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I Hotel
A multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy that spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned.
As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience.
613 pages, Paperback
First published June 1, 2010
About the author
Karen Tei Yamashita
25 books167 followersBorn January 8, 1951 in Oakland, California, Karen Tei Yamashita is a Japanese American writer and Associate Professor of Literature at University of California, Santa Cruz, where she teaches creative writing and Asian American literature. Her works, several of which contain elements of magic realism, include novels I Hotel (2010), Circle K Cycles (2001), Tropic of Orange (1997), Brazil-Maru (1992), and Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Tei Yamashita's novels emphasize the absolute necessity of polyglot, multicultural communities in an increasingly globalized age, even as they destabilize orthodox notions of borders and national/ethnic identity.
She has also written a number of plays, including Hannah Kusoh, Noh Bozos and O-Men which was produced by the Asian American theatre group, East West Players.
Yamashita is a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for I Hotel.
She has also written a number of plays, including Hannah Kusoh, Noh Bozos and O-Men which was produced by the Asian American theatre group, East West Players.
Yamashita is a finalist for the 2010 National Book Award for I Hotel.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 145 reviews
July 3, 2017
An under read, under appreciated 21st century gem, one that's worth going out of your way to track down.
Difficult to explain this book concisely: basically, it's 10 linked novellas centered on the I Hotel in San Francisco that range from 1968-1977 and detail, with excellent historical research, the travails and successes of the region's "yellow power" movement. Each novella takes on a different slice of the Asian immigrant experience in America, and each has some degree of stylistic variety. They vary somewhat in quality but when they're good they're REALLY good and the noble failures (two of the ten) are quite interesting.
I, HOTEL is most notable for its extreme formal innovation mixed with its effortlessness. The book never draws attention to how showy it is. That makes it at once much wilder than, let's say, INFINITE JEST and also more pleasant to read. (with pleasant not a value judgement, per se, I like INFINITE JEST). In its academia it reminds me a bit of some of the higher scenes in ULYSSES (which I think she's referencing) but despite its breeziness, it's nearly completely non-commercial in its subject matter. Basically, it's the least hubristic book of hubris that I've found.
As a work of pan-Asian unity this also stands out. Yamashita is a Japanese-American who lived through the time-period and setting of this book, but she launches immediately and masterfully into the Chinese experience with the 3 likable, nuanced characters in Part One, which had more twists than East of Eden but always felt very controlled. I was initially stunned when I, HOTEL revealed itself to be linked novellas (and disappointed, because I loved the early characters), but part 2 was rollicking and fun and provided a different slice of the Asian-American experience, with just enough callbacks to keep the continuity of the novel in play. This persists throughout - old favorites return and you begin to feel a strange sense of community.
I also like that I, HOTEL is also sort of boring at points. I mean that as a complement: a good campus novel should be a bit boring, and the nuances of the radical politics seem well researched and authentic.
I think this is a great, natural contrast with the GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, which is almost as formally ambitious but also a semi-mess and very self-aware. I, HOTEL doesn't exactly remind me of anything else though - maybe in its humor and slang, WHITE BOY SHUFFLE by Paul Beatty, but that's not nearly as effortless or as maximalist. I haven't read MASON AND DIXON so I say this loosely, but it's a bit like imagining late-career Pynchon writing accurate, observed historical fiction. There's an incredible section on the meaning of hotels on 599 and 600 which reminded me very profoundly of Rick Moody's excellent HOTELS OF NORTH AMERICA. So, this is as great and bonkers as anything.
It sticks the landing too. The last page (the whole last novella) is genius, the last sentence is perfect, and I'm incredibly admiring of the structure of the thing now that I'm on the other end of it. Each novella is quite distinct - the one with the cook was perhaps my favorite, but they all have their merits. This is a real discovery, a borderline "lost" novel. I'm thinking about writing an essay one of these days.
Difficult to explain this book concisely: basically, it's 10 linked novellas centered on the I Hotel in San Francisco that range from 1968-1977 and detail, with excellent historical research, the travails and successes of the region's "yellow power" movement. Each novella takes on a different slice of the Asian immigrant experience in America, and each has some degree of stylistic variety. They vary somewhat in quality but when they're good they're REALLY good and the noble failures (two of the ten) are quite interesting.
I, HOTEL is most notable for its extreme formal innovation mixed with its effortlessness. The book never draws attention to how showy it is. That makes it at once much wilder than, let's say, INFINITE JEST and also more pleasant to read. (with pleasant not a value judgement, per se, I like INFINITE JEST). In its academia it reminds me a bit of some of the higher scenes in ULYSSES (which I think she's referencing) but despite its breeziness, it's nearly completely non-commercial in its subject matter. Basically, it's the least hubristic book of hubris that I've found.
As a work of pan-Asian unity this also stands out. Yamashita is a Japanese-American who lived through the time-period and setting of this book, but she launches immediately and masterfully into the Chinese experience with the 3 likable, nuanced characters in Part One, which had more twists than East of Eden but always felt very controlled. I was initially stunned when I, HOTEL revealed itself to be linked novellas (and disappointed, because I loved the early characters), but part 2 was rollicking and fun and provided a different slice of the Asian-American experience, with just enough callbacks to keep the continuity of the novel in play. This persists throughout - old favorites return and you begin to feel a strange sense of community.
I also like that I, HOTEL is also sort of boring at points. I mean that as a complement: a good campus novel should be a bit boring, and the nuances of the radical politics seem well researched and authentic.
I think this is a great, natural contrast with the GOLDEN NOTEBOOK, which is almost as formally ambitious but also a semi-mess and very self-aware. I, HOTEL doesn't exactly remind me of anything else though - maybe in its humor and slang, WHITE BOY SHUFFLE by Paul Beatty, but that's not nearly as effortless or as maximalist. I haven't read MASON AND DIXON so I say this loosely, but it's a bit like imagining late-career Pynchon writing accurate, observed historical fiction. There's an incredible section on the meaning of hotels on 599 and 600 which reminded me very profoundly of Rick Moody's excellent HOTELS OF NORTH AMERICA. So, this is as great and bonkers as anything.
It sticks the landing too. The last page (the whole last novella) is genius, the last sentence is perfect, and I'm incredibly admiring of the structure of the thing now that I'm on the other end of it. Each novella is quite distinct - the one with the cook was perhaps my favorite, but they all have their merits. This is a real discovery, a borderline "lost" novel. I'm thinking about writing an essay one of these days.
December 17, 2015
Lu Hsun gives up medicine. What's the point? He could study all he wanted to make his people healthy in body, but they were sick in their minds, dig. Now this might seem like a jump, but Lu Hsun thinks the answer is literature. So he starts a new life writing.I know of the 'People's History of the United States' but what about the 'Non-White People's History of the United States'? Something huge and intricately spun and developed on a scale to put Gibbon to shame, something which may already exist and due to my inherent whiteness in a Silicon Valley suburb I mistakenly believe I have conjured up as the Next Big Thing, because what my piss-poor in the realms of consensual and non-fetishizing miscegenation people didn't invent, they stole and tied up the trail in court and copyright. Betty Boop, The Lion Sleeps Tonight, almost all of the '20's and 60's today's rap tomorrow's fashion everything in between, and that's just from black people.
I learned the hard way that whether it’s the prison community or the Asian American community, the academy will close ranks to keep that experiment with reality out. In a short period of time, we saw the politicization of prisoners and the criminalization of students. And this scared folks. Students saw three choices: go to school, go to prison, go to war. We challenged the idea that society, and therefore education, should be controlled by the threat of punishment and the history of race.So, Bay Area. Multicultural Chinatown Japantown the majority of my neighbors being of Asian descent after the requisite white flight, right? A white liberal's wet dream, a radical political hotspot with a heady history of the pushing the envelope straight white man, all full up in the books about the earthquakes and the fires and the drugs and the sex and all that white appropriated jazz leaving nothing for those who were here before and those who were brought here by force and those who came and could never blend in the skin tone range even though their lives depended on it. It leaves us here today with a video about the Berkeley protests of the 60's without a single black speaker, gentrification in the leaps and bounds of tech companies and the Ellis Act, and the awesome gutting of cultural minorities wielded by the one and only BART and its Oakland et al. stations. White people resting on their laurels when white people didn't do shit.
History tells us that the white man's pride is located in his laws, such that he will justify his pride and his greed, his great paternity and his superiority, with the great writ of his laws. Everything must follow accordingly. The white man will only give up or lose something if forced to do so by his own laws; in this way, he cannot lose face and continues secure in his pride that his law must be just.I can just imagine the faces of people who followed me for my review of Les Misérables and are getting this 'reverse racism' 'radical' 'raging' instead of CAN YOU HEAR THE PEOPLE SING plastered on pictures of the Ferguson protests cause US Americans sympathize a lot more with their white-rinsed entertainment than their blood rinsed politics of the non-European people. Newsflash: if you read this book and don't find it extremely sexy, I can't help you, because not only is there erotica and ancient Japanese woodcut pornography and food that makes you want to eat the pages and thought writ large upon the planes of This Is What Happened and This Is How We Acted and This Is How We Are Building Our Hope, there's life. There's love. There's the young people before the respectability politics and the old people who could were left behind by the Capitalism Psychopathy train and all the Communists in between, and if that's a turn off for the love of cognitive dissonance do not come crying to me about democracy. Some Ferguson protesters have baggy pants and don't wear shirts, Martin Luther King, Jr. always preached nonviolence in a suit, Malcolm X rallied to physical resistance in a suit as well, and both of the suit-wearers were murdered in cold blood. The only solution to today's democracy is to be rich and white, and those in disagreement are not the ones I'm writing for. Those offended by that, educate yourself. You would not believe the carnage that has been wreaked in the name of offense by those in suits.
Who, then, is the revolutionary woman? In these days she is a barefoot peasant, a child on her back, wielding an AK-47. Of course, she may be uniformed in cotton pajama trousers, batik sarong, sari, Mao jacket, jilbab, miniskirt, or Levi jeans; covered in straw hat, veil, hijab, worker's cap, or helmet. In every case, the winds of liberation blow through her fingers.You could stick this in WWII Germany and you'd get a movie made out of it right quick because of there's one thing US Americans love it's a villain whose crimes they know they'll never be convicted of. Read the recently released CIA Torture Report if you don't believe me. Obama pardoned them all in efforts to "move forward" and in doing so became the final straw of why I will trust the most ineffectual protester over the President of the United States anytime, all the time, and if you're going to accuse me of racism because of that jesus fucking christ please. I don't have any black friends that I can talk to face to face and am as racist as they come, so we're going to move on from your pitiful attempt at derailment now.
So I tell people I don’t want equal no equal rights anymore. I’m fighting for human rights. I don’t want to become equal to men like them that beat us. I don’t want to become the kind of person that would kill you because of your color.Politics is why my earliest US American ancestor was a landowner instead of a landstealer. Politics shafted the Indians of All Tribes occupation of Alcatraz Island and put the white straight man's landing on the moon in its historical place. Politics is the swooping of corporate interests into the refuge of minority cultures and building idols to Finance and Tourism on the guts of those who had the power of life but didn't know how to market it. Politics is Mark Wahlberg having a violent history of racist assaults and attempting to wipe the slate clean so he can expand his business and sell alcohol in California. If you've never been used as target practice by politics, congratulations. You haven't necessarily had an easy life, or are rich, or any of the requisites for happiness as mandated by capitalism, but if you are killed, rest assured your murder will not be justified and your murderer will have by legal standards committed a crime.
-Fannie Lou Hamer
The police across the street who now guarded our four doors pointed at our stupid battle and laughed.
Now honey, not to confuse you or anything, but some of us are reading Borges instead of Mao.How about some warnings for people interested in picking up this book. Well, it's long, it's difficult, Yamashita swears more than I do, character development's like wut, dense political meanderings and controversial wieldings of meaning galore, feminism that repeatedly gives white feminism the finger, non-PC whatevers for those who need a slogan to delimit the boundaries of their Mayonnaise social justice, plot? Plot. Ten years of revolutionary activism in a hotel that ends up being destroyed anyway, and lost causes are never worth reading about, right?
Poem's like cuisine. Makes the world sensible. Ingredients in the head, then apply fire. Have you eaten today?
Thus we emerged from every living crevice in our hilly city, every tenement, blighted Victorian, public housing project, cheap hotel, single or collective rental, many of us the forgotten and abandoned people whose voices were muffled in the underbelly of working poverty, stuffed into the various ethnic ghettos, we the immigrants from the Old and New Worlds, from the black and white South and tribal America, we the dockworkers of the long shore, we the disabled and disavowed vets, we the gay and leathered, we the garment workers, restaurant workers, postal and clerical workers, we who praised the Lord in his house at Glide and his People’s Temple, we of the unions, tired and poor, we the people.What do I need to say to get you to read this book? If I haven't said it already, I can't help you.
That’s another thing to take into consideration, the way things happen because you are young and don’t know any better. You might say it’s youthful idealism, but youth doesn’t really know what’s ideal. It just feels right sometimes.Life is politics is life.
Must rescue books, Sesshu announces with determination.
June 21, 2013
Just wow. A huge, sprawling, aimless and yet deadeye story of identity, resistance, success and failure, all that jazz (as in free, as in Rahsaan Roland Kirk's twin saxes blowing different melodies at the same time, as in Miles' electric phase fusing white-boy funk with black panther politics, as in Thomas P), ancient folk tales and pragmatic political actions, Mao vs Reagan, all scattered out over 600 pages, 10 years, the echo of billions and centuries in a few dozen people over 10 years, spoken in scores of voices and a new genre for every chapter. Written in every perspective and yet somehow ending in a clenched-fist first-person-plural. I'll try to write something more coherent about it, but I'm not sure I can.
May 4, 2016
Very impressive indeed - perhaps a point of reference for the style would be somewhere between Venessa Place and Vollmann's non-fiction.
Second half better than the first, so I would advise keeping going if you are unsure.
Go read the other reviews on here for more of an idea - this book was successful enough not to require anything more from me
Second half better than the first, so I would advise keeping going if you are unsure.
Go read the other reviews on here for more of an idea - this book was successful enough not to require anything more from me
May 8, 2011
This is the best, most original, most ambitious, funniest, saddest novel I've read so far in 2011, and I can't actually imagine I'm going to read anything much better in the next 8 months.
Yamashita tells the whole civil right story through the Asian-America perpective, centering on a dilapidated and eventually demolished long-stay hotel in San Francisco. The book is a series of linked novellas -- one per year for a decade (1966-1977), each focused on the inhabitants of the hotel or activities that took place there.
The early novellas about the uprisings in the Bay area colleges and universities are just dazzling, with a heartbreaking portrait of S.I. Hayakawa, the brilliant Japanese-American semanticist who was exactly the wrong person in exactly the wrong place when he was president of San Francisco State.
The book uses narrative, drama, analects, artwork, comic books, FBI records, documentary film scripts, letters, and documents of all sorts. Some sections contain the best short stories I've read in years.
This is a brilliant book, all 605 pages of it.
Yamashita tells the whole civil right story through the Asian-America perpective, centering on a dilapidated and eventually demolished long-stay hotel in San Francisco. The book is a series of linked novellas -- one per year for a decade (1966-1977), each focused on the inhabitants of the hotel or activities that took place there.
The early novellas about the uprisings in the Bay area colleges and universities are just dazzling, with a heartbreaking portrait of S.I. Hayakawa, the brilliant Japanese-American semanticist who was exactly the wrong person in exactly the wrong place when he was president of San Francisco State.
The book uses narrative, drama, analects, artwork, comic books, FBI records, documentary film scripts, letters, and documents of all sorts. Some sections contain the best short stories I've read in years.
This is a brilliant book, all 605 pages of it.
June 8, 2023
the best book I have read for a long time! it’s told as a set of interconnected novellas exploring a decade of Asian American activism and political organising from 1968–1977. every section has a different feel and focus and narrative style, experimenting with genre and form in a way I loved. and each novella has the touchstone of the I-Hotel, which became the center of political action & community organising in San Francisco when the elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrants who lived there were threatened with eviction. based on over a decade of archival research and interviews, the book is deeply rooted in historical events and community groups that existed at the time: the 1968 student strike at San Francisco State; the Filipino grape workers’ strike; the artwork in the Coit Tower; the Alcatraz occupation; the final resistance against the eviction. the arguments and dreams and conversations people have in this novel remind me of organising meetings and reading groups and actions I’ve attended with comrades & friends: that is to say, it all feels so tangible and real. it’s a book about Marxist-Leninist-Maoist theory and practice and how the two intersect, combine and interplay through action and study. it’s a book about community, solidarity, putting your body on the line. it’s a book about poetry and love and art and food. and ultimately it is a book about struggle, real revolutionary struggle, how to dream it and do it and live it.
May 20, 2011
As a matter of principle, I avoid hotels, in any form, at all costs. But I Hotel, like the ones in Vegas, I just couldn’t seem to resist.
The publishers refer to Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel as “This dazzling, multi-voiced fusion of fiction, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy [that:] spins an epic tale…”
On other matters of principle, I am always cautious when the word “epic” gets thrown around like blame after an oil spill. But flipping through its pages, I Hotel does appear to have graphic and stylistic elements in the realm of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, House of Leaves, and VAS.
Which makes me excited. It’s the future of literary storytelling. Language and ideas still dominate, but there is no reason why the form cannot evolve to be more nuanced, interesting, and visual. Novelists have been keeping too many tools in the toolbox for too long.
I’m going to just come out and say it: I am pro e-reader. I’d love to read I Hotel on one. Because the only negative thing about the experience thus far has been holding the damn book up. Because despite its modernist underpinnings, I Hotel is a veritable work in the classic sense. It is not for the easily distracted, weak, or dumb. The paperback I borrowed is over 600 pages.
And isn’t the title clever? Like iPod or MymaxiPad.
The prose, too, is fine. Nibble on this, from page 2:
“Who are we to know that our black daddy Martin with a dream and our little white father Bobby will take bullets to their brains? By the end of the year, we are monkey orphans let loose, raising havoc; no daddies to pull the stops, temper the member; got those wired tails swinging from every rafter, we are free at last, brother, free at last.”
I particularly like “black daddy Martin with a dream,” and “temper the member.”
And here’s some of that philosophy they were talking about earlier:
“There exists an unscientific attitude toward language that results in doctrinal disagreements. We must understand that problems are formulated in words, and that a change in the attitude toward language can help us become understanding listeners.”
She need not continue the obvious: “and therefore fix our fucking problems!”
I’m really looking forward to this one…
Despite my initial enthusiasm, I Hotel is not a good book.
Do not read it. It is long. It is boring. It is disappointing. It is safe. It is easy. It is pointless. It has no edge.
2010 ytd, I can only recommend Reality Hunger.
And White Hotel. But that’s from 1981. The ’80s generated a lot of marvelous creations, yours truly being one of the many significant yet underrated entities in question from that special time.
I Hotel is cumbersome, disjointed, schizophrenic, frustratingly sprawling, and lacking in cohesion. There are no compelling protagonists. There is a lot of telling and very little storytelling. It’s just all over the place and entirely overwhelming in the worst of ways. It is a big book of very little, suffering from what must certainly be at this point some kind of Asian-American authorial cliche to engage in sprawling multi-generational sagas.
Acknowledging this irrefutable mediocrity, Yamashita apologizes in the Afterword: “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.”
First of all: hogwash. Borrring! Obnoxious MFA semantic posturing. You should honor the complex architecture of your novel!
Second of all: The afterword is better written than the novel.
The publishers refer to Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel as “This dazzling, multi-voiced fusion of fiction, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy [that:] spins an epic tale…”
On other matters of principle, I am always cautious when the word “epic” gets thrown around like blame after an oil spill. But flipping through its pages, I Hotel does appear to have graphic and stylistic elements in the realm of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, House of Leaves, and VAS.
Which makes me excited. It’s the future of literary storytelling. Language and ideas still dominate, but there is no reason why the form cannot evolve to be more nuanced, interesting, and visual. Novelists have been keeping too many tools in the toolbox for too long.
I’m going to just come out and say it: I am pro e-reader. I’d love to read I Hotel on one. Because the only negative thing about the experience thus far has been holding the damn book up. Because despite its modernist underpinnings, I Hotel is a veritable work in the classic sense. It is not for the easily distracted, weak, or dumb. The paperback I borrowed is over 600 pages.
And isn’t the title clever? Like iPod or MymaxiPad.
The prose, too, is fine. Nibble on this, from page 2:
“Who are we to know that our black daddy Martin with a dream and our little white father Bobby will take bullets to their brains? By the end of the year, we are monkey orphans let loose, raising havoc; no daddies to pull the stops, temper the member; got those wired tails swinging from every rafter, we are free at last, brother, free at last.”
I particularly like “black daddy Martin with a dream,” and “temper the member.”
And here’s some of that philosophy they were talking about earlier:
“There exists an unscientific attitude toward language that results in doctrinal disagreements. We must understand that problems are formulated in words, and that a change in the attitude toward language can help us become understanding listeners.”
She need not continue the obvious: “and therefore fix our fucking problems!”
I’m really looking forward to this one…
Despite my initial enthusiasm, I Hotel is not a good book.
Do not read it. It is long. It is boring. It is disappointing. It is safe. It is easy. It is pointless. It has no edge.
2010 ytd, I can only recommend Reality Hunger.
And White Hotel. But that’s from 1981. The ’80s generated a lot of marvelous creations, yours truly being one of the many significant yet underrated entities in question from that special time.
I Hotel is cumbersome, disjointed, schizophrenic, frustratingly sprawling, and lacking in cohesion. There are no compelling protagonists. There is a lot of telling and very little storytelling. It’s just all over the place and entirely overwhelming in the worst of ways. It is a big book of very little, suffering from what must certainly be at this point some kind of Asian-American authorial cliche to engage in sprawling multi-generational sagas.
Acknowledging this irrefutable mediocrity, Yamashita apologizes in the Afterword: “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.”
First of all: hogwash. Borrring! Obnoxious MFA semantic posturing. You should honor the complex architecture of your novel!
Second of all: The afterword is better written than the novel.
January 23, 2011
I really wanted to like this book, with its fascinating subject matter (Asian American radicals in San Francisco from the 30s through the 70s) and creative structure (reminded me most of Bolano, of things read recently). However, the political didacticism was just too heavy handed -- the mind numbing factionalism and doctrinalism of those years too lovingly recreated, while the energy and excitement was really not. Almost no one emerges from the novel's intricate structure and political detail as a compelling character -- you'll find yourself straining a lot to remember who is who (it is a strange irony in a book that repeatedly attacks the racist "all Asians look alike" meme that, while Yamashita's characters are Filipino, Japanese, Chinese -- their backgrounds of oppression leading to radicalism and participation in campus boycotts and revolutionary splinter movements are all so similar that you can't keep them straight). The dialogue is stilted and heavy, the complexities a little too complex for a plot you don't care about and that barely exists. The bright exception is the ribald, gluttonous voice of Felix the tale spinning Filipino chef -- the only place where the novel escapes its academic didactism to become a gripping narrative. This glimpse of what this book could have been makes the failure of the larger project that much sadder.
August 7, 2023
you ever read a book that feels like it was written for you specifically?
April 1, 2013
This book is a masterpiece.
It's somewhat experimental fiction, and clearly not everyone likes that (see other reviews), but as a whole I have seen nothing that tackles the subject matter and time period with such attention to detail, spirit, and, well, affection. Not nostalgic -- if anything certain segments remind me too much of situations I'm glad I'm not in anymore -- but I Hotel distills the political time and place of SF in the '70s better than anything I have ever read.
This book makes the untold history of this time come alive. Best book I read in 2010.
It's somewhat experimental fiction, and clearly not everyone likes that (see other reviews), but as a whole I have seen nothing that tackles the subject matter and time period with such attention to detail, spirit, and, well, affection. Not nostalgic -- if anything certain segments remind me too much of situations I'm glad I'm not in anymore -- but I Hotel distills the political time and place of SF in the '70s better than anything I have ever read.
This book makes the untold history of this time come alive. Best book I read in 2010.
November 5, 2022
10 out of 5. Amazing. A new favorite.
November 18, 2010
The International Hotel (I-Hotel) was built a year after the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake in Manilatown, a community of some 20,000 Filipino immigrants on the edge of Chinatown. It was a residential hotel, which mainly housed Filipino and Chinese immigrant bachelors who worked in nearby businesses but couldn't afford homes, along with a smattering of artists and community and political activists that moved there in the 1960s. The I-Hotel sat in the shadow of the Financial District's famed Transamerica Pyramid, and as the area became more populated with gleaming office buildings the land adjacent to the hotel became more desirable while the building seemed more and more out of place. The hotel was purchased by a wealthy Chinese investor in 1968, who planned to tear down the building, evict its residents, and build a more profitable high-rise tower.
The residents of the hotel and community activists fought the developer and the city for years to prevent its demise. However, in 1977 the city's police department physically overpowered dozens of protesters and forcibly evicted its remaining residents, who were mostly elderly men who had lived there for decades, and the building was torn down immediately afterward. Ironically, the planned commercial development never took place, and a reincarnation of the I-Hotel for low- and middle-income residents was built on this site in 2005.
Karen Tei Yamashita, a professor of Literature and Creative Writing at UC Santa Cruz, uses the I-Hotel as the basis for this ambitious, sprawling, unique and successful novel about the Asian American civil rights movement, or Yellow Power movement, in San Francisco, Berkeley and other Bay Area cities in the 1960s and 1970s. The book is divided into 10 novellas, and each revolves around mostly fictional characters who are deeply involved in the burgeoning movement, including student protests at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley, the Native American takeover of Alcatraz Island, the efforts of farm workers to earn a decent wage and working conditions, and, of course, the unsuccessful efforts to save the I-Hotel. Yamashita uses a variety of tools to tell these stories, including poetry, portraits, graphic art, and government manuscripts.
Most of these novellas were very well done, and the book's ending was superb. Throughout the book I felt as if I was an observer being pulled along, sometimes breathlessly, from one story and one locale to another, in a whirlwind series of historical and personal narratives by a persistent and passionate guide. At the book's end I was somewhat fatigued, a bit overwhelmed, but ultimately grateful for the journey and what I learned along the way.
December 16, 2010
First of all, I am not Asian or an Asian American. I wasn't even alive in the 60s or 70s and I have been in San Francisco for a total of 5 days in my whole life. So not exactly the 'target market' for this book. With that caveat, this was a HUGE struggle to finish. I would have put it down a long time ago if it werent for the fact that it was the book of the month for my book club. As it was, it took 3 separate attempts to get past page 24, including 3 times where I fell asleep after reading 5 pages.
I honestly have no idea what I read. There is no 'story' just images and feelings and ephemeral ideas. I dont think the format did anything for the book. It certainly gave it a different vibe than straight up prose, but I'd be hard pressed to say that it was something that made it better. I had to skip whole parts because they were completely indecipherable.
That said, I think that this book will probably appeal to a lot of the more cerebral readers out there, or people who were in any of the three categories i listed in my first two sentences.
Glad to be done. Very glad to be done.
I honestly have no idea what I read. There is no 'story' just images and feelings and ephemeral ideas. I dont think the format did anything for the book. It certainly gave it a different vibe than straight up prose, but I'd be hard pressed to say that it was something that made it better. I had to skip whole parts because they were completely indecipherable.
That said, I think that this book will probably appeal to a lot of the more cerebral readers out there, or people who were in any of the three categories i listed in my first two sentences.
Glad to be done. Very glad to be done.
Read
January 28, 2019The kind of book that has instant appeal ; looks exactly my kind of thing. Unfortunately it never got under my skin. Whether story or prose it just kind of went me by.
On the other hand, this is perhaps the epic of the Asian=American experience. Truly an encyclopedic thing.
On the other hand, this is perhaps the epic of the Asian=American experience. Truly an encyclopedic thing.
January 7, 2021
The International Hotel sounds like quite the hub of heart and of struggle; a living, changing embodiment of a dozen diasporas squashed together by oppression, history, and a gentrifying city. The hotel is the center of this story, and yet, after six hundred pages, I am left wishing I knew more of its smells, the character of its hallways, the personal traumas of its older inhabitants. I would easily swap a few more of these details for the two hundred-plus pages of this book that are devoted to squabbles about Mao and Lenin and the "alphabet soup" of leftist organizations. And I am a person who can actually appreciate a few squabbles about Maoism and Leninism.
The disjointed structure feels at times fun and engaging, and at other times confusing and convenient. I often felt like I had no bearing on the story. The Hotel is supposed to hold the story together, to be the common thread, but it is often lost as the characters, some of whom don't even seem to interact with the hotel, twirl frantically around us. I understand that this is how movements work, how lives feel so often, how a decade must play out: chaotically, stored in the memories and humors of a thousand people. But, as a novel, I just couldn't quite sink my teeth into it as far as I would have liked.
Is this a book about "America's most transformative decade," as the book jacket claims? Or is it a book about a hotel, its people, and the struggle to hold on to a small, beautiful scrap of space? Can't it be both? Well, I think it does try be both, and it feels stuck between the big story and the small story. And the small story suffers the worse for it.
I do think, all said, that some specific people would really enjoy this book: those who live in the bay area, those who have close connections to Asian American ghettoized communities, those who are engaged in anti-gentrification struggles, and those who really care a lot about the internal squabbles of leftists in the 1970s.
It is true that, after several hundred pages of this often frustrating novel, I felt like I was also struggling along with the characters to find, to hold, to save this hotel. This investment made the final pages of the book some of the most affecting and beautiful.
The disjointed structure feels at times fun and engaging, and at other times confusing and convenient. I often felt like I had no bearing on the story. The Hotel is supposed to hold the story together, to be the common thread, but it is often lost as the characters, some of whom don't even seem to interact with the hotel, twirl frantically around us. I understand that this is how movements work, how lives feel so often, how a decade must play out: chaotically, stored in the memories and humors of a thousand people. But, as a novel, I just couldn't quite sink my teeth into it as far as I would have liked.
Is this a book about "America's most transformative decade," as the book jacket claims? Or is it a book about a hotel, its people, and the struggle to hold on to a small, beautiful scrap of space? Can't it be both? Well, I think it does try be both, and it feels stuck between the big story and the small story. And the small story suffers the worse for it.
I do think, all said, that some specific people would really enjoy this book: those who live in the bay area, those who have close connections to Asian American ghettoized communities, those who are engaged in anti-gentrification struggles, and those who really care a lot about the internal squabbles of leftists in the 1970s.
It is true that, after several hundred pages of this often frustrating novel, I felt like I was also struggling along with the characters to find, to hold, to save this hotel. This investment made the final pages of the book some of the most affecting and beautiful.
November 22, 2017
I felt this book was confusing and uneven, though that I think was the point. There are stories contained that were more engaging than others. Overall though, a complicated and multi-angled view of a very specific place and time emerges. Something like cubism, where you are seeing as many sides as possible at once. It is disorienting and there were parts where I wasn't really enjoying the book, but I can see how it works to tell a story in a fairly realistic way. Reality doesn't have clear plot lines and beginnings or ends.
November 14, 2020
I don't even know where to begin with this massive (over 600 pages), varied (comics, plays, transcripts, dance notation, stories), multicultural (10 different interweaving stories) monument of a book. Basically, it tells the story of the International Hotel, a nexus of activism in the late 60s early 70s San Francisco, especially Asian American activism. It is a battle to keep this cultural touchstone from being demolished, and along with it the stories and oral history of the few elderly tenants who still live there.
It is told thru 10 stories from differing points of view, which interweave in amazingly complex and ephemeral ways. You'll be reading along and then say, wait, wasn't two stories ago from this person just mentioned in passing? I would imagine a whole new way of understanding this book would open up if I just sat down and read it again, as I bet there are plenty of folks that show up in the earlier stories as bit players, only to become stars in their own stories later on.
I'm no quite up to that challenge, unfortunately!
The ways it used multiple methods of storytelling reminded me of Stephenson's epic The Baroque Cycle Collection, only Ms. Yamashita explored even more mediums, including comic strips, songs and even a long intricate dance(!) soliloquy.
And I learned so much and was so discouraged at the same time. There was a lot about African American contemporaries, getting treated the same way 50 years later - incarcerated and often murdered for raising a ruckus. Or the chapter that interwove writings from Mao Tse-Tung, Marx and words from the Bandung Conference, the first large-scale Asian–African. So fascinating. As were, in an incredibly depressing way, the stories of Japanese incarceration during World War 2. Makes you want to scream in frustration and depression.
So if you are looking for a deep, intricate, dense thicket of words, pictures and images, with an explosive clarity about activism during that time, you would be hard pressed to find a better novel. I am a different person for reading this. What else can you ask from a book?
It is told thru 10 stories from differing points of view, which interweave in amazingly complex and ephemeral ways. You'll be reading along and then say, wait, wasn't two stories ago from this person just mentioned in passing? I would imagine a whole new way of understanding this book would open up if I just sat down and read it again, as I bet there are plenty of folks that show up in the earlier stories as bit players, only to become stars in their own stories later on.
I'm no quite up to that challenge, unfortunately!
The ways it used multiple methods of storytelling reminded me of Stephenson's epic The Baroque Cycle Collection, only Ms. Yamashita explored even more mediums, including comic strips, songs and even a long intricate dance(!) soliloquy.
And I learned so much and was so discouraged at the same time. There was a lot about African American contemporaries, getting treated the same way 50 years later - incarcerated and often murdered for raising a ruckus. Or the chapter that interwove writings from Mao Tse-Tung, Marx and words from the Bandung Conference, the first large-scale Asian–African. So fascinating. As were, in an incredibly depressing way, the stories of Japanese incarceration during World War 2. Makes you want to scream in frustration and depression.
So if you are looking for a deep, intricate, dense thicket of words, pictures and images, with an explosive clarity about activism during that time, you would be hard pressed to find a better novel. I am a different person for reading this. What else can you ask from a book?
June 13, 2022
This is a maddening book—often brilliant but just as often undisciplined and meandering. I’m usually fine with fiction employing actual events and people for a greater truth, but in this case, the fiction (in general) isn't strong enough to offset the negative effects of obscuring the little-known but important actual history. It just muddies. Plus it’s too long by half.
But what do I know? This was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist.
The author states she had a ton of material to work with but she doesn’t do a good job distilling the important and interesting from the obligatorily inclusive. The story's focus is on the decline, the fight to save, and the ultimate destruction of San Francisco’s I-Hotel in the now subsumed and forgotten Manilatown. But it's also (or probably mainly) a meditation on the concept and history of “Asian Americans”—a term that at one time was politically expedient and essential but is now seen as so encompassing as to be meaningless and problematic.
I liked how she sprinkled primary sources throughout the book (Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History, War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare, etc.). But what would have been really cool is to have an actual bibliography and index.
Coincidentally I recently received an email from a friend who did some sound work on a new movie called Chinatown Rising by Harry Chuck and Josh Chuck which is now playing online. Is Harry Chuck a character in I-Hotel? I dunno (there’s no index!). But I'm going to watch the movie.
But what do I know? This was a 2010 National Book Award Finalist.
The author states she had a ton of material to work with but she doesn’t do a good job distilling the important and interesting from the obligatorily inclusive. The story's focus is on the decline, the fight to save, and the ultimate destruction of San Francisco’s I-Hotel in the now subsumed and forgotten Manilatown. But it's also (or probably mainly) a meditation on the concept and history of “Asian Americans”—a term that at one time was politically expedient and essential but is now seen as so encompassing as to be meaningless and problematic.
I liked how she sprinkled primary sources throughout the book (Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire, America Is in the Heart: A Personal History, War of the Flea: The Classic Study of Guerrilla Warfare, etc.). But what would have been really cool is to have an actual bibliography and index.
Coincidentally I recently received an email from a friend who did some sound work on a new movie called Chinatown Rising by Harry Chuck and Josh Chuck which is now playing online. Is Harry Chuck a character in I-Hotel? I dunno (there’s no index!). But I'm going to watch the movie.
January 5, 2011
i've been reading this book for a while. according to goodreads since december 11. up until the last novella I was planning on giving it 3 stars. I mean it's a great book and I enjoyed it,but it has it's issues as does everything. BUT the last novella is a really beautifully written who are we. Of the ten sections there are 3 really good sections: the first one, the one about ben and the last one. The other sections vary in their greatness, but none of the book is actually bad.
so the problems:
Parts of the book are historical events that would be much happier if they were better explained. I mean you can just call someone a paper aunt and then move on, and I mean I know what that is, but I think the book would benefit from having that explain especially for all the people that weren't in my american immigration class in college. A lot of the organizing and protest stuff probably could have benefited from better explanation, but since I don't know what I don't know I can't pinpoint exactly what I needed to follow the book better. The sections that I liked were the ones about people and relationships instead of the ones about weird organizing things in the city.
I read an author quoting an author once. I don't remember who I was reading but I think he was quoting ann patchett who said, paraphrased, when you do research for a novel read one book then write your novel. this book suffers from over research. it is so busy telling you every little thing that happened at moments it reads more like a history book than a novel. I think this style tends to lose a lot of the emotional weight of the events. If you think about tim obrien, he was able to convey the historical reality of vietnam war, because instead of writing about everything that happened he wrote about a few emotion laden events, and we leave that book feeling like he understand the horror that was vietnam. After some of the novellas in this book I left thinking, well god I guess that happened and I should remember these facts about it. Now I've forgotten all that. There is a reason I don't read history books.
I think this book would have benefited from being drawn into one story line instead of being separated like it was. Although I do understand the artistic decision to separate it.
I recommend the book though, it's a good read.
so the problems:
Parts of the book are historical events that would be much happier if they were better explained. I mean you can just call someone a paper aunt and then move on, and I mean I know what that is, but I think the book would benefit from having that explain especially for all the people that weren't in my american immigration class in college. A lot of the organizing and protest stuff probably could have benefited from better explanation, but since I don't know what I don't know I can't pinpoint exactly what I needed to follow the book better. The sections that I liked were the ones about people and relationships instead of the ones about weird organizing things in the city.
I read an author quoting an author once. I don't remember who I was reading but I think he was quoting ann patchett who said, paraphrased, when you do research for a novel read one book then write your novel. this book suffers from over research. it is so busy telling you every little thing that happened at moments it reads more like a history book than a novel. I think this style tends to lose a lot of the emotional weight of the events. If you think about tim obrien, he was able to convey the historical reality of vietnam war, because instead of writing about everything that happened he wrote about a few emotion laden events, and we leave that book feeling like he understand the horror that was vietnam. After some of the novellas in this book I left thinking, well god I guess that happened and I should remember these facts about it. Now I've forgotten all that. There is a reason I don't read history books.
I think this book would have benefited from being drawn into one story line instead of being separated like it was. Although I do understand the artistic decision to separate it.
I recommend the book though, it's a good read.
January 9, 2011
Relentlessly intelligent, both in terms of literary style and substance. Alternating poetry, prose, screenplay and line narrative, I Hotel runs the gamut from hip and light-hearted to horribly sad. Full of truths and insights into an explosively intense and volatile period of recent history - the life of the left in the late '60's and early '70's. The frame is the Asian American experience, particularly in NoCal, most particularly in San Francisco. Readers are treated to compelling historical fiction regarding Japanese, Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese experiences including interments, human smuggling, sweatshops, and blatant discrimination. At the same time, diverse characters provide insight into a rich variety of political, cultural and intellectual traditions and achievements.
Told as a series of loosely interwoven stories, I Hotel can be a bit of a challenge at times. In fact, I decided to finally let go of trying to find threads between stories and characters. I found it more rewarding to enjoy each segment on its own. May be worth a re-read someday.
Told as a series of loosely interwoven stories, I Hotel can be a bit of a challenge at times. In fact, I decided to finally let go of trying to find threads between stories and characters. I found it more rewarding to enjoy each segment on its own. May be worth a re-read someday.
January 13, 2022
I forget exactly how I came to I Hotel. It was a recommendation: either "if you like big, difficult novels" (which I do) or "big, older novels you may have missed." I was aware of Yamashita. Some time ago I'd penciled her earlier novel Tropic of Orange into my mind so I wouldn't forget it. But I was still putting it off because these days I have to be in the proper mood for magical realism, so I snatched up I Hotel instead and began.
I wasn't disappointed. While I didn't think it especially difficult, I did find it innovative and boldly daring a reader to engage in its varied styles and optics on the page. The structure is 10 novellas about the Chinatown/Manilatown section of San Francisco. Almost every character is of Asian descent but mainly Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Japanese, Korean. The International Hotel on Kearny Street was the focal point for the Asian artistic movement and for Asian political dissent during the years of the novel, 1968 to 1977. The novellas aren't linked except in casual mentions of a character who may have figured in earlier stories. Almost every character is motivated by activist feeling relevant to Asian Americans. Some of them are old communists, even Filipino Huks. Some characters are student activists in the university unrest of the period, some are union organizers and activists in support of migrant farm labor. Most of the Japanese characters were impacted by their forced detention during WWII. And one novella takes place on Alcatraz during the American Indian Movement's occupation there. Though the flow of time spans 1968 to 1977, my impression is that some novellas cover 10 years in themselves. Beginning with the student protests in 1968, it ends with the city's decision to use eminent domain to forcefully evict the International Hotel's elderly population of artists and activists so the area can be used for new development. The event is a moment of history, and Yamashita's primary concern is history. It's a loose history of Chinatown during the 10 years but also alludes to every aspect of the Asian American experience, from the coolie labor used to build the transcontinental railroads to the Japanese internment.
Yamashita uses a variety of styles: film screenplay, news reportage, poetry, even graphic illustration. One novella has political manifestos sprinkled within a script to support the character dialogue. It sounds challenging, but it's not. It's easy to read, and it's a lot of fun. The only part I found onerous was the novella involving Korean pornography. I never quite got it. I thoroughly enjoyed the different styles and enjoyed the characters--communists, cooks, artists, union organizers, students--and their zippy dialogue enlivening the streets of Chinatown and the halls of the International Hotel, from the riotous Berkeley campus laced with tear gas to the final sad image of the artists and activists walking down Kearny after being evicted in the name of urban progress.
I wasn't disappointed. While I didn't think it especially difficult, I did find it innovative and boldly daring a reader to engage in its varied styles and optics on the page. The structure is 10 novellas about the Chinatown/Manilatown section of San Francisco. Almost every character is of Asian descent but mainly Chinese, Thai, Filipino, Japanese, Korean. The International Hotel on Kearny Street was the focal point for the Asian artistic movement and for Asian political dissent during the years of the novel, 1968 to 1977. The novellas aren't linked except in casual mentions of a character who may have figured in earlier stories. Almost every character is motivated by activist feeling relevant to Asian Americans. Some of them are old communists, even Filipino Huks. Some characters are student activists in the university unrest of the period, some are union organizers and activists in support of migrant farm labor. Most of the Japanese characters were impacted by their forced detention during WWII. And one novella takes place on Alcatraz during the American Indian Movement's occupation there. Though the flow of time spans 1968 to 1977, my impression is that some novellas cover 10 years in themselves. Beginning with the student protests in 1968, it ends with the city's decision to use eminent domain to forcefully evict the International Hotel's elderly population of artists and activists so the area can be used for new development. The event is a moment of history, and Yamashita's primary concern is history. It's a loose history of Chinatown during the 10 years but also alludes to every aspect of the Asian American experience, from the coolie labor used to build the transcontinental railroads to the Japanese internment.
Yamashita uses a variety of styles: film screenplay, news reportage, poetry, even graphic illustration. One novella has political manifestos sprinkled within a script to support the character dialogue. It sounds challenging, but it's not. It's easy to read, and it's a lot of fun. The only part I found onerous was the novella involving Korean pornography. I never quite got it. I thoroughly enjoyed the different styles and enjoyed the characters--communists, cooks, artists, union organizers, students--and their zippy dialogue enlivening the streets of Chinatown and the halls of the International Hotel, from the riotous Berkeley campus laced with tear gas to the final sad image of the artists and activists walking down Kearny after being evicted in the name of urban progress.
July 23, 2022
Wow. I feel like that does a pretty good job of explaining my thoughts after reading the book—it was just absolutely loaded with such incredible parallel plotlines, determined and passionate activist characters, and the absolute coolest way of employing several different mediums of writing, from screenplay to poetry to dance choreography back to prose to theatre script to a comic strip. I'd previously read novellas/chapters 1971 and 1977, and I will say that the contextualization of those two novellas helped me enjoy them even more, but 1971 stands out regardless of that contextualization. I love Sandy Hu and her "this is my revolution, and don't you forget it" quote. Definitely worth a re-read, as it's an extremely overwhelming book and takes time to process (do NOT rush this read)—absolutely a book I want for my future bookshelf. There are several parts that drag more, which may be better understood during a reread, but Yamashita is another gift to this world with how she writes and what she writes.
January 4, 2020
This is not easy reading but it was 100% worth the effort. There were so many voices in this unique novel, it gave it prismatic effect, each beam is its own and each trails off sometimes forever and sometimes to rejoin the others later. It's so fractured, even in form: playwriting, graphic novel, etc all within various novellas that alone are one thing but together paint an entire canvass. So what is it about? Revolution, art, history, culture, immigration, San Francisco, the Yellow Power movement, Marx, Mao, Lenin, education, class, 1960s-70s, and so on and so forth. There's some verbal imagery that will stay with me forever (and an actual drawing of a woman as a banana that I won't be forgetting anytime soon). Sprawling, yes. WTF moments, yes. But worth it.
Tip: read the afterward first as it gives history on I-Hotel in San Francisco and some of the goals and processes Yamashita had producing this novel.
Tip: read the afterward first as it gives history on I-Hotel in San Francisco and some of the goals and processes Yamashita had producing this novel.
February 25, 2023
I absolutely admire the stylistic ambition of this book. The combination of illustrations, screenplays, plays, poetry, lyrics, and even comic book represents an attempt to do a John Dos Passos approach to 1968 through 1977, with a "hotel" for each cast of characters. And there are some many insightful observations about the nexus between the Asian American community and various strands of radicalism (including Black Nationalism!). However, Yamashita isn't particularly good at characterizations. And at a certain point, political dialogue becomes one-note and strident. And we're given more than 600 pages of this! So hats off big time to Yamashita for the attempt here. It's fascinating, though not entirely successful.
Read
February 26, 2023I wish I could have stuck with some characters/stories for longer, and some sections were a bit too experimental for my taste, but I HOTEL is a masterpiece. A gorgeous record of Asian American movement work of the 60s and 70s. A dazzling homage to the radicals and revolutionaries, the students and the artists, who made it happen.
January 2, 2024
A beautiful novel. Incredibly moving in its content and style. A text for the past present and future.
October 21, 2020
Some passages from I Hotel:
*
Why is the call to write so strong? Only a writer knows. You can give any excuse you want.
*
Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”
The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.
*
Everyone’s got a version of the same story, or maybe there’s no such thing as the same story; it’s a different story every time.
*
So maybe there’s this moment. It’s different for everyone, but it’s pivotal. It’s the moment your head gets screwed off and screwed on again, and everything is changed forever. You can never see life the same way again. You can never go back. Well, you can go back, but you go back with new eyes, maybe a new brain, new ears, new mouth. It could be there’s a propensity for the moment, like DNA, that’s planted inside you ready to catch the moment. Some folks might say it’s family history. Or maybe you can trace a series of events, plot them out like a map. You remember this time in your childhood: your mother or father said this; you saw that; you got caught up in this; you read that. Then it all comes together and wham! The lights turn on. O.K., it might be more subtle, more gradual, but there’s always something really significant that captures the heart and mind. And it’s not to say that it might not be painful or personally devastating as well. At that moment you shed an old life to become a whole person because, you believe, your body in its actions and your mind in its spirit are wholly in sync. Your talents and possibilities exist for a purpose that is beyond yourself.
Now it’s not as if this moment lasts forever, or that things don’t get sticky and go back on themselves. But it’s the moment you return to because it sustains meaning and empowers the lonely individual. Of course most folks never get this moment, and you who do get it are still imperfect human beings.
*
Maybe he did it because he was the youngest and didn’t know it was a shot in the dark. That’s another thing to take into consideration, the way things happen because you are young and don’t know any better. You might say it’s youthful idealism, but youth doesn’t really know what’s ideal. It just feels right sometimes.
*
However, it was not the strenuous insistence of backbreaking and tedious labor alongside his comrades Cubanos that impressed Ben San Pablo; it was instead their deep love for Cuba. There was no way to get around it. He did not love the place of his birth, and every one of his companion Americanos also only expressed hatred for their imperialist homeland. And among themselves, the hostilities between the Third and the white worlds were hidden from their Cuban hosts. How then would they ever return to wage a revolution?
*
The purest definition of the vanguard is as a fighting unit in armed struggle without which no vanguard may become a vanguard, in which case the struggle over its political life and organization may become an end in itself. High revolutionary fervor may be inversely proportional to a situation that is not in fact revolutionary.
*
It’s not easy to get into a boat with three people you don’t know and go rowing off toward your destiny. If someone said, “Hey, get into the boat; it’s going to change your life,” would you do it? That’s the trickery of being young. You figure, what the hell. I’ve never done this before. You’ve got time. Youth’s supposed to have adventures. Even when there’re folks who come rowing back from that trip and tell you what could happen or even warn you to turn around, you think you’ll make your own mistakes but not those. But they never tell you everything. The past is always saved in someone’s ego, so the really complicated and difficult things can only be known by living them out yourself. When it’s all said and done, you too will save the hardest stuff inside your knowing ego. And you won’t do it out of meanness, or duplicity, or vanity, but maybe because you just forget and get tired, because you’ve got to be an elder with a certain distance that they call wisdom, or because they never ask you anyway.
*
Now some might say that making it through the Coast Guard blockade that night was a condition of this invisibility, but others will tell you that storytelling in itself is powerful magic, can get you from point A to point B, and you don’t know how it happened.
*
The fifth day of the takeover would be dawning in a few hours. The feeling of excitement and purpose was palpable everywhere. How many times in your life do you feel that kind of power, the sort that unifies a people in collective pride and knowing? This time, you and your people get to choose. It’s not an idle feeling, but one that you pursue in various forms, like singing the same song or cheering the same team or praying to the same spirit. A connective wave carries you to the same infinite space and you feel more alive than you have ever felt.
*
Similarly, everyone in the various organizations went tooth and nail at each other. Sometimes physical fights broke out. But what was at stake? The ultimate stakes for revolutionary change were high indeed, but the forks in the road were often so minor that only the most sophisticated thinkers understood the nuances. Ria and Olivia might argue that their decisions were based on the resolution of theoretical struggle, but how many others came to conclusions based on friendship, loyalty and feeling? Ria and Olivia could jab at each other and come away whole, but how many would be casualties in these fights, where they had joined a group and therefore a struggle to match their passions with their beliefs like first love? To be scorned or threatened or put on trial by those you love for something you believe so passionately is a long hurt and a quiet dying.
*
In the meantime, the world turns in strange serendipity, and destiny, if there is such a thing at all, is not a single destination, a straight predictable line to some inevitable end. Maybe you do get to turn, turn again, and turn back, dance a two-step, waltz in three-four, or chant a wakening that opens up a space of possibility, the great yawning mouth of your future. And maybe when you get there, it’s not the future at all but the constantly evolving present.
*
Maybe we shoulda seen it coming. The rich got a problem, they can always sell it to another rich guy who needs that problem to solve another problem. Years down the line, you gonna look at the hindsight and think yeah, now you see the whole picture. But the whole picture is always there.
*
Return to the teahouse, and sit in the dark with Master Konnyaku, watching the fog hunt through the grass and tall weeds, creep silently under the house. Think about Hiro and a conversation about Thich Quang Duc, the sixty-seven-year-old monk who, in 1963 on a busy Saigon intersection sat in the lotus position, smothered in gasoline, and lit himself afire. Hiro hands you a book; he’s always handing you some book. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. As Americans, maybe we can never understand this, he says. Full engagement with life. An act of sacrifice to open the heart to love.
*
By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup – KDP, IWK, WMS, KSW, IHTA, CPA, CCA, EBS. On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed. We threw ourselves into the concerted work of myriad social and political projects, and we worked our butts off. Our commitment and our passion were irreproachable. We were in these years full-time revolutionaries, and we only thought about the revolution we were building, the fierce resistance to a system that served the few and propertied and wealthy, a social system that had failed our immigrant parents and grandparents, had denied their human rights because of their class and color. We learned to educate ourselves in a literature and culture of resistance, and finding ourselves gathered together at the very center of our Asian communities, we also began to educate ourselves in the practice of that resistance. And that practice gave us experience and power. We were young and powerful, and we were the future.
Well, that was the face of it, because over time, despite our agreed ideals, we came to hate each other. For some strange reason, once we entered one of those four inviting radical doors of the I-Hotel and gave our lives to any one of the projects within, our lives were transformed. Our transformation from individuals into collectives was precisely the thing that gave us power, but power has many sides to it, especially the power of a group. Feeling power, wielding power, demonstrating power. A group could act as a single fist or as an open handshake. Well, handshakes were not the tenor of our times. Perhaps it could be said that four mighty fists emerged from four doors to confront a common enemy, to fight in concert the foes of the I-Hotel, but we admit that very often the left fists did not follow the right fists, the punches did not follow the hooks and jabs; we could not agree on our tactics and strategies, and outside the safety of our doors, we avoided or passed each other in hostility, rushing off to our separate tactics and strategies.
We could blame this all on Lenin and Mao, the two leaders whose theory and practice had led to real revolutions, to the overturning of old social structures, and we were avid readers and interpreters of their theories and practices. They were our heroes. We thought they had realized our dreams. Thus we may have followed their principles of democratic-centralism, meaning in theory that we should all participate in our arguments but finally follow in the fierce unity of our majority decision. And we also believed that our arguments were necessary to our collective struggle, that each group was pursuing a line of thinking that would eventually be proven or disproven in practice, that at the end of our struggle, we would finally unite in common unity. Our struggles would make us stronger, more powerful. But we were young and inexperienced, and our fighting was very real, our ideas held just under the tender surface of our new skin and flared in our nostrils. We wanted to be right. We wanted to win.
After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods, and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting about if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we found and spent our youth.
*
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.
*
Why is the call to write so strong? Only a writer knows. You can give any excuse you want.
*
Chen spoke first. He changed the direction of the conversation. “The work of the revolution is a life devoted to the people, that is to say, the public. It’s a public life. A man’s private life, one’s deep interior, must at times be forgotten or sacrificed.”
The young man shifted. We shifted too, wanting to avoid the weight of these words.
*
Everyone’s got a version of the same story, or maybe there’s no such thing as the same story; it’s a different story every time.
*
So maybe there’s this moment. It’s different for everyone, but it’s pivotal. It’s the moment your head gets screwed off and screwed on again, and everything is changed forever. You can never see life the same way again. You can never go back. Well, you can go back, but you go back with new eyes, maybe a new brain, new ears, new mouth. It could be there’s a propensity for the moment, like DNA, that’s planted inside you ready to catch the moment. Some folks might say it’s family history. Or maybe you can trace a series of events, plot them out like a map. You remember this time in your childhood: your mother or father said this; you saw that; you got caught up in this; you read that. Then it all comes together and wham! The lights turn on. O.K., it might be more subtle, more gradual, but there’s always something really significant that captures the heart and mind. And it’s not to say that it might not be painful or personally devastating as well. At that moment you shed an old life to become a whole person because, you believe, your body in its actions and your mind in its spirit are wholly in sync. Your talents and possibilities exist for a purpose that is beyond yourself.
Now it’s not as if this moment lasts forever, or that things don’t get sticky and go back on themselves. But it’s the moment you return to because it sustains meaning and empowers the lonely individual. Of course most folks never get this moment, and you who do get it are still imperfect human beings.
*
Maybe he did it because he was the youngest and didn’t know it was a shot in the dark. That’s another thing to take into consideration, the way things happen because you are young and don’t know any better. You might say it’s youthful idealism, but youth doesn’t really know what’s ideal. It just feels right sometimes.
*
However, it was not the strenuous insistence of backbreaking and tedious labor alongside his comrades Cubanos that impressed Ben San Pablo; it was instead their deep love for Cuba. There was no way to get around it. He did not love the place of his birth, and every one of his companion Americanos also only expressed hatred for their imperialist homeland. And among themselves, the hostilities between the Third and the white worlds were hidden from their Cuban hosts. How then would they ever return to wage a revolution?
*
The purest definition of the vanguard is as a fighting unit in armed struggle without which no vanguard may become a vanguard, in which case the struggle over its political life and organization may become an end in itself. High revolutionary fervor may be inversely proportional to a situation that is not in fact revolutionary.
*
It’s not easy to get into a boat with three people you don’t know and go rowing off toward your destiny. If someone said, “Hey, get into the boat; it’s going to change your life,” would you do it? That’s the trickery of being young. You figure, what the hell. I’ve never done this before. You’ve got time. Youth’s supposed to have adventures. Even when there’re folks who come rowing back from that trip and tell you what could happen or even warn you to turn around, you think you’ll make your own mistakes but not those. But they never tell you everything. The past is always saved in someone’s ego, so the really complicated and difficult things can only be known by living them out yourself. When it’s all said and done, you too will save the hardest stuff inside your knowing ego. And you won’t do it out of meanness, or duplicity, or vanity, but maybe because you just forget and get tired, because you’ve got to be an elder with a certain distance that they call wisdom, or because they never ask you anyway.
*
Now some might say that making it through the Coast Guard blockade that night was a condition of this invisibility, but others will tell you that storytelling in itself is powerful magic, can get you from point A to point B, and you don’t know how it happened.
*
The fifth day of the takeover would be dawning in a few hours. The feeling of excitement and purpose was palpable everywhere. How many times in your life do you feel that kind of power, the sort that unifies a people in collective pride and knowing? This time, you and your people get to choose. It’s not an idle feeling, but one that you pursue in various forms, like singing the same song or cheering the same team or praying to the same spirit. A connective wave carries you to the same infinite space and you feel more alive than you have ever felt.
*
Similarly, everyone in the various organizations went tooth and nail at each other. Sometimes physical fights broke out. But what was at stake? The ultimate stakes for revolutionary change were high indeed, but the forks in the road were often so minor that only the most sophisticated thinkers understood the nuances. Ria and Olivia might argue that their decisions were based on the resolution of theoretical struggle, but how many others came to conclusions based on friendship, loyalty and feeling? Ria and Olivia could jab at each other and come away whole, but how many would be casualties in these fights, where they had joined a group and therefore a struggle to match their passions with their beliefs like first love? To be scorned or threatened or put on trial by those you love for something you believe so passionately is a long hurt and a quiet dying.
*
In the meantime, the world turns in strange serendipity, and destiny, if there is such a thing at all, is not a single destination, a straight predictable line to some inevitable end. Maybe you do get to turn, turn again, and turn back, dance a two-step, waltz in three-four, or chant a wakening that opens up a space of possibility, the great yawning mouth of your future. And maybe when you get there, it’s not the future at all but the constantly evolving present.
*
Maybe we shoulda seen it coming. The rich got a problem, they can always sell it to another rich guy who needs that problem to solve another problem. Years down the line, you gonna look at the hindsight and think yeah, now you see the whole picture. But the whole picture is always there.
*
Return to the teahouse, and sit in the dark with Master Konnyaku, watching the fog hunt through the grass and tall weeds, creep silently under the house. Think about Hiro and a conversation about Thich Quang Duc, the sixty-seven-year-old monk who, in 1963 on a busy Saigon intersection sat in the lotus position, smothered in gasoline, and lit himself afire. Hiro hands you a book; he’s always handing you some book. Vietnam: Lotus in a Sea of Fire. As Americans, maybe we can never understand this, he says. Full engagement with life. An act of sacrifice to open the heart to love.
*
By now we understood the joke about the Red Block on Kearny and swimming around in radical alphabet soup – KDP, IWK, WMS, KSW, IHTA, CPA, CCA, EBS. On the face of it, we were all radical activist revolutionaries, and we were all united to defeat a capitalist-imperialist system of greed. We threw ourselves into the concerted work of myriad social and political projects, and we worked our butts off. Our commitment and our passion were irreproachable. We were in these years full-time revolutionaries, and we only thought about the revolution we were building, the fierce resistance to a system that served the few and propertied and wealthy, a social system that had failed our immigrant parents and grandparents, had denied their human rights because of their class and color. We learned to educate ourselves in a literature and culture of resistance, and finding ourselves gathered together at the very center of our Asian communities, we also began to educate ourselves in the practice of that resistance. And that practice gave us experience and power. We were young and powerful, and we were the future.
Well, that was the face of it, because over time, despite our agreed ideals, we came to hate each other. For some strange reason, once we entered one of those four inviting radical doors of the I-Hotel and gave our lives to any one of the projects within, our lives were transformed. Our transformation from individuals into collectives was precisely the thing that gave us power, but power has many sides to it, especially the power of a group. Feeling power, wielding power, demonstrating power. A group could act as a single fist or as an open handshake. Well, handshakes were not the tenor of our times. Perhaps it could be said that four mighty fists emerged from four doors to confront a common enemy, to fight in concert the foes of the I-Hotel, but we admit that very often the left fists did not follow the right fists, the punches did not follow the hooks and jabs; we could not agree on our tactics and strategies, and outside the safety of our doors, we avoided or passed each other in hostility, rushing off to our separate tactics and strategies.
We could blame this all on Lenin and Mao, the two leaders whose theory and practice had led to real revolutions, to the overturning of old social structures, and we were avid readers and interpreters of their theories and practices. They were our heroes. We thought they had realized our dreams. Thus we may have followed their principles of democratic-centralism, meaning in theory that we should all participate in our arguments but finally follow in the fierce unity of our majority decision. And we also believed that our arguments were necessary to our collective struggle, that each group was pursuing a line of thinking that would eventually be proven or disproven in practice, that at the end of our struggle, we would finally unite in common unity. Our struggles would make us stronger, more powerful. But we were young and inexperienced, and our fighting was very real, our ideas held just under the tender surface of our new skin and flared in our nostrils. We wanted to be right. We wanted to win.
After we had worked together for our beliefs in twenty-four-hour days without rest, bonded ourselves to each other through the inner struggles of self-criticism within our groups, confessed our social sins to our brother- and sisterhoods, and lost our individual selves to our collective purpose, we finally could only be with each other. And we found ourselves fighting about if we should collude with the so-called system and its elected liberal officials, if our struggle should be defined as working with the working class or our oppressed Asian communities, if this or that hotel tenant was an advanced worker, if our loyalties were with the PRC or the USSR, if any of us were reformists, revisionists, or sellouts, if our art and writing must always have political purpose, and we were very sure that depending on our correct analysis of these definitions, we could then make decisions to act that would be ultimately unbeatable. But however we may have accounted for our thinking and our actions in these years, this was how we found and spent our youth.
*
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.
July 2, 2013
Set during a turbulent decade spanning the late 60's through the early 70's, I Hotel is the expansive story of the Yellow Power Movement, set primarily around the International Hotel, the home of aging Asian migrant workers and the headquarters for many of the movement's activities, told over 10 novellas or "hotels."
It's funny. I read this for an independent study and spent much of my month dedicated to it bemoaning its high difficulty level, its constant changing up of prose style and narrative structure, its occasional distance from its characters. While I recognized its fierce intelligence and ferocious ambition, it was a book I thought was easier to admire than to love.
Yet, it's this book, out of the several I read, that haunts me to this day. Sure, it's a difficult read, but it's a book that didn't treat me like an idiot and expected me to keep up. It's one of the few books that I've ever read that I can honestly say made me smarter and more knowledgeable. Much of what I know now about the fiery activism of the sixties and seventies not only from the Asian American Movement but also the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panthers, and Chicano Movement came from my time reading this book. Furthermore, in the end, I *did* connect with the characters: I still sigh over Olivia Wang and Ben San Pablo's bittersweet romance or wonder how Felix Allos is getting on or try to square my reaction to the acid temperament of Aiko Masuoka. Mostly, I mourn the loss of the International Hotel, whose destruction is not only the end of the book but also is the most tangible end of the Yellow Power Movement.
It's that kind of novel. I can't say I'd recommend it to everyone, but to certain people, I think this can be not only a book to read but to experience. You'll leave the book deeply and indescribably changed.
It's funny. I read this for an independent study and spent much of my month dedicated to it bemoaning its high difficulty level, its constant changing up of prose style and narrative structure, its occasional distance from its characters. While I recognized its fierce intelligence and ferocious ambition, it was a book I thought was easier to admire than to love.
Yet, it's this book, out of the several I read, that haunts me to this day. Sure, it's a difficult read, but it's a book that didn't treat me like an idiot and expected me to keep up. It's one of the few books that I've ever read that I can honestly say made me smarter and more knowledgeable. Much of what I know now about the fiery activism of the sixties and seventies not only from the Asian American Movement but also the Civil Rights Movement, Black Panthers, and Chicano Movement came from my time reading this book. Furthermore, in the end, I *did* connect with the characters: I still sigh over Olivia Wang and Ben San Pablo's bittersweet romance or wonder how Felix Allos is getting on or try to square my reaction to the acid temperament of Aiko Masuoka. Mostly, I mourn the loss of the International Hotel, whose destruction is not only the end of the book but also is the most tangible end of the Yellow Power Movement.
It's that kind of novel. I can't say I'd recommend it to everyone, but to certain people, I think this can be not only a book to read but to experience. You'll leave the book deeply and indescribably changed.
February 9, 2023
Update: Got it back from the library and finished it. The only thing I'd say having read the whole thing is that it's like a pointillist painting, where each of the 9 chapters, and the sections within each chapter are dots that, as a whole, give an impression of the place and time in which the people and activities in and around the I Hotel existed. I sometimes was lost in the individual stories, but definitely came away with an appreciation for the overall one.
[Have to return to library; at Chapter "1974," p. 423]
I ran out of time before I could finish this 600-page book. There's a hold request on it at the library. I plan to check it out again so I can finish the final third. But what a scope in the first 400 pages. It says more about my ignorance than the nuance of the book that the Asian-American activism of the late-'60s and '70s, the uprisings around SFSU and Berkeley, the cultural relevance of the I Hotel and overall centrality of the Bay Area to this decade were all news to me.
I'll try to review it better when I'm finished, but for now: I did not care for a lot of the experimental elements of the book. Some chapters were presented as a screenplay, with a graphic treatment, or as interview transcripts. It took me a while to realize that each chapter was largely its own story, separate from the others except for time and place. Shifting narrators meant I was not always sure who was talking or whom they were talking about.
In short, I had a lot of frustrations with the book. But it revealed so much to me, I will let all of that slide. Perhaps on a second reading I'd take up more. And regardless, the imagined but representative stories of families, activists, scholars and poets were fascinating.
[Have to return to library; at Chapter "1974," p. 423]
I ran out of time before I could finish this 600-page book. There's a hold request on it at the library. I plan to check it out again so I can finish the final third. But what a scope in the first 400 pages. It says more about my ignorance than the nuance of the book that the Asian-American activism of the late-'60s and '70s, the uprisings around SFSU and Berkeley, the cultural relevance of the I Hotel and overall centrality of the Bay Area to this decade were all news to me.
I'll try to review it better when I'm finished, but for now: I did not care for a lot of the experimental elements of the book. Some chapters were presented as a screenplay, with a graphic treatment, or as interview transcripts. It took me a while to realize that each chapter was largely its own story, separate from the others except for time and place. Shifting narrators meant I was not always sure who was talking or whom they were talking about.
In short, I had a lot of frustrations with the book. But it revealed so much to me, I will let all of that slide. Perhaps on a second reading I'd take up more. And regardless, the imagined but representative stories of families, activists, scholars and poets were fascinating.
Displaying 1 - 29 of 145 reviews