
Fortunado bought three tickets, moved closer to the dance floor. He watched the couple closest to him. The man danced with his eyes closed, whispering into the woman’s ear; the woman yawned, then scratched something from her teeth.
Fortunado put the tickets in his pocket and took a chair by the wall. This would be a night of music to enjoy alone, nothing more, and it would be enough.
A new song began, and a man with a beer in each hand stomped across the dance floor, pestering girls for free dances. “Sorry, Vicente,” a girl with a long cigarette said, “no money, no honey.” She blew smoke in his face and walked off. “Your loss,” Vicente shouted back. He finished one beer, then the other. He was tall for a Filipino, lanky in his fitted blazer and trousers. He zigzagged through the crowd, bumping into couples, then suddenly tripped over the ticket man’s cane. “I’m fine, everybody,” Vicente shouted, gaining his balance, “I’m just fine,” and to prove it he began dancing alone, swaying side to side with some imaginary partner. He was a drunk, pathetic sight but Fortunado couldn’t help but laugh.
Vicente saw him and walked over. “If I’m so funny,” he said, wiping his mouth with the back of his sleeve, “then where’s your girl, big shot?”
Fortunado shrugged.
“With all these fine girls around? Your head must be broken.” Vicente flicked Fortunado’s forehead twice, like he was checking the ripeness of a coconut. Fortunado swiped his arm away, and warm beer came spilling over Fortunado’s head.
“Idiot!” Fortunado got to his feet. “You want to dance so badly? Then take them.” He took the tickets from his pocket and threw them to the floor, shoved Vicente aside, and walked off.
In the washroom, he ran a red cocktail napkin under warm water, wiped his head and dabbed the beer from his shirt, the lapel of his jacket. He thought of his life in America: the hot, dusty hours in the fields, the muggy nights in the bunkhouses, all the workers who passed the time regretting the new life and lamenting the old. They were new arrivals too, most of them Filipinos, and they never stopped telling him: Nobody knows you here, just the work you do, just the color of your face. They called America a mistake, and now the dream was to find a way back home, to the life you knew and the person you were. Tonight was meant to prove that he had been right to come.
He looked in the mirror. The shoulders of his borrowed blazer were wider than his own. The sleeves fell past his knuckles. Fool, he thought to himself.
The door opened and he saw Vicente in the edge of the mirror. “Never pay for dances,” he said, setting the tickets on the sink. “That way, you find out which girls want your dimes and which ones really want to dance with you.” He reached for Fortunado’s lapel. “Messy boy. Wear mine.” He removed his jacket and held it out, a peace offering.
“I’m fine with my own.”
“Suit yourself.” He lit a cigarette, introduced himself, then asked, “What’s your name?” a question Fortunado had not heard since he was hired in the fields five months before. In his life now, weeks could pass without ever hearing his name.
So he told him.
“Fortunado.” Vicente shook his head, exhaling smoke. “Too long. I’ll call you Nado.” He stamped out his cigarette on the wet, crumpled napkin and stepped toward the door. “This place is dead, Nado. Let’s move on.” He held the door open, and though Fortunado didn’t move, Vicente continued to stand there, waiting. Fortunado realized that Vicente had come to the Dreamland alone too.
They walked up and down the streets and Vicente na
med them: Kearny, Washington, Jackson, Clay. Certain blocks felt more familiar than the rest, those lined with small eateries and shops named Bataan Kitchen, the Manila Rose Cantina, the Lucky Mabuhay Pool Hall. All around, Filipino men smoked, laughed, and drank from silver flasks, hollering for each other and darting across the street, as if this city had been theirs from the beginning. And sitting on the top step of an apartment building was the oldest Filipino Fortunado had ever seen in America, gazing at the moon as if it held the face of the one he loved.
“Manilatown,” Vicente said. “Our small place in San Francisco. Just like home, eh?”
Fortunado shook his head. This was better.
They continued walking, and Vicente told his story: he came here alone from Manila at the start of ’33, scrubbed toilets and floors for a miserable half-year before finding better work as a bellhop in the Parkdale Hotel, a decent job with barely decent pay, but the best you could do in times like these. “It’s hard out here, sometimes,” he said, slowing his pace, “you get lonely, you get scared …” His voice trailed off as though these were his final words for the night, the truth he finally had to admit. But then he stopped, turned to Fortunado. “So be tough, okay?” He smiled, then punched Fortunado gently on the arm.
Hours passed, bars and restaurants closed. They found themselves at the end of the city, and walked along the Embarcadero. “Look there,” Vicente said, pointing toward the water, and through the dark Fortunado saw it: the beginnings of the Bay Bridge. It would be the longest steel structure in the world, eight miles connecting San Francisco to Oakland. For now, it was only a line of towers rising from the black water, half-hidden in fog, and Fortunado wondered when it would be finished, if someday he might travel across it.
“I don’t want to go back,” he said.
“Then don’t,” Vicente said. “What’s in Stockton anyway?”
Nothing. Just the hard, thin mattress Fortunado slept on, the canvas bag filled with the few clothes he owned, and more days in the fields with the kind of men he dreaded becoming.
They made their way to 848 Kearny Street and entered the I-Hotel, where Vicente kept a room for six dollars a week. He offered his floor for the night and Fortunado accepted, rolled up his coat for a pillow and used Vicente’s as a blanket. It was his best sleep in America yet. The next day, Vicente loaned Fortunado twelve dollars for two weeks’ rent, and he checked into number 14 on the third floor, the room next door to Vicente’s and exactly the same: a small, narrow space with a twin bed, a corner sink, a three-drawer bureau, and a single window that looked out on the 800 block of Kearny Street. Below, Fortunado could see two Filipino groceries, a barbershop, a Chinese laundry, and on the rooftop across, an unfinished billboard with a half-painted picture of a crate of apples, the word new written in yellow letters beneath.
“Not much of a view,” Vicente said.
Fortunado opened the window, letting in a breeze. “Good enough for now,” he said.
Fortunado was twenty years old that night they met. Vicente was twenty-four.
Now, Fortunado was sixty-three. Vicente, sixty-seven.
Neither of them married. No one in the I-Hotel ever did, and when they wanted to, the law forbade them. No Filipino could bring a wife or fiancée to the States back then, and there were no Filipinas here. Marrying white women, even dating them, was illegal, and always dangerous. The same week he arrived in California, a Filipino field worker was beaten to death for swimming in a lake with his white girlfriend.
The law changed in 1967. “I’ve been alone this long,” Vicente had said, “what would I do with a wife?” He was fifty-seven by then, too old and too late to bother with marriage. “She’d want a bigger place, something expensive. No thanks, I’m fine where I am.” But during their Saturday afternoon walks through Chinatown, the sight of a wedding banquet in a Chinese restaurant made him silent, suddenly tired and irritable. He would hurry back to the I-Hotel, pour himself a shot of Du Kang, the gold-colored Chinese liquor they drank as young men, and pace the short distance of his room as though trapped inside it, then finally sit at the window with his hands on the sill, staring down at the slow-moving traffic. From the sidewalk below, Fortunado would watch him, knowing Vicente’s regrets—the years of come-and-go women, the time and money wasted on prostitutes, the better life he might have lived had he been brave enough to try. And Fortunado would think, I’m sorry.
Somewhere close, glass shattered. Vicente looked up from his packing, turned toward the door as if to investigate, then brushed his knuckles against his jaw. “I want to shave before we leave,” he said. He went to the sink and turned on the faucet, waited for cold water to turn hot.
Fortunado went to the door and looked through the peephole: protesters crammed more furniture into the stairwell, others hammered wood planks over windows already boarded up, and at the end of the hallway, three men chained themselves to exposed pipes running down the wall while the rest cheered them on.
Fortunado double-checked the locks, tugged at the knob, and made sure the door would hold. “It’s just the parade,” he said.
Fortunado had left Stockton with no money and no plan, but in the beginning, San Francisco worked the way America should: he had a friend, a room of his own, and soon after, a bellhop position at the Parkdale Hotel.
Vicente lied to get Fortunado the job: he told his boss that a cousin with three years’ experience as the houseboy of Seattle’s ex-mayor had just arrived in the city, looking for work. “I told them I’ve known you my whole life,” he explained, “so try to act like it.”
The following morning, they caught the first cable car on the California line, rode to the top of Nob Hill, and stepped off at Powell and Mason. Straight ahead was the Parkdale Hotel, seven stories high, twenty windows across, and from where Fortunado stood it seemed the rest of the city had vanished behind it. Inside, a dozen marble pillars held up the lobby’s mahogany ceiling, a brass staircase spiraled upward, and in the copper elevator doors, Fortunado could see his reflection: his bellhop uniform fit tightly and made him stand up straight, his pomade-slicked hair gleamed under the light, and the dozen buttons on his coat could be mistaken for gold.
Those months in the fields stooped over in the dusty heat, the brim of his hat casting an unending shadow on his face—that was someone else’s anonymous life. Now, when Fortunado crossed the lobby, he would welcome guests in his best English, and they, in turn, regarded him with courteous smiles. But the best times in the day, those moments when he believed he was where he belonged, were when he passed Vicente in the hallway or on the stairs: Vicente would nod with a quick smile of recognition, and sometimes, when no one was watching, he would reach out and punch Fortunado on the arm, just below his shoulder.
At the end of Fortunado’s first month in the city, Vicente raised a bottle of Du Kang to the night sky and said, “To Nado, the finest houseboy in all of Seattle.” He took a swig, and passed it over. Fortunado drank, swallowed slowly to ease the burn.
They were on the third-floor fire escape of the I-Hotel, too tired to change out of their uniforms. They sat for hours, laughing as they reminisced about the night they met, as though it had happened years instead of only weeks before. But as the night grew darker and colder, their faces turned serious, their voices quiet. “It’s good that I found you,” Vicente said, “finally someone I can talk to who doesn’t whine about life.”
“You can’t listen,” Fortunado said. “They’ll get you down.”
“But it’s tough. No family. No wife. No home of my own.” Vicente brought the bottle to his lips but didn’t drink.
Fortunado put his hand on Vicente’s shoulder. “Those things will happen. I promise.”
“It’s better here, yeah? We were right to come?”
Fortunado leaned in, so close he saw Vicente’s eyes glisten, and said yes.
They let moments pass in silence, and a solitary car drove down Kearny. “I’m drunk,” Vicente said, setting the bottle of Du Kang by For
tunado’s feet. “What’s left is yours.” He rested his head against the brick wall, blinked slowly until his eyes stayed shut. He was shivering, so Fortunado took off his jacket and draped it over Vicente’s shoulders, tucked it under his chin. His hands were just below his jaw; then a finger, at the edge of his lip. Fortunado had been this close with others before: those few flirtatious men back home, who at some point became willing. But it was never like this: below the street was empty and silent, every window and doorway was black, and the sliver of moon cast no light. These were signs that the world was offering up this moment, a chance to understand what it was like to kiss the one you knew, perhaps loved. Good night, he told himself, that’s all it means, and moved closer until their faces touched. He kissed Vicente, and just as he was about to apologize, he felt Vicente kissing him too.
Then Vicente turned away. “It’s late,” he whispered, eyes still closed, “time to go back.” He got to his feet and climbed through the window, and Fortunado watched him walk down to the far end of the hallway, where he unlocked his door and shut it behind him. It was almost light when Fortunado finally returned to his room. He sat on his bed with his back to the wall, listened to Vicente on the other side, breathing and turning in his sleep.
Later, just before work, Vicente opened Fortunado’s door, already dressed in his uniform. “Come on, slowpoke,” he said, snapping his fingers twice. He made no mention of the night before, only that his head still buzzed from the Du Kang they shared. Then he hurried down the stairs and Fortunado slowly got up, and when he saw his face in the mirror above the sink, he understood how this would go: as it did back home—with silence and forgetting, the only way he knew.
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