House of Memory

This essay explores how Yamashita so fashions the ten hotel-novellas in her largest work, I Hotel, as to mirror the many-roomed historic San Francisco original with its old-time Filipino and Japanese worker population and whose demolition became a prime focus for the birth of 1960s Asian American radicalism. The hotel serves as both fact and image for the memory of a history from the 1882 Immigration Act to Order 9066 and wartime internment, and from West Coast labor history to US Asian student radicalism in the era of the Vietnam War. The one reflexively is carried in the other, text and history.