In the 1990s, Amy Ling, then professor of English and Asian American literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, sent me a questionnaire she hoped would turn into an essay that would be part of a collection of essays by Asian American writers. The answers I returned disappointed Amy—she sent me a more full-bodied response written by another author. Comparing my work to the other author’s, it seemed to me that we both had answered everything with the same ideas, except my answers were in shorthand. I decided to answer Amy with something she really didn’t want at all, something she could reject outright. So I wrote an article about a book I’d never written. That led to thinking about that unwritten work. It was about the Asian American movement, mostly as I knew it in Los Angeles. But by 1997, I had come to live in Santa Cruz, and I thought I should explore the San Francisco/East Bay area where my parents grew up and where I was born. I shifted to a new center for this now real project: the International Hotel in San Francisco Manilatown/Chinatown, the site of political activism and community service for almost a decade until 1977, when residents of the hotel were forcibly evicted.
The I-Hotel, as it was known to its residents and the greater city, housed mostly elderly Filipino and Chinese immigrant bachelors, men who had come to work and make their fortunes prior to World War 11 and who, because of antimiscegenation laws, exclusion acts prohibiting Asian immigration, and a life of constantly mobile migrant labor, were unable to find spouses, have children, and to settle in the United States. In the 1960s and 1970s, the I-Hotel was sold to force the eviction of the residents and to redevelop the site as the extension of a West Coast Wall Street. In an effort to save the hotel and the surrounding Chinatown and Filipino communities, Asian American activists staged dramatic protests with thousands of participants and made the hotel a center for political activities and community service. The I-Hotel became a magnet for a multitude of political action groups in the San Francisco Bay Area, a center and symbol for the Asian American movement.
Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the political and social changes of this period, Asian American students and community activists, influenced by the civil rights movement, the Black Panthers, and international revolutionary movements, gathered to create what became the Asian American, or Yellow Power movement. From this came Asian American studies, with departments in colleges and universities across the country, communes and cooperatives, drug rehabilitation programs, bookstores, newspapers and journals, theaters, filmmakers, cultural centers, artists, musicians, politicians, law cooperatives, educators, historians, underground Marxist-Leninist-Maoist collectives, and literary and political movements. For the Asian American community, this was a flourishing time of new creative energy and political empowerment.
Since beginning this project, I have spent countless hours in Asian American archives, wandered around the old brick-and-mortar sites, read books, viewed films, listened to music, speeches, and rallies, and had both long and short conversations with over 150 individuals from that time. Researching a period in this way is passionately involving, so much so that you begin to live it and to forget why you began the project in the first place. At some point, I realized that I was supposed to be writing a novel, and the research had to stop.
I began to create a structure for the project. I found my research was scattered, scattered across political affinities, ethnicities, artistic pursuits—difficult to coalesce into any one storyline or historic chronology. 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. Their choices took different trajectories, but everyone was there, really there. 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. While the book has become inevitably big, it yet seems to me to be a small offering, a rendering to be continued and completed by others.