ABSTRACT
At the end of Karen T. Yamashita’s I Hotel, the communal voice of “we the immigrants from the Old and New Worlds” (2010, 588)1 recalls the story of San Francisco. As a frontier town, San Francisco started with a couple of basic props: “a trading post and a saloon with a second oor of lodging rooms” (589). In time, a jail was erected, the trading post became a dry goods store and the saloon morphed into a restaurant and a hotel. That, we are told, was the basic town, plus a church and a school, and possibly a couple of professionals such as a doctor and a lawyer. But, the voice cautions, “when we took everything away and thought only about the second oor of lodging rooms, we remembered that people have always come from distances and had to be accommodated, given shelter and a bed, and what we used to call board” (589). Complicate and multiply this pattern and you get a city that gravitated around lodgings. “City life and hotel life were inextricably connected” (589), the voice concludes. Not that San Francisco was an exception. Hostels and inns in Mesopotamia date back to 2000 BC, and in Crete there is evidence of a hostel erected around 1500 BC. In fact, regulated commercial hospitality appears in the Code of Hammurabi (O’Gorman 2010, 4-6).2 There were rewards to look forward to, as Khety rhapsodized, and respect for the poor pleased the “divine assembly.”
