Karen Yamashita - I Hotel

The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up.

— Paul Valéry

4.1 It was not Monsieur Teste but a poem by Valéry that aroused an awakening in the spirit heart of the young poet. Paul Lin wrote enthusiastically to his mentor Chen Wen-guang at his address in Paris. He did not think it was a mere coincidence, that is, the poem’s title, “Le Cimetière Marin.” He knew himself to be in the same hills of California’s Marin County, in a beautiful cemetery of books overlooking the salt-breathing potency, that fresh exhalation of the sea.

4.2 The poet commanded: The wind is rising . . . We must try to live! / The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave / Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking / Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages! Where, Paul asked, in France was le Cimetière Marin? Would Chen be visiting?

4.3 In Paris Chen felt a strange foreboding, as if Monsieur Valéry’s ghost lurked at his sleeve, even as the memory of Paul’s soft features floated over the flickering sunlight tracing the scaled surface of the Seine. The teacher embraced the exuberance of his young and awakening apprentice. “Yes, perhaps,” he replied. Valéry was born in the port of Sète on the Mediterranean. He had planned anyway a trip to Provence to visit James Baldwin in the coastal village of Saint-Paul de Vence.

4.4 Edmund rolled his eyes but smiled. He asked: “How is it that our teacher knows everyone?” Scanning the shelves for Chen’s American collection, they found a copy of Giovanni’s Room signed by Baldwin: To my dear friend Wen-guang. James. Those who walk in the same spheres enjoy the coincidence of friendship.

Mind, like parachute, only function when open.

—Charlie Chan

5.1 Chen collected postcards of predictable sites (the Eiffel Tower) and obscure significance (a bald woman), stood in what he thought to be significant locations, and penned cryptic aphorisms to the boys at home. On the Rue de Fleurus, outside of Gertrude Stein’s flat, he wrote to Yat Min in scripted Chinese characters: “ It is wonderful how a handwriting which is illegible can be read, oh yes it can .” So said Gertrude Stein.

5.2 To Paul he wrote in blocky English: “There ain’t any answer, there ain’t going to be an answer, there never has been an answer, that’s the answer .” Gertrude Stein

5.3 The young poet wrote to his long-distance mentor: I am collecting your postcards (please send more) along with my own reflections and jottings, nonsense, and whatnot too, in a journal I have named Analecta. I am adding analecta to it every day. For example, Valéry writes in his analecta: “Reality can only express itself with absurdity.”

5.4 P.S. I met Jack Sung, as you suggested. He hangs out at Il Piccolo with some others. Edmund hangs out at Il Piccolo too, but for other reasons. Edmund calls Sung and his bunch “the Poetry Boys Club.” We meet, then head out like a bunch of gangsters, rummaging around used book stores, looking for any discarded book by an Oriental. So far: Sui Sin Far and Onoto Watanna. Youth has its purposes.

Politics is the art of preventing people from taking part in affairs that properly concern them.

— Paul Valéry

6.1 Edmund Lee played tricks with the weekly Chinatown newspaper, published bilingually—English running left to right on one side, Chinese running right to left on the other. On the Chinese side, the Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association, aka Six Companies, promoted the Miss Chinatown USA Pageant with a large spread and photograph of the charming Carole Yung, Miss Year of the Rooster Chinatown, crowned and smiling nervously with a live rooster in her arms, more than ready to turn over her crown, sash, and animal on February 8 at the Masonic Temple at 1111 California Street at eight p.m. to the new Miss Year of the Dog Chinatown. Above the Chinese article about someone voted the most beautiful Chinese girl in the USA, Edmund set the large headline in bold type: GALILEO STUDENTS WALK OUT!

6.2 Two hundred impetuous Galileo High School students walked out on February 5 in a demonstration to make Chinese New Year an official U.S. holiday. As they say, fat chance. Could it be that the lovely Carole Yung, like an impertinent homecoming queen with her crowned princesses in tow, also walked out? Beauty may sometimes be used for political gain.

At times I think, and at times I am.

— Paul Valéry

7.1 Paul Lin signed up for Jack Sung’s creative writing workshop at SF State. The other students in the workshop were confused by Paul’s work. They said: We want to know what it is. What’s this cryptic shit about? Sung said: Leave him alone. He’s working it out. That was how Paul knew he had arrived in the Poetry Boys Club. The reasons for membership were not always explained.

As for the good man: what he wishes to achieve for himself, he helps others to achieve; what he wishes to obtain for himself, he enables others to obtain—the ability to simply take one’s own aspirations as a guide is the recipe for goodness.

— Confucius (6.30)

8.1 In the same year, Edmund Lee investigated and wrote articles about the infamous Wah Ching Chinatown gang and their exploding violence. His first article was about Glen Fong, who ended his short nineteen years of life shot and killed by a rival tong on Jackson Street at one in the morning. In another few months Teddy Ta, twenty-one, was stabbed, and by the end of the year Larry Miyata, sixteen, and Raymond Leong, eighteen, were also shot and killed. Their blood smeared the sidewalks of the street the Chinese affectionately call Dupont Guy.

8.2 Edmund also wrote the obituary for Sai Gin Lew, PFC, born September 20, 1949, died in Vietnam December 5, 1970.

8.3 Edmund hung around the Il Piccolo coffee house, where he met the lost Chinatown kids he recognized to be like himself: fresh off the boat but with nothing to show for it, and no pop to bless their arrival in America with a break-your-legs warning. To see oneself in another is to learn both fate and possibility.

8.4 March Eu Fong, our crowned assemblywoman, and her political entourage visited our forbidden city—labyrinth of tourism, flaming woks, gambling dens, herb and curio shops. Something had to be done. High commissioner Fong asked who among her constituents had the talent to write. It was thus that Edmund volunteered to write the proposal to the federal department of Heath, Education, and Welfare. By the end of the Year of the Dog, to Edmund’s great astonishment, the government granted one hundred thousand dollars in funding to open a Chinatown Youth Service Center. Writing can be lucrative.

Ancient ancestor once say, “Words cannot cook rice.”

— Charlie Chan

9.1 Someone said, “Edmund Lee, you wrote the proposal, now you better make it work for us. You are now the director of the Chinatown Youth Service Center, with offices in the old Hungry i in the I-Hotel.” What was the responsibility of the director of the Chinatown Youth Service Center? As Edmund Lee himself had proposed, he should get jobs for the Chinatown youths. Otherwise they were going to spend their time on the streets making trouble and killing each other.

9.2 Down the street and across from Portsmouth Square, in the heart of Chinatown, the Holiday Inn was inaugurated with twenty-seven floors and 565 rooms, but there were no Chinese working there. Edmund went as the director of the CYSC, but who was he, a young skinny student with horn-rimmed glasses and some federal funding? “We are sorry,” they said, “no qualified Chinese have applied.” A hotel with a name like Holiday can only be a business, not a charity.