The heat wave broke hard overnight, leaving unrecognizably delightful conditions today–cool, overcast, and even a little misty. Felt a little like Portland.
The remainder of the MoPac was similar to what preceded it, and before I knew it I was already transitioning into Lincoln sprawl, shifting over to other pedestrian tracks. I had one stop in mind, shortly before my hotel–the National Roller Skating Museum. Not because I have any interest in roller skating, mind you; I never cultivated the art. It’s just the kind of whimsical place I love to hit on this walk, telling a very particular story of a niche passion. I didn’t appreciate quite how early the roller skate emerged–1743–nor was I familiar with its popularity spikes in the late 1800s and post-WWII boom period. I froze in front of a video showing a couple figure skating, on ice, in roller skates. Humanity really is limitless.
After that, I popped over to see William Jennings Bryan’s house. The Buffalo Bills of presidential candidates, I first learned about Bryan when I visited the Rhea County Court House, where the Scopes Monkey Trial occurred, as a kid. Just a few years later, I was the judge in a performance of Inherit the Wind, watching the fictionalized Bryan take it on the chin in the ultimate Pyrrhic Victory. So, I figured I owed him a visit, even if his house today–lovely as it is–has been consumed by the surrounding hospital complex. It seems oddly appropriate that science has steadily eroded his estate, down to the very foundation.
Ultimately, though, today was all about checking into a hotel room, showering, and lounging. Good lord, have I been eager to be clean and cool once more, and that remained unchanged even with more temperate conditions. Nonetheless, I headed back downstairs to the lobby afterward, as it sometimes seems easier to focus and write in a public space. On this occasion, the lobby also gifted me two subjects to write about.
First, I fell into a conversation with Evan, who was waiting to pick up a family member. He was immediately interested in what I was doing, noting that he was really motivated to learn how to hike, because things are likely to “get crazy” in the next few years. “What do you mean, ‘get crazy’?” “Well,” he replied, “just look at the market. Anything can happen. I heard they might choose to shut off electricity.” I sat dumbstruck for a second, and then asked, “why would they do that?” He didn’t have an answer; he just heard the rumor, and it seemed credible enough. He has been primed to expect catastrophe, and yet his response is halfhearted magical thinking–like hiking his way through tyranny.
“That’s why I’m proud to have never voted in an election,” he suddenly interjects. “It’s like South Park said, we have a Turd Sandwich and a Giant Douche, and they’re all just in the pockets of the people who pay their way.” I affirm that it’s easy to be disappointed that, out of all the people in this country, we consistently get two finalists for the presidency who can feel so underwhelming, especially when–not so long ago–both were in or approaching their 80s. I see where that cynicism comes from. “We just keep getting swung between communism and Nazism,” he replies, “and I guess I’m just in the radical middle.” “Don’t you think,” I ask, that it’s possible to believe first that both candidates are flawed, self-aggrandizing, and beholden to larger interest groups, and second that one might still be more interested in attending to the common good than the other?” He acknowledged that this is probably true.
But then we were right back to the magical thinking. “I keep thinking about finding a few people who want to start something different, organic farming, but still have the ability to smoke weed after work. It would just take so much saving.”
I’m mindful in writing this up that it would be easy to mock Evan. I’m probably walking a fine line on that front already. But it gave me pause when he suddenly added, “What I don’t understand is why we don’t take care of homeless people. We’re all one paycheck away from being homeless.” Evan’s not an immoral or amoral person. He has core values. Beyond homelessness, he wants people to have health care, especially better options for pain management. He’s also engaged, in his way, listening to information about the state of the world, even if the credibility is abysmally poor. And yet, he is disheartened, worn down by years of cynicism, to the point where disengaging entirely from the broken system becomes a badge of honor. It’s not the belief that things are bad that’s troubling; it’s the near-complete-certainty that they can’t get better.
I only have to look across the lobby, though, to see that things absolutely can improve. One of the major, defining trends I’ve encountered on this walk across the US is the prevalence of South Asians in hotel management. In towns big and small, in chains and independent budget hotels alike, it’s a near certainty that a person of South Asian heritage will be working the counter when I arrive to check in.
This is no coincidence; on the contrary, what I’ve just caught onto is the “Patel Motel Cartel,” something with roots far deeper than I could have imagined. Mahendra K Doshi, the author of Surat to San Francisco, dates this trend to the 1920s, when Patels from the Indian state of Gujarat started coming to the US. In 1942, Kanji Manchhu Desai became the first Gujarati to become a hotel owner, when he took over a Sacramento, California business. (The unfortunate additional context to what might otherwise be a positive story of immigrant achievement is that he bought it from a Japanese-American owner after he was forced into an internment camp.) Today, around half the motels in the US are owned by Indian Americans; a New York Times Magazine article that is now 25 years old noted that “about 70 percent of all Indian motel owners… are called Patel,” which links them to the Gujarati subcaste. Their prominence in small towns is even greater, where they own 80 to 90% of the motels. They even have an overarching organization now, the Asian American Hotel Owners Association, which represents over 36,000 accommodations and collectively employs over 1.1 million people.
I particularly enjoyed how Tunku Varadarajan, the New York Times Magazine’s correspondent, explored the subject of integration into small town communities with his interview subjects. He asked one motel employee “what on earth had brought him to a place like Huntsville [Texas]” The response: “‘’Why shouldn’t I be here?’’ he said. Indians like him were everywhere, especially in places like Huntsville. Go 15 miles west and you’d find a motel run by his cousin. Ninety miles south and there was another cousin in another motel. An uncle had a place, too, somewhere in Georgia. Wherever there was a motel in the United States, he said — and I mistook this assertion for hyperbole — there were likely to be people from India running it.
This doesn’t mean that they’re always welcomed with open arms. In the South, in particular, some communities responded by promoting “American-owned” motels as competition. Varadarajan’s subject was unfazed. “‘It doesn’t get us down,’ he insists. ‘If we survived Idi Amin, a couple of redneck motel owners aren’t going to bother us much. In any case, our motels are American-owned, too. We’re Patels, and Americans.’”
But why this particular career track? Why motels? According to Vilpesh Patel, who runs a motel in Connecticut, it’s not complicated. Motels are easy to run. Great English isn’t a necessity. You’ve got to work long hours, but if you have family then you have affordable labor and all day to get it done. Best of all, it comes with housing, so your biggest expense is already covered.
Maybe it’s forcing the issue to bring Evan and these immigrant hoteliers together in dialogue, but it’s hard not to see the line between the defeatism that paralyzes so many established Americans, and the joyous opportunism and indefatigable work ethic that characterizes these immigrants. (To close with a tangent–how odd is it that “opportunism” is loaded with negative implications? Why is that the case? Why wouldn’t we celebrate someone who runs headfirst through any door that is cracked open for them?)
