The Fight to Save the I-Hotel (and Solidarity Itself?)
"Although the pivotal moment theory might work for some, it might be overblown."
Try to picture “Asian America,” and you’ll probably get it wrong. Does a person of a single nationality come to mind, or maybe someone who just looks vaguely Asian? Were they born in the United States, or did they immigrate? Did you put them in a particular place, and why there? Whatever you’ve conjured is surely too specific or too broad, or maybe somehow both.
So instead, picture a banana. A sexy, heroic, maternal Chiquita banana with two conjoined, apparently human, Asian-presenting daughters. Her sleazy, Uncle Sam hat-wearing lover pimps the daughters and kills the mother when she tries to come to their defense. The banana’s own sister arrives from China, enacts revenge, and splits the daughters, who were always too different to be joined at the hip.
Does that clear things up? It’s one tiny cartoon slice from Karen Tei Yamashita’s I-Hotel, a fictionalized retelling of the real struggle to preserve an Asian community hub in San Francisco. The International Hotel, which Yamashita researched for years, housed mainly single, aging, immigrant men barred from bringing or starting families upon arrival in the United States. Until its eviction in 1977 and demolition two years later1, it sat on the border between San Francisco’s Chinatown and its waning Manilatown, a point of crossover between two groups for whom immigration had only recently become legal and who were rapidly being displaced.2
Yamashita narrates the ten years preceding the eviction over ten composite novellas and at least twice as many storytelling modes. There are dramatic scripts, documentary screenplays, choreographed dances, revolutionary epigraphs, reactionary epigraphs, experimental poems, folk tales, and cold hard historical facts. There’s still plenty of novelistic prose — in second, third, and first person plural and singular forms. And a comic strip about a banana.
Like several of Yamashita’s bits, Chiquita Banana doesn’t show back up. She does, however, display a collision of influence that lies at the novel’s core. Chiquita is a symbol of the exploitation of Latin America3, dating the avatar of the United States, and avenged by a sister from the East (named Mulan Rouge). The tangled picture is at once absurd, violent, hilarious, and tragic. It’s this chaotic formula that Yamashita uses to cobble together her Asian America, a subject so diverse, so disparate, its existence is up for debate.
The term “Asian American” has only been in wide use since the late 1960s, when a Japanese and Chinese American student couple at UC Berkeley convinced fellow Asians that if white people couldn’t tell them apart anyway, they might as well have some racial solidarity — and an umbrella term that wasn’t a slur. Some other Asian students, many of them Filipinos, found the label too flattening, but at a time when fervent political activism could catapult a new category, it proved useful enough.
In this frenetic Vietnam War era, the International Hotel’s salvation became a rallying cause for the surging Asian American movement. Students and radicals passed out flyers and amassed demonstrations and chanted: “The people united will never be defeated!” Then, the forces of real estate and the city of San Francisco defeated them.
It was a unique moment of pan-Asian solidarity in which a variegated band of would-be revolutionaries united across ethnic and ideological lines to serve a singular cause — sort of. The push to save the I-Hotel was also a fractious, arguably futile, movement in which a flurry of activists fought hard in every direction, including against each other.
In The Loneliest Americans, released a decade after Yamashita’s 2010 novel, Jay Caspian Kang writes that “the tenants of the I-Hotel could unite behind their very real demands, but for the various student groups trying to test their nascent solidarity, the needs of ‘Asian Americans’ could never quite take precedence over the ideological and identity concerns of the individual groups.” He argues often (in essays, on his podcast, in strident tweets) that the movement’s significance has become inflated as it has become mythologized, and that these groups never shared enough of a history to support a common cause. The people were always going to be defeated, in this view — they were never united.
Yamashita understands such skepticism. It’s woven through all ten little books in her book. Often, it’s biting and comical, and while everyone might look righteous, no one looks good.
She stages a bitter fictionalized fight between the J-Town Collective and Citizens Against Nihonmachi Eviction, two Japantown resident groups split across the reform-versus-revolution divide — CANE considers working with local authorities; JTC is offended by the thought. There is outrage over whether it was the right call to slap local officials’ faces on flyers.
The book is silly with acronyms. After the eviction, the movement’s various groups brawl, devolving into “an alphabet soup of punching youth.” They argue “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.” They’re often caught indulging in an embarrassing, at times grating fixation on who they are and what it means.
There’s a special episode of The Dig, released over the summer, where the cultural critic Andrea Long Chu calls up a bunch of her family members and asks them if they think she’s white. She’s a quarter Chinese, the same fraction that I am Okinawan, and it’s mortifying to hear her more-Asian relatives waffle. I unwittingly imagine my own doing the same.
Be it potentially uncomfortable, it’s worth considering what your identity confers. What is the ratio of oppression to cultural meaning to diversity points? Even some of Kang’s sharpest critics agree that there is no single Asian America, that as more people have come from more parts of a massive continent, the term has become too broad, too loose, to carry any real meaning. And it benefits the more privileged among us to identify with a broadly oppressed class — you can claim an ancestor’s struggle without ever struggling yourself.
In a chapter called “Tule Lake,” named for the infamous World War II-era Japanese internment camp, Yamashita tackles the thorny concept of intergenerational trauma when three Japanese Americans run into a Modoc man, whose tribe is native to the land the U.S. government seized for the sprawling prison. The Japanese kids “could have been mistaken for Indian,” the narrator notes when they first meet, citing “the features that claim the same genes that crossed the Bering Strait or canoed across the Pacific. Different tribes is all.”
At Tule Lake, the Modoc man leads the Japanese Americans in a memory ritual that allows them to watch scenes from the past: one as a baby in Japan; another’s mother before his birth in an internment camp. The next day, he shows them significant sites from the Modoc War, “one rebellion” in a brutal process of colonization. He tells the gathered youth that the Vietnam War ended “‘because we’—he pointed to himself, a vet, ‘we refused to fight.’”
“Funny how a group can be bound by refusal and resistance,” Yamashita writes. “Maybe something does get passed along. Could be ghost stories, something in the deep places of your psyche that’s always hungry, hungry for intangible things that get defined later.”
Even for characters who aren’t Japanese, Yamashita presents the internment, still a relatively fresh memory in the novel’s Vietnam era, as a unifying trauma — a past-tense pairing for the hotel’s looming demise. A white woman hosts a photo exhibition about her time in camp, a commitment of solidarity with her Japanese husband and kids. A group of Chinese American students (self-dubbed “the Poetry Boys Club”) make it their mission to track down and republish the manuscript of John Okada’s No-No Boy, the now-classic 1957 novel of Japanese resistance to American assimilation and its consequences.
This osmosis of Japanese-centric trauma might seem controversial, especially if you consider the colonial history: Japan, symbolized by the red hot rising sun, was an imperial menace to most of its Asian neighbors, and the country now acts as a willing partner to the United States’ military empire. Yamashita’s characters discuss this, too.
“Okinawans suffer dual-repression: by the U.S. military and the so-called Japan Self-Defense Forces. It’s an imperialist partnership,” says a JTC member, proposing “a tie-in to CANE” — shortly before the two groups’ bitter divorce. Their featured novella kicks off with a chapter titled “Dossier #9066,” for the executive order that initiated the internment.4
This is not to say Yamashita confines discussions of trauma or imperialism to the context of Japan and its diaspora. Both themes are essential for connecting characters across borders — and at times for comic relief. When the ministers of information for the Black Panther Party and Red Guard Party share a Moscow hotel room on an anti-imperialist pilgrimage to Vietnam, Yamashita includes an epigraph from Mao Tse-tung:
I call upon the workers, peasants, revolutionary intellectuals, enlightened elements of the bourgeoise and other enlightened personages of all colours in the world, white, black, yellow, brown, and so forth, to unite against the racial discrimination practiced by U.S. imperialism and to support the American Negroes in their struggle against racial discrimination.
Then the ministers of information light their hotel room on fire trying to hot box.
For the most part, the recurring absurdity keeps the love and hope and solidarity from getting too sappy. But the novel is fundamentally hopeful, and Yamashita, a trained anthropologist who got to know real-life versions of many of her characters5, can’t help but betray her belief in the vision. Sentimentality is never far.
“Our transmission from the International Hotel,” as Yamashita calls it, concludes in a first-person-plural narrative voice, an authoritative “We” whose perspective shifts as it speaks in a commanding, essayistic tone. The reader has encountered a few We’s by this point, occasional one-off chapters where some wise multifaceted entity swoops in to tell us what is really going on. There are several sprinkled throughout the book, evincing different perspectives and critiques, and it seems like all of the many multiples get a chance to talk at the end.
There is the We who rallied to support the I-Hotel and the We who lived in it and the We who reside in Chinatown and Manilatown but want nothing to do with it, because they’re marginalized and avoid trouble. None of them conveys the novel’s singular perspective.
But there does emerge, at the end, one clearly stated, unifying theory of Asian America. “A very few of us can say that we made the trip out of curiosity, but everyone else must probably admit that we’ve been forced across the Pacific, caught in the shifting consequences of war,” one of the final narrators declares. “That war might be violently active or violently passive, hot or cold, political or economic, but nevertheless, war.”
It stands in stark contrast to Kang, who writes a decade later that the “internecine fights” plaguing the movement “betrayed the difficulties of creating a coalition out of people who didn’t share much of a history.”
Asian America is a slippery term, ripe for opportunism and triggering cringes over its attempt at solidarity. You probably don’t have to read a whole book about it to understand the cause for skepticism. I saw it in practice when my partner, synthesizing Kang’s argument for my dad, asked if he thought of himself as Asian American. If anyone fits the bill, it’s him, but my dad said no almost reflexively, like the term was a fly he wanted to brush off.
He’d call himself Japanese American, maybe, or Okinawan, he said. The instinct is to get more specific.
My great-grandparents were from the once-independent Pacific archipelago now known as Okinawa, formerly the Ryukyu Kingdom. They were refugees of an economic war that took hold when Japan annexed their islands and overhauled their land rights, impoverishing basically everyone there. My grandma was born in Los Angeles, where the Japanese community was big enough that Okinawans could cohere within the broader group. But in the eyes of a U.S. at war with Japan, they were all Japanese.
In this context, Yamashita’s unifying presentation of the internment makes sense. World War II broke out when my grandma was a teenager, and whenever I mention this, I’m quick to qualify: but they didn’t have to go to camp! They just had to give up their property (a hotel, actually) and flee to Colorado. Eventually, most of the family moved back West; now my relatives play golf, work in STEM fields, and drive cars around California. On a recent visit, we went to LA’s National Japanese American Museum, where we saw an exhibit on the internment.
And if you consult the foundational works of the Asian American literati, the internment’s centrality rings true, too. The “Poetry Boys Club” resurrecting No-No Boy represents one of I-Hotel’s many details derived from history: The book really had been shunned and fallen out of print, and it really was brought back by a group of mostly Chinese American up-and-coming writers. They included the legendary playwright Frank Chin, who credited Okada with unleashing Asian American literature by being “so good it freed me to be trivial.” It clearly influenced Yamashita, who wrote that No-No Boy “moves from character to character, within a constellation of the communal, reflecting the psychic interior of a conflicted and divided community, and gifting, through this storytelling, I believe, a communal reconciliation.”
It’s debatable whether Chin and his co-editors of the 1974 Aiiieeeee! anthology still speak for as many Asians in America fifty years later — especially considering how many of them weren’t here yet when the literary community was finding itself. And it’s funny how a community can melt away when put into a different context.
Over six thousand miles from California, a sprawling monument to trauma sits nestled in Itoman, Okinawa, amid a hauntingly quiet public park. The Okinawa Prefectural Peace Memorial Museum narrates the atrocities of the WWII Battle of Okinawa, when U.S. and Japanese fighting killed an estimated 150,000 Okinawan civilians. You can walk through a replica of a cave where families hid and hear recordings of victim testimony. The parallel plight of Japanese people in America feels almost irrelevant.
Or it did, for me, until I stood reading a plaque about Okinawans in the diaspora sending packages of food and clothing back for their relatives. My grandmother, then 95 and standing at my shoulder, said that she remembered her mother doing just that from Colorado.
Out of five siblings, my grandma was the most interested in her family’s path to the U.S. from Okinawa — and the colonial exploitation by Japan that necessitated it. She passed that interest on to me, and I learned that many Okinawan anti-colonial activists reject the assimilationist premise that they’re Japanese. So how could we be Japanese American?
My grandma was also the only one out of five to marry a white person. If the sheer percentage of your lineage is what counts, I am among the least qualified of my Asian American relatives to be writing this. I’ve wondered, as Andrea Long Chu did, if my extended family members see me as white or Asian. They aren’t as blunt as random strangers, who will simply guess. In an experience recognizable to many mixed or even somewhat ethnically ambiguous people, I’ve been slotted into a litany of classifications, from disturbingly exacting fractions of white and Asian to various Latin American nationalities to just “Indian,” by which I think the drunk woman who said it on the bus meant Native American.
These strangers are correct in assuming one thing: Everyone’s people are from somewhere. Someone in your family history has probably been brutally displaced or done some brutal displacing, or maybe both. And just as any racial group resists a single, phenotypic picture, a descriptor Yamashita pins on Asians could apply to anyone: “We are all the ordinary or extraordinary veterans of cycle upon cycle of global conflict.” The question, then, is if from our shared status, we can build solidarity that works.
Recommended if you like: exhaustively researched historical fiction; multiple unreliable narrators; deciphering weird puzzles; making notes of characters’ names so you can recognize them when they reappear several hundred pages later; the podcast Time to Say Goodbye (maybe); Infinite Jest (sorry).
Not recommended if you like: a linear narrative; pure text uninterrupted by illustrations; getting comfortable in one format and staying there; one obvious protagonist; hagiography.
The demolition has a few competing dates floating around out there. In her afterword to I-Hotel’s tenth anniversary edition, Yamashita cites 1979, two years after the eviction, as do the I-Hotel’s own history committee and citizens advisory committee, plus the San Francisco Chronicle. Assuming all these are right, it appears that Jay Caspian Kang, Wikipedia, and a review in The Nation are wrong. Also worth noting: a resurrected I-Hotel opened in 2005.
For more on San Francisco’s so-called redevelopment, check out this one-hour historical doc (and Marxist analysis), available in the public domain.
But bananas are, actually, native to Asia and the South Pacific.
Issued 82 years ago today, in fact. I hadn’t planned to put this post out on the national Day of Remembrance for the internment (which this year falls on Presidents’ Day), but here we are.