1974: I-Migrant

The seventh novella in the National Book Award Finalist I Hotel, following San Francisco’s Asian-American community through the civil rights era. 

 Centered around the International Hotel, a historic low-income residence in San Francisco’s Chinatown, the ten novellas of Karen Tei Yamashita’s epic are each devoted to a single year in one of America’s most transformative decades. This multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins a kaleidoscopic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights, all played out among Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs. 

In 1974: I-Migrant Hotel, the International has a new landlord—a multinational corporation based in Hong Kong—and the residents are more than a little uneasy about what this means for them. It’s the Year of the Tiger, and while Felix and Macario build a retirement home for Filipino farm workers down in Delano, they also study the situation back in Chinatown.