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    1974: I-Migrant: A Novella
    1974: I-Migrant: A Novella
    1974: I-Migrant: A Novella
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    1974: I-Migrant: A Novella

    By Karen Tei Yamashita

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    About this ebook

    The seventh novella in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era. 

     Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s epic are each devoted to a single year in one of America’s most transformative decades. This multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins a kaleidoscopic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights, all played out among Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs. 

    In 1974: I-Migrant Hotel, the International has a new landlord—a multinational corporation based in Hong Kong—and the residents are more than a little uneasy about what this means for them. It’s the Year of the Tiger, and while Felix and Macario build a retirement home for Filipino farm workers down in Delano, they also study the situation back in Chinatown.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCoffee House Press
    Release dateMay 15, 2014
    ISBN9781566893893
    1974: I-Migrant: A Novella
    Author

    Karen Tei Yamashita

    Karen Tei Yamashita is the author of seven books (including I Hotel, finalist for the National Book Award, and most recently Sansei and Sensibility), all published by Coffee House Press. Recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters from the National Book Foundation, the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, and a United States Artists’ Ford Foundation Fellowship, she is professor emerita of literature and creative writing at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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    • 4/5

      Sep 3, 2013

      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.
    • 5/5

      Nov 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.

    Book preview

    1974 - Karen Tei Yamashita

    1: Grass Roots

    It’s morning, and I’m knocking on Macario’s door. Who’s Macario? Just a kid, but a smart kid come a long way, and I’m not talking just over the bridge from Berkeley, so we elect him vice president. Vice President of the International Hotel Tenants Association. O.K., I set him up for this, but I still got to pay my respects. There he is standing in the door with his toothbrush. Felix, he says.

    Mr. Vice President, I say.

    Felix, cut the bullshit, he laughs, but he sees my suitcase and asks, Where you going?

    It’s time, I say.

    Time?

    Yeah, I got to go back to my grass roots.

    Luzon? Ilocos? he asks.

    What the fuck I go back there for?

    You Visayan?

    Now you trying to insult me?

    Felix. He’s waving that toothbrush. "Where are you going?

    Delano.

    Oh.

    "I been thinking. Now come to find out we got this new landlord. This Enchanted Seas Corporation. If it was enchanted seasons, maybe I could deal with that, season this place into an enchanted restaurant. But who’s got a business incorporating enchanted seas? My thumb points to me, the boss. I been to enchanted seas. Hey, I been to disenchanted seas. What does a corporation know about an international hotel like this one? They could turn it into a five-star enchanted castle with a sea moat, and where we gonna be? Out in the street on our butts."

    Felix, like you’re always telling me, we’ve got to study the situation. We just found out about Enchanted Seas. Give us some time.

    Do you read Herb Caen?

    "In the Chronicle? Yeah?"

    Herb says it’s a Hong Kong investment company. How come Herb knows, and we don’t know nothing shit?

    Because. Macario drops the toothbrush to his side. He shrugs. We don’t know nothing shit. He looks dejected.

    Now I feel bad. I don’t want to be so hard on him. It’s not his fault. I equivocate. Maybe that’s the writing on the wall, I say. At least the last owner was a Democrat. You can always find the Democrats, in the capitol buildings, cutting ribbons, kissing babies. But this multinational corporation. What you gonna do? Catch a plane, go picket Hong Kong?

    It’s not going to be easy.

    I shake my head. So. I pick up my suitcase. I go to Delano, help my union brothers build a retirement place. Who didn’t pick grapes? Pay union dues? You did your time, you get a place to live. That’s how it should be.

    Macario agrees. That’s how it should be.

    I point down the hall to the kitchen. Back of the shelf, got a bottle of bagoong. I make it myself. That’s for you. But don’t lose the cover. I wave the air like there’s a fart. And the wok, you keep it.

    You coming back, right?

    I thump Macario’s chest. You save the hotel, maybe so.

    We can’t do it without you, Felix.

    I taught you everything I know. I pause for a moment. Well, not everything.

    We laugh.

    I pat him on the shoulder. Now you got to— I wave him away, because who wants to make a scene?

    He finishes my sentence. —study the situation.

    I can feel his eyes following me down the long hall. I turn the corner and slip an envelope under Abra’s door. She’s out already, taking her kids to school.

    Outside, the air comes brisk down Kearny, but the sun is out. I cross the street to get a final look at the I-Hotel, my home off and on for maybe fifty years. I see Frankie step into Tino’s and pull off his hat, in for an early-morning shave and trim. After Tino’s, he’ll hang out at the Lucky M and shoot a round with maybe Benny or Noy Noy. For lunch, you can find him at the Silver Wing, then a stroll down to Portsmouth, like he owns the street. Maybe he does. For Frankie, it’s still the 1930s. Pinoy about town in his pinstripe double-breasted McIntosh every day. He’s gonna die in that suit.

    Me, I zipper up the old jacket and pull down my cap with the huelga boycott button. I got a Greyhound to catch. Delano’s south, over there down the 1-5 headed Bakersfield way.

    Come to find a couple months later, who shows up in Delano, making the turn at the old gas station and headed down the dirt road to Forty Acres? It’s Macario in a Chevy station wagon followed by a caravan of maybe five more cars. Bunch of kids fall out of those vehicles with their sleeping bags and hammers. Hey, Felix. Macario waves. Put us to work.

    Welcome to Agbayani Village, I say to Macario and the kids. O.K., not kids. I should say students, from the university. Maybe they get extra credits for making the trip, so I know I got to give them their extra credits. Let me tell you about Paolo Agbayani.

    I tell them Paolo Agbayani was my union brother. We join AWOC in the same year and stand together in the picket line. What’s AWOC? Practically all-Pinoy union: Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, affiliated with the AFL-CIO. We start the Great Delano Grape Strike of 1965. Then the boycott. When’s the last time you eat a grape?

    No one can remember.

    Right, I tell them. Don’t forget it. We Pinoys in Delano started the whole goddamn thing.

    Paolo Agbayani’s like me. Working all his life, and finally got nobody but himself. So we got each other. We’re on picket duty over at Perelli-Minetti ranch when Paolo keels over. He’s leaning into his picket sign when I catch him falling, grabbing his heart. Whatsa matter, Paolo? Get help! Get him some water! Maybe it’s heatstroke. Paolo!

    Viva la huelga.

    Paolo!

    Mabuhay.

    We say of the brothers like Paolo that he was a soldier of the soil. This soil here is where he fought his battles and finally died. So what we are building here is Paolo Agbayani’s final resting place, the home where he should have lived. That’s how we put everyone to work, digging foundations, laying bricks and tile, sawing roofing beams, setting pipes for plumbing and electricity.

    I say to Macario, You sleep over at Filipino Hall, but come over to Schenley camp, and I make you a good meal. By now you miss my cooking?

    Shit, how’d you know? I gotta come three hundred miles to get a meal.

    What? You don’t come to build my retirement house? I kick you out.

    Ah man, Felix, how long we gonna hold out? I’m losing weight.

    What are you doing here anyway? We finally evicted?

    Not yet.

    What about Abra? How’s Abra?

    She’s holding the fort while I’m here. She’ll be here in a few days. Got to wait until her kids get summer vacation. Then I gotta go back.

    She driving herself?

    Bringing the old yellow Bug.

    It could fall apart any minute.

    You know she fixes it herself.

    I think about Abra

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