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A review by jacob_wren
I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita, Leland Wong, Sina Grace
5.0
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.