“Yes, that’s right. Open up right now.”
Abra wipes her eyes and pulls open the door. Her body is back to being fierce. Abracadabra in her back pocket. She says, “You keep your hands off this gentleman. We will leave quietly. But keep your hands off.” She pulls me up from the bed, holds on to my arm. We walk out together.
I don’t tell Abra the rest about not failing. It’s gonna be about remembering. I remember my union brothers. Same year, Larry Itliong dies, and Philip Vera Cruz—he quits the United Farm Workers. I figure it out later when I see a picture of Cesar Chavez, honored guest of the Philippine nation, on an elephant with Marcos. We get betrayed by saints and gods. Before that, maybe I could return to Agbayani. Now, I cannot.
We walk slowly down the old corridor. Mattresses and waste and broken pieces of the hotel everywhere. We go by Frankie’s room, and I stop to look in. I see Frankie’s two suitcases torn open, the letters and postcards thrown up and scattered everywhere, love letters flying out the broken window.
I’m getting confused. Something inside my gut is grabbing me. I hold on to Abra now. I think I see Pio’s ghost back in the hotel again. He’s walking out slowly right there in front of me. Maybe he’s got his banjo. I think we send Pio away for good, but now I see even ghosts getting evicted.
By the time we leave the hotel, maybe it’s dawn. Foggy light competing with the neon. My gut is killing me. Abra whispers, “Felix, Felix.”
I bend over at the gutter, and everything inside me pours out. I cannot stop it. I heave and weep. I know everything is leaving my body: noodles in gelatin broth, Dongpo pork for Wen, lemongrass coconut stew with chili, Sixto’s fertility roots, Phil’s sweet black coffee, Johnny Bulonglong’s fried fish in soup, Cesar’s thin vegetable broth with handmade bread, Delano grapes, Alaskan salmon and salmon caviar, halo-halo for Lucy, Hiro’s natto chili Spam on rice, lechon baboy and kalua poaa for Pio, Imelda’s chocolate cheesecake for Abra and the twins, Joe’s cans of Spam and corned beef, Macario’s chicken adobo, ng ka py and twenty herbs, local fish, and empty, empty soup. Abra hangs on to me like she’s holding on to a waterfall. Pretty soon I’m only spitting blood and tears. Abra’s holding on to this empty sack. Keeps whispering, “Felix, Felix.” My guts running in a river down Kearny to Jackson.
I don’t tell Abra that maybe in the end, you can’t remember nothing, and nobody else remembers nothing. But goddamn, we never give up. All we ever do is survive. I see through my bloody snot the last of my brothers walking away down dirty streets, trash spinning with love letters, looking up at the old hotel and looking away for the last time, Frankie still in his pinstriped McIntosh, walking away with Pio, maybe hang out over at Portsmouth, then moving on, circumnavigating. And that’s the end. Like Pio’s ashes. Ghosts. Only I never think it can hurt like this.
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 11 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; Japa
nese 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.
Also available by Karen Tei Yamashita
The Illustrators
LELAND WONG’S prints and photography have been widely published and exhibited both nationally and in the California region. During the 1970s he became involved with the Kearny Street Workshop and remains active in San Francisco’s Asian American community as an artist, screen printer, and photographer.
Illustrations for all chapter frontispieces and karate poses (pages 267, 270, 273, and 276).
SINA GRACE is the author of Cedric Hollows in Dial M for Magic, and the comic book series Books with Pictures. He also provided illustrations for Amber Benson’s Among the Ghosts, a children’s book for Simon and Schuster. He lives in Los Angeles.
Illustrations for “Chiquita Banana” (pages 262–264) and “War & Peace” (pages 244–250).
Permissions Acknowledgments
Anonymous: [#35 “Leaving behind my writing brush and removing my sword, / I came to America”] and [“Ox”] from Island: Poetry and History of Chinese Immigrants of Angel Island, 1910-1940, translated by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung. Copyright © 1980 by the History of Chinese Detained on Island Project. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Washington Press.
Frank Chin, excerpts from Act I from “Chickencoop Chinaman” from Chickencoop Chinaman & The Year of the Dragon. Copyright © 1973, 1974 by Frank Chin. Reprinted with the permission of the University of Washington Press.
Kahlil Gibran, “On Friendship” from The Prophet. Copyright 1923 by Kahlil Gibran, renewed 1951 by Administrators C.T.A. of Kahlil Gibran Estate and Mary G. Gibran. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc.
V.I. Lenin, excerpts from What Is to Be Done? Reprinted with the permission of Foreign Languages Press.
“Si hablo del hambre . . .” (“If I speak of hunger . . .”), translated by Lourdes Echazabel-Martinez. Reprinted by permission of the translator.
Mao Tse-tung, excerpt from “Changsha,” translated by Willis Barnstone, from The Poems of Mao Tse-tung (New York: Harper & Row, 1972). Translation copyright © 1972 by Willis Barnstone. Reprinted with the permission of the translator.
Paul Valéry, excerpt from “The Graveyard by the Seal,” translated by C. Day Lewis, from Selected Writings of Paul Valéry. Copyright 1950 by New Directions Publishing Corp. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp.
Funder Acknowledgments
Publication of this book has been made possible in part by a major donation from Richard and Amber Sakai. Support for this title was also received from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Coffee House Press receives major general operating support from the Bush Foundation, from Target, the McKnight Foundation, and from the Minnesota State Arts Board, through an appropriation by the Minnesota State Legislature and from the National Endowment for the Arts. We have received project support from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency. Coffee House also receives support from: three anonymous donors; Abraham Associates; Around Town Literary Media Guides; Bill Berkson; the James L. and Nancy J. Bildner Foundation; E. Thomas Binger and Rebecca Rand Fund; the Patrick and Aimee Butler Family Foundation; the Buuck Family Foundation; Dorsey & Whitney, LLP; Fredrikson & Byron, P.A.; Jennifer Haugh; Anselm Hollo and Jane Dalrymple-Hollo; Jeffrey Hom; Stephen and Isabel Keating; Robert and Margaret Kinney; the Kenneth Koch Literary Estate; Allan & Cinda Kornblum; the Lenfestey Family Foundation; Ethan J. Litman; Mary McDermid; Sjur Midness and Briar Andresen; Schwegman, Lundberg, Woessner, P.A.; John Sjoberg; Mary Strand and Thomas Fraser; Jeffrey Sugerman; Stu Wilson and Mel Barker; the Archie D. & Bertha H. Walker Foundation; the Woessner Freeman Family Foundation in memory of David Hilton; and many other generous individual donors.
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Good books are brewing at www.coffeehousepress.org
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