Ars memorativa

An especially dolorous exercise is to compare our sublime theories of community with the fraught actuality of people trying to live together. It would be a cruel understatement to say that we have not lived up to our own social dreams. And yet it is no less an understatement to say that art often manages to retrieve a sad beauty from the depths of squalor itself. One of the things that is so amazing about Karen Tei Yamashita's most recent novel, I Hotel, is that she not only retrieves the sad beauty of a particularly fraught period of a particularly squalid community—Asian Americans in San Francisco during the 1960s-70s—but that she does it in a way that is also exhilarating, celebratory. Those familiar with the history of the real I(nternational) Hotel—the one on Kearny and Jackson—know that its loss represented a real cultural defeat; Yamashita's novel faces that defeat but chooses resilience, however heartbroken, over victimization. As one of the narrators bitterly muses, "maybe in the end you can't remember nothing, and nobody else remembers nothing. But goddamn, we never give up. All we ever do is survive."

There is a whole tragedy compressed in that word "ever": it contains the sense of an almost morbid tenacity in the face of unjust social conditions, conditions that prevent anything beyond mere survival. Yamashita doesn't exactly universalize the Asian American (or even the immigrant) experience, but she does indicate its crucial intersections with broader historical trends: civil rights, labor reform, student protest, and the legacy of leftist politics generally. If we don't necessarily come away from the novel thinking that it is the story of America itself, we nonetheless perceive how profoundly co-imbricated are all narratives of social struggle. And for those who want or need it, the allegory is there: America as itself a kind of I-Hotel, a place of refuge for the dispossessed, for the hopeful, for the hard working, for the abject. For this reader, however, the novel was far more rewarding in its fidelity to period detail, the poignancy of individual lives, than in any kind of overarching political narrative.

That narrative is already well known and needs little further embroidery. The International Hotel, originally intended as a ritzy tourist destination, was rebuilt in 1907 as temporary housing for first-generation Filipino laborers. By 1968, the year the novel begins, these manongs as well as other Asian bachelors, most of them elderly, began receiving eviction notices: the site of the I-Hotel had been targeted for incursion by the financial district. What followed was ten excruciating years of doomed grassroots resistance. Many lost their homes and a mixed community of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Korean immigrants lost a touchstone, a rallying point. Yamashita depicts the ongoing crisis from multiple perspectives, covering the spectrum (ethnic and generational) of people involved. The many-voiced chorus she conducts throughout the novel, whose arias blend into one another to produce startling harmonies, demonstrates her bravura technique. Each of the ten sections or "novellas" that comprise the novel is complete in its own right while at the same time organically connected to the others. Each tends toward thematic coherence, whether it be love, or food, or revolution. Where I Hotel comes closest to the traditional Asian American novel is in its suggestion that these are one and the same, that food is love is revolution is culture is family is history, etc. In many other ways, however, I Hotel outstrips or otherwise radicalizes the traditional Asian American novel.

There is, first of all, its ambitious scope, representing nothing less than the whole mélange of Asian cultures in San Francisco in all their turbulent proximity. This isn't so much an Asian American novel as a Pan-Asian American novel. The sheer command of historical and cultural detail is impressive. When Felix, the narrator mentioned above, is evicted from the Hotel under threat of violence, he becomes so sick that...