Essay On I Hotel By Karen Yamashita

Karen Yamashita is a testament to the idea that Asian America is a political movement, not a racial identifier. Yamashita’s novel, I-Hotel, tells the story of the Asian American community during the 1960s and 70s in California by weaving one story throughout ten seemingly separate novellas, with each one representing a room in a hotel. In I-Hotel, Yamashita champions magical realism, a literary style when otherworldly events are written as fact. By writing I-Hotel in this style, Yamashita provides the reader with a firmer understanding of real-life events these magical depictions often mirror. In her genre-defying fictional novel, I-Hotel, scholar and professor Karen Tei Yamashita warps illusion and reality in most of her ten novellas. Much

Iron Ox wants to bring his mother to his hideout of outlaws, and Timely Rain grants his request on three conditions: he must leave his axes and mustn’t drink wine and travel alone. The bandit agrees, sets out, and encounters a man pretending to be himself. Iron Ox spares the man, but kills him once he realizes he lied about having a poor mother. On the journey, back Iron Ox’s mother complains she is thirsty, but he realizes fetching water won’t be an easy task, “Then after he rips it [a stone incense urn] out, he’s got a five-hundred-pound urn to drag to the stream to fill with water, and by the time he gets it filled, he’s got a thousand-pound urn to drag back to Ma” (Yamashita 226). Stating that Iron Ox can reasonably carry a 1,000-pound urn is a prime example of how Yamashita uses magical realism to muddle the reader’s sense of reality. It is physically impossible for any human to carry 1,000 pounds, but Iron can simply because he is “strong and dumb.” Describing fantastical feats as reality is the foundation of magical realism, and Yamashita does exactly that throughout

We can put I-Hotel in discussion with Steven G. Yaos’ academic journal, “Foreign Accents: Chinese American Verse from Exclusion to Postethnicity,” because Yamashita’s book is a prime example of the resistance Yao so passionately describes:

“Nevertheless, precisely because these older poetic forms still enjoyed considerable prestige at the time, their use by the Angel Island poets constitutes a form of cultural resistance to the duress of immigration to and subsequent incarceration in America, a defensive response to their confrontation with the ideological landscape of the United States and its attendant legal, bureaucratic, and penal machinery” (Yao 11).

Yamashita’s book is a testament to art and literature; Yamashita skilfully executes each story with a unique medium in each novella. By flexing the breadth and mastery of her writing style and knowledge, I-Hotel is the pinnacle of the product of sophisticated labor because it contains poetry, short and long-form prose, and more abstract versions of writing. I-Hotel is a testament to Asian American literature because it “appropriates” high forms of literacy to immortalize the lived experiences of the AAPI community, similar to how Yao explains the Chinese poets’ collective resistance. Yamashita transcends