The 1906 San Francisco earthquake had destroyed many records, and in the absence of these documents, the officers resorted to questioning the immigrants and their alleged families on the details of their relationships. They asked about family trees, descriptions of home villages, and even the material of the living room floor. Discrepancies in the versions meant deportation or a long wait on the island for an appeal hearing. Most Chinese stayed on the island for two or three weeks, but some waited months and even years for their appeals.

In this limbo, some detainees wrote poems on the barrack walls. Many scribbled on the wood in ink, but some outlined the fluid strokes of the Chinese characters on the surface and then carved the words into the wood. Most of the poems were unsigned, but some inscribed surnames or hometowns. Most of the poems expressed the melancholy of imprisonment on the island. They spoke of homesickness, stalled dreams, anxious futures, and fears of disappointing the family. In many of them, the cold and fog of the bay heighten the isolation of the island. Some poems called for revenge, some affirmed a determination to succeed. Some compared the plight of the detainees to Napoleon’s exile.

Most of the poems were written in the style of classical Chinese poetry. The majority have seven characters to a line, each poem either four or eight lines. A few poems follow strict rhythmic and tonal conventions, some were written in couplets, and many incorporated the Cantonese vernacular. (Most of the immigrants came from the Canton province in southern China.) In such a compressed form, the language is lyrical and spare. These poems filled the barrack walls.

The Chinese language was the bane of my school years. In Singapore, where I grew up, each student is required to learn their mother tongue as a second language. This policy is meant to inculcate us in our cultures and traditions, which is noble in spirit and a departure from actual practice. In the classroom, instead of discussing literature or engaging in spirited debates, we learned the language as a collection of phrases to be memorized. We treated the language as a static body of knowledge, like the compounds of organic chemistry, rather than as a form of speech and a means of conveying ideas, meanings, and emotions. Though I spoke some Chinese at home, the language has always felt abstract to me, an isolated subject rather than a part of my identity.

As a child, I also heard in the words tradition and heritage a plot to keep me in my place, dutiful and compliant. Unlike the selfish and hedonistic West, we who are steeped in our Chinese traditions were supposedly decent people who respected authority. In particular, we were to keep our bodies under control, straitjacketed into the trappings of propriety. The body, I now know, is the source of speech, and speech is the foundations of language. “Censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time,” Hélène Cixous wrote, and in these words I saw the condition of my childhood: unable to speak. I inhabited instead the stories that others wrote for me. Fairly or not, I associated the Chinese culture with this silence, and when I came to America at nineteen, I was glad to be freed of the language.

When I came to Angel Island I had been in America for seven years, the first three as a student in the Midwest and the last four working in Denver. In Denver I had begun to write. I write largely about the landscapes of the American West and the ways these places shape our beliefs, and in the Angel Island poems I saw answers to the questions I had been asking about landscape, language, and borders. At that time I was also on a work visa I had obtained through a lottery process. The year I applied, there were three times more applications than available visas and in the absence of a political will to change the quota, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services held a lottery to determine which petitions they would review. I won the lottery, but I also knew that my future was determined on such arbitrary grounds.

On Angel Island, I visited a room in the men’s barracks that had been converted into a museum. After decades of exposure and neglect, most of these poems had already faded into the wood, though the crevices occasionally yielded the shape of a Chinese character. Most of the words looked familiar to me but I could not pronounce them. As I walked along the yellowing walls I noticed two poems still legible in their entirety. I looked at the inscriptions with a mix of terror and familiarity: I had an inkling of what they said, even though I could barely read the words. I also recognized the way I dissociated around the Chinese language. And most strangely I felt the rhythms, intonations, and lyricism of the poems, reverberations that began deep in my body.

My friend Lin Lin who came with me grew up in Beijing and had then just received her American citizenship. She read a poem aloud to me in Mandarin, the dialect of the capital and the official language we learned in school. As she enunciated each word, I began to recognize the images and meanings, the wind and night and fog, in the poem. I felt the loneliness of the landscape and the anxiety of detention, but I could not process these emotions. I pressed a button on the signboard below the poem, and a disembodied voice recited it in Cantonese. Cantonese I know not at all, and in the dialect, the words sounded strange to my ears and the images became abstract again.

The signboard also had an English translation of the poem. The two languages have different sentence structures and modes of making meaning. In translation, much of the form, rhythm, and the intense compression are lost, but in this version I could finally read the poem, which begins:

In the quiet of the night, I heard, faintly, the whistling of wind.

The forms and shadows saddened me; upon seeing the landscape, I

composed a poem.

The floating clouds, the fog, darken the sky.

Angel Island, like its neighboring Alcatraz, was a prison by landscape. The San Francisco Bay fortified the walls and the fog intensified the isolation. In this prison, the detainees wrote these poems in the boredom, dread, and uncertainty of their confinement, not knowing if their families would remember the number of steps to the front door or the location of the rice bin in the house. In Island, a collection of poems, translations, and oral histories by Him Mark Lai, Genny Lim, and Judy Yung, all children of Angel Island detainees, the authors write that they found it hard to get the former detainees to talk about their experiences. Some had a lingering fear of retribution, but many did not want to relive the shame and humiliation of their imprisonment. They would rather have kept silent.

In this light, the anonymity of the barrack walls gave the detainees a space to voice a history that would otherwise not be told. As I looked at the poems on the walls, I wished I knew the language better. Despite this linguistic border, I saw in the verses an indomitable spirit in the face of adversity. In writing poetry the detainees spoke in the face of silence, drawing out a language rooted in bodies that cannot cross the San Francisco Bay.

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The National Book Awards will be announced on Wednesday, November 17. The list of fiction finalists this year snubs a number of notable titles—including Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom—and includes two novels from small, independent publishers. One of these is Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel, from Coffee House Press, a challenging entry that didn’t get any great attention when it was released last spring. But the NBA nod is well deserved: I Hotel is at least as ambitious as any other novel published in 2010. Yamashita spent a decade researching this book, which is a sprawling archive of historical detail bound together by an idiosyncratic and expansive imagination

For all its density, I Hotel focuses on a brief historical moment, San Francisco’s Yellow Power movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Before there were “Asian Americans” in the Bay Area, there were the descendants of Chinese, Filipino, and Japanese immigrants who shared little, culturally or politically, other than the burden of racist stereotypes: Charlie Chan, coolies and field hands, jade dragons and perfumed tigers, warrior hordes that charge into battle screaming “AIIIEEEEE!!” Yamashita’s characters are the artists, students, and revolutionaries who struggle against these stereotypes, sometimes individually and sometimes collaboratively, during one transformative decade.

A lot of collective action takes place in the International Hotel itself, a home for Chinese and Filipino bachelors. The ground floor serves as community center, performance space, and hideout for many of Yamashita’s protagonists, and the hotel shows up as the single recurrent landmark in this novel’s numerous narrative threads. At first just a homely backdrop, the I-Hotel takes on special significance when developers threaten demolition. The plot to save the hotel calls everyone home. One migrant farmworker abandons a strike with César Chávez to return to San Francisco. “This my grass roots,” he says of the fields. “I-Hotel my brick roots.”

Though an important community symbol, the crumbling I-Hotel isn’t sturdy enough architecture to comfortably house Yamashita’s scattered, multi-perspective pastiche of a novel all by itself. I Hotel is made up of ten separate novellas that don’t so much interlock as lean against one another. Few characters survive from one novella to the next—many are killed off, others drift away. Each novella employs a vast array of textual modes and formats, including poems, comics, myths, plays, recipes, CIA dossiers, movie transcripts, Confucian Analects, Marxist dialectics, and countless epigraphs plucked from the speeches of Malcolm X and Imelda Marcos, the writings of Eldridge Cleaver and Mao Tse-Tung, and the lyrics of Diana Ross.

Karen Tei Yamashita

The wealth of allusion sometimes makes this unabashedly postmodernist novel seem more curated than plotted, as though Yamashita wanted patrons to come to their own conclusions as they wander from room to room. She interrupts the story with political and literary theory or other historical curios. Each novella begins with the main characters, relevant historical moments, and even central themes neatly listed in the diagrammed squares of an unfolded origami box: The first novella begins in 1968, centers around Third World Liberation Front strikes, and deals with issues of “narrative voices.” The second novella begins in 1969, is concerned with “mind/surveillance/cinema verité,” etc. At times I Hotel reads like a love letter to avant-garde fiction of the 1970s, composed in a university library under the influence of huge doses of Adderall.

Thankfully, Yamashita’s wit, style, and skill as a storyteller animate all this PoMo bric-a-brac. What could have been merely a dizzying academic exercise becomes instead a vivid portrait of revolutionary San Francisco. Yamashita is a master of the vignette, and her many set-pieces taken together articulate the way a common cause can flourish even on the flimsiest scraps of shared experience.

In one chapter, a Chinese professor and a Filipino cook strike up conversation at a noodle house late at night. Both are foodies, and they decide to write a cookbook together based on an archetypal East Asian myth of two lovers who meet every summer and winter solstice. In the myth, the lovers spend the full day of each solstice in each other’s arms and then complete their tryst by serving each other a multi-course feast fit for gods. The cook philosophizes:

This is the great myth of the Asian peoples. How can the West compare? All they got is the poison apple… Think about it. Innocence to knowledge. Good to evil. And then they get to have sex. What kind of screwed up thinking is that?

The professor agrees, but for the sake of including fall and spring seasonal dishes in their cookbook, he wonders if maybe they can have the couple meet four times a year in their version of the myth. “O.K.” replies the cook. “We can change the story. Why not?”

The same call to revise the story recurs throughout I Hotel. Some facts of this provisional Asian American identity are as material as a steaming bowl of noodles: San Francisco, Angel Island, immigration laws, a dilapidated hotel on the border of Chinatown. But the stories that rise out of these facts are up to the teller, and are always acts of imagination.

Reimagining history is Yamashita’s aim, as she manages to brilliantly envision and celebrate her subject. Her scrupulous research can occasionally overwhelm, but ultimately I Hotel succeeds as a living, breathing memorial of a historical novel, as if to make good on an early scene in which an aging woman scolds her writer nephew: “Don’t let us down, especially after we’re dead.”

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