1974

  I HOTEL

  ALSO BY KAREN TEI YAMASHITA

  Through the Arc of the Rain Forest

  Brazil-Maru

  Tropic of Orange

  Circle K Cycles

  COPYRIGHT © 2010 by Karen Tei Yamashita

  COVER DESIGN by Linda Koutsky

  BOOK DESIGN by Allan Kornblum

  Illustrations by Leland Wong © 2010 Leland Wong

  Illustrations by Sina Grace © 2010 Sina Grace

  AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH © Mary Uyematsu Kao

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CIP INFORMATION

  Yamashita, Karen Tei, 1951–

  I Hotel / by Karen Tei Yamashita.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1974: I-Migrant, NOVELLA, E-ISBN 978-1-56689-389-3

  1. Civil rights movements—United States—Fiction.

  2. Asian Americans—Fiction.

  3. Nineteen seventies—Fiction.

  4. Nineteen sixties—Fiction.

  5. Chinatown (San Francisco, Calif.)—Fiction.

  I. Title.

  II. Series.

  PS3575.A44119 2010

  813'.54—DC22

  2010000382

  This story is based, in part, on true events, but certain liberties have been taken with names, places, and dates, and the characters have been invented. Therefore, the persons and characters portrayed bear absolutely no resemblance whatever to the persons who were actually involved in the true events described in this story.

  For Asako and her grandchildren

  Contents

  1: Grass Roots

  2: Halo-Halo

  3: Pig Roast

  4: Empty Soup

  5: Rations

  6: Ng Ka Py

  Afterword

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  The Illustrators

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Funder Acknowledgments

  Coffee House Press

  1974: I-Migrant Hotel

  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 t
ell 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 running the I-Hotel, telling the old guys where to take their business. “Abra’s tough.”

  “Tougher than me.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  “We’ve been studying the situation, you know.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah, Enchanted Seas is a mafia godfather out of Thailand. Samut Songkhram.”

  “Samut what?”

  “Songkhram. He’s got a monopoly in Thailand on the sale of whiskey. All the Siamese police and generals are in his pay.”

  “That’s Thailand. What’s it got to do with us?”

  “He’s been buying up all the hotels around the I-Hotel.”

  “You ever eat Thai food?”

  “No.”

  “They got this lemongrass coconut stew with chili. You just slip the white fish in there real gently. Serve it in a hot pot cooking on your table.”

  “Shit. You’d get evicted for some Thai food?”

  “Think about it. Levi-Klein, Simon Solomon, the old owners. Latkes and matzo ball soup. How can you compare?”

  Macario throws his hands up. “I thought you gonna help me.”

  “How many times I got to tell you: the way to a man’s heart.”

  “I’m going to send you in to poison this Songkhram bastard.”

  “Now you talking.”

  End of a working day, I’m dishing up the food.

  “What’s this?”

  “This my creation. Call it ‘roots on a bed of rice.’”

  “But what’s this?” The brother is pointing at a large round root on his plate.

  “Rutabaga,” I say. “How about a beet? This one’s daikon. Maybe you like gobo or yam?”

  He’s fishing around. “I’ll take the carrots. What else you got?”

  “Fifteen kinds of root vegetables. Try turnip. Try parsnip. Try onion. Everything that grows under the earth.”

  “You add some worms?”

  “For protein. What you expect?”

  “Shit, Felix. This stuff is too healthy.”

  “You gotta watch your cholesterol, Freddy. I’m just looking after you.”

  Macario says, “It’s pretty subtle. Did you want me to bring that bottle of bagoong?”

  “Hell no. These guys on a no-salt diet. Just following doctor’s orders. Sometimes you got to force the palette by tasting the thing itself. You concentrate on that rutabaga; you can taste the true soil of Delano.”

  “That’s deep, Felix.” Macario forks his roots.

  “Deep is Sixto’s garden. Go check it out. Everything below the ground. Nothing topside. Go figure. Sixto must like to dig.”

  Lenny says, “You don’t know? Fermin’s chickens got into Sixto’s garden. Ate everything topside.”

  Sixto yells from somewhere, “Next time I kill your goddamn chickens!”

  “My chickens kill you first!”

  Then Candido says, “How come you don’t cut these up?” He’s looking at his roots on his bed of rice. “Looks like dicks and balls.”

  Everybody’s laughing. As a matter of fact.

  I say, “Tell me the truth.” I get my knife ready. “You want them cut up?”

  “Hey,” Pete remembers. “I seen this somewhere on television. No lie. Fertility soup.”

  “It’s an island recipe,” I nod. “Gonna enhance your chances.”

  Guffaws go all around.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Could use some hot sauce.”

  Instead of saying grace, everybody’s dancing.

  You be surprised how roots fill you up. It doesn’t take much. By the end of the meal, everyone burping and sitting satisfied. That’s when our brother Philip Vera Cruz gets up and starts to put it all into what he calls the context of the larger struggle. He gets up and starts talking like he’s talking to the three, four guys at his end of the table, but everybody gets quiet so they can hear, because they know Philip’s our leader, our vice president next to Cesar Chavez.

  These days, who doesn’t know Cesar Chavez? But who knows about my union brothers Philip Vera Cruz and Larry Itliong? Who knows the context of the larger struggle that goes back seventy-five years to the Philippine-American War of 1899? Phil’s gonna tell you, like he always does. Why guys like me are here, what we did, and why. How come we got to toil in the soil for fifty years to make some growers fat and wealthy? Help them take their agribusiness into every fertile valley in the state, from San Joaquin to the Imperial, and we retire to nothing? When the legs won’t stoop no more, put our old feet on the road and say, Walk. If you lucky, they give you a shovel and say, Go dig your grave. Phil’s gonna make you hear with new ears. First you strain to hear him, but then very gradually he’s a quiet storm booming through your own chest.

  But what Philip says I get to later.

  A couple of days pass, and Abra and her two little ones arrive. Happen to be twins, boy-girl pair. I got names for them: Andie and Emil. I don’t see them for a while, so I see them bigger, coming up to Abra’s elbow and maybe passing soon.

  I’m using up the sugar ration making sugar cookies. I’m teaching them to dig up Sixto’s garden. “Dig here. You gonna find golden treasure.”

  Abra comes in with her sweaty brow. Hair all pushed inside her hat. Cheeks and arms peppered with sawdust. Skin glowing underneath. I think, how much more beautiful they get? “I could use a drink, Felix.”

  “From the tap O.K.?”

  “That’ll do.” She turns the glass and takes it down in one swallow. What am I, a bartender? Then she fiddles around in her jeans pocket. “I just remembered. I forgot this.” She hands me a folded envelope.

  I shake my head. “I give it to you.”

  “No, you take it back. I can’t accept it.”

  “O.K., it’s not for you. For them.” I nod at her twins. They got the little yellow potatoes all lined up like a line of train cars.

  “Uncle, look how many.”

  She pushes the envelope back. “We already had this discussion. You know the rules. Don’t try to get any ideas.”

  “I don’t got no ideas. Just what I can see.”

  “Hmph.” She eats my sugar cookie.

  “You working for this collective. I don’t say nothing to no
one about this. It’s like me. I’m a union man. But they not paying, so how about they help take care of the kids? Every night you making meetings. What happens to them?” I look at Abra’s twins. Now they got the radishes lined up too.

  “I’m the only one with kids. And they do help when they can.”

  “I could help.”

  “We decided we couldn’t cross that line, remember?”

  “You decided. Not me.”

  “O.K., I decided.”

  “Maybe it’s not too late.”

  “It’s not about being late. You know that already.”

  I shake my head.

  “O.K.” She waves the envelope. “I’ll give this money to the collective.”

  “What?” I say. “They take it and send it to the Commies in the Philippines to fight martial law.” I snatch back the envelope. “O.K. O.K. I’m against martial law, but what about the larger context of my struggle?”

  But I forget to tell you what Philip Vera Cruz says. It’s this kind of speech about our history. Make it real to you, we got to put our real lives inside real history. I tell you my version right here:

  Back in 1920, I’m in Oahu with Pablo Manlapit. How many thousands of us Pinoys and Japanese strike against the plantations? Pau hana. We close them down until they spread their lies. Lies about Manlapit. Lies about how we Orientals look alike but we never get along. Separate the Pinoys from the Japanese. Use the Koreans against the Japanese to break the strike. It’s a lesson you learn. I tell Macario and Abra. This is how you could fail in the end.

  But that’s not all.

  In Hawaii, I get to be persona non grata, so I come to California to see what trouble I can make here. By then, Pinoys about the only folks not being excluded. Then, in 1934, I’m in Salinas with Rufo Canete, and maybe three thousand of us strike the lettuce fields. They deputize a white army, burn down our camp, and drive us out of town. You think they don’t pay someone to come to bust your head open for a lousy extra thirty cents? Pay an army before they pay you. That’s the next lesson.

  Then the next year, they tell me my country’s going to be free and independent. Guaranteed—just wait another ten years. But meantime, I change from being a ward of the American government to an alien ineligible for citizenship. I say, what’s the difference? Except now they want me to go back to where I came from. What do they know about where I came from? They never know except I’m a brown brother. That’s the next lesson.