I HOTEL by Karen Tei Yamashita | Coffeehouse Press 2010 | $19.95

Karen Tei Yamashita—writer, professor, and globetrotter—possesses an oeuvre that is anything but conventional. From her debut eco-fantasy novel Through the Arc of the Rainforest to her latest novel, the incredibly ambitious I Hotel, Yamashita has time and again demonstrated a preoccupation with offbeat human experiences.

At the center of I Hotel is the history of the titular inn, the International Hotel, a low-income housing complex located in San Francisco that became the source of much controversy and conflict when its residents, mostly elderly Filipino and Chinese bachelors, were threatened with eviction in the 70’s. Working with this historic centerpiece, Yamashita crafts a highly experimental novel comprised of prose, screenplay, quotes, analects, and even comics. And in an effort to give it a more comprehensible structure, the novel is divided into ten “novellas,” each corresponding to a year between 1968-1977. For research, Yamashita interviewed residents from the community, and their stories serve as seeds for the novel. Despite her efforts to shape the novel around fictionalized versions of these culled stories, the “fiction” elements end up coming across as secondary to the overwhelming amount of synopsized history and culture that fills the novel in the form of primary source-like documents. Thus, we have a “novel” in which the most compelling sections are the ones that feel least like a novel.

In each novella, we’re afforded glimpses into the lives of various protagonists. In an interview with Kandice Chuh for Discover Nikkei, Yamashita said she roughly structured the book so that each “novella” followed three central characters, with one typically serving the role of a mentor. Characters include the son of activists, a saxophonist, and a dancer, among others. But despite being modeled on actual people these colorful figures feel hastily formed, like participants in a dress rehearsal. The scenes they exist in feel ethereal and unanchored. There’s no sense of settling into moments and scenes and exploring characters and their connection to their settings. Instead, there is mostly dialogue, and not even very effective dialogue. The dialogue often is too heavy-handed or too inconsequential. Despite efforts to spotlight characters and how they negotiate trying circumstances, what takes precedence is an overriding narrative voice that attempts to bridge them all together.

More often than not, what hamstrings the conventional narrative threads is the intrusion of an overriding polemical voice that waxes and wanes about humanistic subjects such as philosophy, history, politics, film, art, and literature. The personal stories are undermined in part because when the novel does digress into the polemical mode, the most compelling writing actually arises. In several of these sections, the language is mesmerizing. There are passages that are so stylistically crisp and stirring that I initially reread them to deconstruct the source of their power:

“Do you command great armies and oversee great territories, or are you the fodder of stinking bodies sacrificed at the front? Do you rule by the will of God or the Mandate of Heaven, or do you grovel in the dirt for your subsistence and share your food with animals? Do you stand at the pinnacle of power, however precariously protecting, with the great umbrella of your powerful arms and silken sleeves, a hierarchy of hapless fools and ungrateful subjects, or are you a struggling peon of unfortunate birth? …The rise and fall of civilizations held in dusty monuments for thousands of years may suddenly be compressed in no doubt brilliant minds to explain the present moment.”

Yamashita is fluent in the language of so many disciplines and subcultures that no matter the subject being explored—whether it’s French poets, Marxist theory, or Imelda Marcos—the writing feels commanding.

The fluency and command Yamashita demonstrates, however, cannot mask the novel’s lack of narrative cohesion nor can it salvage characters that seem never to set themselves apart from the farrago of activity all around them.

But I suspect this lack of cohesion is due less to oversight and more to the progressive aspirations of the text. The novel (if it can even be called a novel) is so brimming with experimentation and historical substance that it ignores more traditional narrative preoccupations, like continuity, character development, and standard conflict resolution structure. But this doesn’t make it an inferior work; it just makes it different, in my opinion. That’s not to say the novel isn’t without it’s shortcomings, but with a certain mindset the shortcomings can be seen as consequences of a different kind of preoccupation, one geared less to achieving the typical objectives of a novel and more towards rendering a kind of spoken word historical epic that captures the zeitgeist of one of the most transformative periods in American history.

While reading I Hotel, I couldn’t help but call to mind Junot Diaz’s critically acclaimed novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Specifically, I thought of a statement Diaz made in an interview, in which he said he initally planned for Oscar Wao to be a multimedia extravaganza filled with comics, web site tie-ins, and other postmodern pyrotechnics. In the end, though, Diaz reigned in his ambitions in favor of a more formally conventional family saga that was distinguished by its unconventional voice. In I Hotel, Karen Tei Yamashita seemingly aims to realize the mega-project Diaz abandoned by creating a novel that combines various formats and syncretizes diverse voices in order to capture the complexities of a community caught up in the turbulent currents of history’s unfolding.

Whether she has created something compelling and worthwhile depends on your expectations going into the book; if you’re expecting clearly rendered stories that will resonate and stick with you, then I Hotel may not be for you, but if you’re looking for a head rush from reading about a host of interesting subjects in a variety of unconventional formats, then you’re probably in the right place.

• China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power, by Rob Gifford
• China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America, by James Kynge
• China, Inc.: How the Rise of the Next Superpower Challenges America and the World, Ted C. Fishman

But for whatever reason, I have my heart set on the Jacques. When I mentioned the twenty-seven holds to a friend of mine, we got into a discussion about to what extent all of this China anxiety is actually warranted. My friend dismissed most of the hype, saying instead that he has his money on another burgeoning Asian powerhouse—India. While there are also books devoted to enumerating the reasons India will ascend to the position of global badass supreme, in my experience India simply isn’t invoked as often as China when someone wants to trumpet the economic decline of America and the concomitant ascendency of an exotic foreign power.

It’s all about China, for some reason. Why?

Perhaps it was the Olympics. Since that opening ceremony of jaw-dropping proportions, China has been front and center when it comes to speculations about the future of the global economy. The 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing showcased China’s sheer manpower and cultural richness, with hundreds of Chinese citizens participating in elaborate choreographed dances and demonstrations.

But is the hype about China warranted? Is China really positioned to become the next global superpower, poised to surpass the United States in just a few years? Well, the question looks to be more debatable than most have suggested. From what I’ve read, I’ve found that James Fallows at The Atlantic has a pretty balanced understanding of China’s position. Recently, he cited three “sensible” articles on China:

• “There’s a New Red Scare: But is China Really So Scary?” by Steven Mufson and John Pomfret at the Washington Post.
• “What the PBOC Cannot Do With Its Reserves,” by Michael Pettis on the website, China Financial Markets.
• “A Land Without Google,” by Jane Qiu at Nature.com.

According to the Pettis piece, a recent op-ed by Paul Krugman of the New York Times, and a recent editorial by the New York Times, China has been artificially deflating the value of their currency, the renminbi. Doing so keeps China strong economically (or, at least, maintains the appearance of strength) because it stimulates exports. Weaker renminbi means cheaper manufactured goods, which means more exports, which means more income from exports for Chinese companies.

Whereas the Qiu and Pettis articles focus on very specific socioeconomic threads, the Mufson/Pomfret piece provides a broader analysis of the general attitudes towards the PRC. Here are just a few of the more interesting snippets from the Mufson/Pomfret:

“But the notion that China poses an imminent threat to all aspects of American life reveals more about us than it does about China and its capabilities. The enthusiasm with which our politicians and pundits manufacture Chinese straw men points more to unease at home than to success inside the Great Wall.” (Quote from Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations)

“This is not to say that China isn’t doing many things right or that we couldn’t learn a thing or two from our Chinese friends. But in large part, politicians, activists and commentators push the new Red Scare to advance particular agendas in Washington. If you want to promote clean energy and get the government to invest in this sector, what better way to frame the issue than as a contest against the Chinese and call it the “new Sputnik”? Want to resuscitate the F-22 fighter jet? No better country than China to invoke as the menace of the future.”

If we take what Mufson’s saying to be true, then clearly there’s a lot of manipulative hype floating around about China. And if we consider Krugman, Pettis, and Mufson/Pomfret’s perspectives together, we see a China who may be inviting some of this false hype.

What does this fear mongering and misrepresentation mean for Asian American literature? Well, it brings up questions of perception, expectation and obligation. Most Asian American writers can probably attest to the fact that, very often, Western audiences find it difficult to process works by Asian Americans independently from their country of origin. With China and its recent events, there is the growing danger that Western audiences will misstep when processing works by Chinese Americans because Westerners’ perceptions of Chinese Americans will largely be extensions of their perhaps misguided perceptions of China the country.

The Chinese American experience in America is ripe with material, of course, and it’s not necessary to flock to and circle around China’s economic issue, even though it is so front-and-center in the media. But then the question becomes: how do you maintain a conversation separate from a subject that’s become so prominent? Are you dooming yourself to irrelevance by ignoring the elephant in the room? Perhaps not. Perhaps by deliberately sidestepping the issue, you’re doing what needs to be done: avoiding the obvious topic in favor of advancing a deeper kind of conversation about the Asian American experience–one that pushes beyond the headline makers.

I would suggest that when we—Americans—talk about China, we’re not just talking about a rising economic superpower, we’re also talking about a whole slew of cultural and ideological assumptions and juxtapositions that may be founded upon false or distorted premises. And the fallout may now be influencing experiences outside of China. In the end, it’s not just a conversation about the renimbi or the future economic landscape but also a conversation about perceptions of otherness, both cultural and ideological, getting appropriated to advance the agendas of a group.

Still, the conversation is an ongoing one, and it’s open for debate.

I Love Yous Are for White People: A Memoir by Lac Su | Harper Collins 2009 | $14.99

Let me begin with this disclaimer: I don’t usually read Asian immigrant memoirs. At least, not until very recently. This particular book came to my attention while I was randomly perusing some Asian American culture blogs, where it had received some attention, in part I’m assuming, because of its provocative title. The reason I wanted to put out this disclaimer up front is because, unlike a lot of other reviews for this book available on the web, this one is not written with an academic background in ethnic studies or extensive experience with the canon of the Asian American memoir. So, what can my review offer? Well, as the child of Asian immigrants who had never read Asian immigrant memoirs until very recently, I found the experience of reading this particular memoir and studying the blogosphere’s response to it to be interesting because of the questions it raised for me as an ethnic person in contemporary America who occasionally writes things for public consumption (Exhibit A: this blog post). So, in addition to sharing my thoughts on the book, I’m going to share some thoughts on the responses it has elicited, which I have found to be equally interesting.

First off, a quick rundown of the book and its author.  I Love Yous Are for White People is by Lac Su, a young Vietnamese immigrant who, as a child, escaped South Vietnam with his family in 1979 and immigrated to America. The memoir begins with a harrowing boat dock escape then explores Su’s experience of growing up in Los Angeles in a series of chapters that read like individual essays. As noted by many reviewers, the book touches upon themes of filial piety, identity negotiation, and the pains of cultural transition. Also noted by many reviewers: what carries the memoir is Su’s voice. Even though a lot of the anecdotes feel either far-fetched (at one point, he blows balloons out of discarded condoms found in the hallway of his family’s apartment building) or too familiar (there’s a scene in a restaurant where his father doesn’t understand how food stamps work), I remained engaged because Su narrated these moments with self-deprecation and earnestness. It is hard not to like a guy who constantly notes how his father calls him “Big Head”—evidently the translation of a Vietnamese “term of endearment.”

While there were a lot of interesting and amusing moments in the memoir, of particular interest to me was the prevalence of violence throughout. I got the impression that for Su and his family, violence was encoded in their family’s story from the get-go. From the boat-dock escape amidst machine gun fire at the beginning, to the brushes with street violence sprinkled throughout, Su’s family just couldn’t get a break. For me, the most riveting scene in the book was a scene of random violence in which street thugs attack Su’s father while he tries to bike to work; the ostensible leader of the gang pins Su’s father on the ground and attempts to shove a screwdriver into his throat (Su’s father avoids serious harm by turning his head to the side in the nick of time). In addition to depictions of random violence like this, there are countless scenes of domestic violence in which Su’s volatile and overbearing father punches, whips, slaps, or uppercuts everything and everyone in sight, including his wife and children. Then, in the latter half of the memoir, Su recounts incidents of gang violence in which he engages in hand-to-hand combat with other local street toughs.  Cumulatively, it comes across as one big olio of dominance rituals and tribalism.

So why did I find the violence so interesting? Well, a simple explanation is just that violence, when so frankly depicted, is often very compelling. Those of you who have read Blood Meridian (Vintage Books, 1985) by Cormac McCarthy and enjoyed it can probably speak to the dark poetry of violence. Then, there is Anne Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (Little, Brown, 2002), which has returned to prominence recently because of Peter Jackson’s film adaption (for those who aren’t familiar, the book and movie are about a fourteen-year-old girl who is raped, murdered and dismembered). Sebold has been quoted as saying she was motivated to write about violence because she doesn’t think violence is unusual; she feels it is just a part of life. Furthermore, she believes we get in trouble when we separate people who’ve experienced it from those who haven’t. And I would have to agree with her; to a lot of people, violence exists in the realm of “otherness,” a place distant and separate from the life they live. This is germane to Lac Su’s memoir because the palpable violence in Su’s stories resonated with me on a personal level, but I’m guessing it didn’t have that same effect with everyone. Perhaps its because I’m just another American who grew up inundated with images of violence via television and movies, or perhaps the specific depictions of violence in the memoir, which ranged from politically geared violence to not-so-random urban violence, conformed to a pattern that can be found in the experience of many Southeast Asian immigrants. Let’s face it, the wars of Indochina ended up encoding violence into the history of countless immigrant families. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I am an aficionado of politically geared violence or urban violence, but I would say that both are ineluctable aspects of my family’s history and reality. Why does this matter? Well, I think the depiction of violence in art, when done well, can be a double-edged sword: you harness the emotional force that images of violence are imbued with in order to elucidate some deeper truth, but you also cannot help but reduce that violence to an artistic substance, a kind of narrative ingredient.

So, here is where the other reviews of this book come in. Several of these blurbs noted that it covered familiar territory with its thematic combination of filial piety, cultural identity, and urban gang violence. While I can understand the resistance towards these worn-out tropes, I think it’s slightly shortsighted to consider this memoir solely as another entry into the slate of memoirs that deal with these tropes. But that isn’t to say that this memoir is unique. Perhaps it isn’t; perhaps if I surveyed the Asian immigrant memoir canon, I’d find several others that explore these same tropes with equal or better skill. What I’m trying to say is if urban violence and the Southeast Asian immigrant story have become such familiar bedfellows, then perhaps that’s the conversation we should be having around books like this one. Going back to Anne Sebold and her views on violence, I think it’s when we classify violence as an element of otherness, or reduce it to a narrative element, that we run the risk of sidestepping fruitful discussions that can potentially bring to the fore systemic issues underlying contemporary institutions and cultures. Perhaps there are geopolitical patterns and socioeconomic roadmaps in place that breed these heritages of violence. Not to get too macro, but I think this topic of discussion is particularly relevant to today’s international climate, considering the state of current U.S. foreign affairs: we have a war in Iraq, a war in Afghanistan, and a war brewing in Iran. Islamic extremism has become a permanent fixture in news cycles, and the accepted liberal left-wing interpretation appears to be that terrorist organizations point to American political violence abroad when entreating young men to join up. While I admit that I have probably made some large mental leaps by going from this memoir by a Vietnamese American male to meditations on the current conditions of U.S. foreign affairs (see my previous blog post for a similar rant), when reading a memoir like this one (which opens with a historically and politically saturated scene and then explores an ethnic family’s roadmap through America), I don’t think it’s necessarily beyond the pale to consider how the geopolitical actions of today shape the cultures of tomorrow. If nothing else, I appreciated that Lac Su’s memoir prompted me to make these connections and consider these questions.

Furthermore, among contemporary critics, there is also some resistance brewing towards literary work by Asians that perpetuate the formula of people of color as victims. The sentiment appears to be that using the person of color/victim pairing in order to deploy emotional bombs or to fulfill sociopolitical agendas is a well-worn approach and should be eschewed for the sake of progress. While I do agree that recycling such a familiar formula can be tiresome and counterproductive, I think the danger in this shift is that it would potentially shift the discussion along a class axis, as opposed to merely shifting it on a thematic axis. I don’t have any hard figures or data, but I have the sense that many disadvantaged people of color in America today feel like victims in some way or another, and that manifests in the literature they produce. However, perhaps the critical resistance is more against the imposed images of victimization, i.e. those produced by a white person (see: David Brooks’ op-ed on Avatar and “The Messiah Complex“) that are then adopted and perpetuated by the artists of the culture upon which the images have been imposed. Perhaps the sentiment is that in order for people of color to resist the imposed role of “the victim,” they must produce art that does not self-identify them as victims. Tying this back to the memoir: I found I Love Yous Are for White People and the critical conversation around it to be interesting because I think Su, through this memoir, made real attempts to represent himself not just as a Vietnamese immigrant male operating according to an imposed or predetermined character sketch, but also as an individual with a distinct personality that can be discerned amidst the familiar tropes and role-plays of Asian American literature. And for that reason, I, as well as many other reviewers, appreciated Su and his efforts as a storyteller.

P.S. This memoir, for a variety of reasons, reminded me of Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny’s documentary A.K.A. Don Bonus,which is also about a young Southeast Asian immigrant teenager trying to navigate his way through school and family life. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in stories of this ilk.

What is it like to be a military interpreter? I wondered. Well, I did a quick Google search and came across the book, The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual, and came across a section on interpreters that illuminated for me what it must be like for these individuals. For example, interpreters are expected “not to interject their personality, ideas, or questions” and always “[mirror] the speaker’s tone and personality.” And American military operatives are instructed to “position [the] interpreter by their side (or a step back). This keeps the subject or target audience from shifting their attention or fixating on the interpreter rather than on the leader.” Of course, this is all reasonable and for the sake of effectiveness, but at the same time, it seems lamentable that a figure with field experience among natives and among American troops would assume such a secondary position. Which brings up questions about why native interpreters choose to work with Americans in the first place. I suspect economics are involved, but perhaps there’s more. Undoubtedly, most interpreters must, at some point, deal with questions of loyalty, identity, and legitimacy. While the The U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual instructs American military personnel to take care of their interpreters, there’s also a warning to be cautious around interpreters, in case their loyalties lie elsewhere. Moreover, in terms of identity, interpreters are tasked with an interesting set of objectives, in that they are expected to understand the nuances of not one, but two languages, and be cognizant of culturally specific mannerisms. And this is all in addition to being able to adopt many of the qualities and characteristics of the speakers they are interpreting. With these kinds of responsibilities, interpreters operate in a provocative nexus point between native Afghans and American forces.

From a literary perspective, the theme of interpretation is a familiar one in the Asian American literary canon. Probably the most recognizable is Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies, which explores, through a series of short stories, the pains of assimilation that come along with being a Bengali American. Then, there’s Chang-Rae Lee’s novel Native Speaker, which explores questions of identity and loyalty through a story about an industrial spy. In both works there’s an underlying sense of otherness and an overriding preoccupation with dual identity. And like the Afghan military interpreters, characters in these works often operate in nexus points that require them to adopt the qualities and characteristics of two abutting cultures.

Tying this back to counterinsurgency and the war in Afghanistan, I feel the figure of the military interpreter is a worthwhile entry point to comprehending a counterinsurgency war’s ramifications on culture and identity because the interpreter’s identity touches on questions of legitimacy, exploitation, loyalty, and cultural dissonance—questions that very often are at the heart of “ethnic literature.” So, what’s the point of this observation? Well, even without considering the echoes of Vietnam in America’s counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, I think the Afghan war compels anyone interested in diaspora literature to consider the patterns of American warfare in the twentieth century with respect to cultural invidiousness and its impact on identity, and how these patterns inform diaspora literature’s preoccupations. Because the humanist bent of counterinsurgency in this present war, I believe, has the potential to confer upon us deeper understanding of the implications of modern warfare. And furthermore, I believe the diaspora experience has the potential to inform our understanding of why counterinsurgency rarely ever works, and why it may not work in Afghanistan. Perhaps, in the end, the failure of counterinsurgency lies in the inherent paradox of a humanist’s war.