A brief moment in karen tei yamashita's recent novel i hotel (2010) resurrects a crucial fragment of asian american literary history. Yamashita's book—part send-up and part recounting of actual events—pays homage to and reimagines the multiple paths that were critical to the late-1960s and 1970s Asian American movement. In a small yet important scene, I Hotel highlights how the development of an Asian American literary canon was entwined with the production of heroic masculinity. Three men drive four hundred miles to visit Dorothy Okada, widow of the author John Okada, on a mission of archival recovery and masculinist “heroics” (96). Their adventure begins when one of the men discovers Okada's 1957 novel No-No Boy (now a canonical work) and a letter that mentions the possible existence of an unpublished manuscript by Okada. Ultimately, the trip is unsuccessful. “What happens next,” the narrator tells us, “is history” (97). Confronted by the lack of public interest in Okada's work, Dorothy has burned his papers, and the disappointed men can only ask ridiculously inappropriate questions about the couple's marriage and sexual relationship. In this story, the men who set out to become heroes of Asian American literary studies are thwarted by a woman's failure to preserve the text, and they reduce Dorothy to a supporting role. Yet in recapturing the gendered division at the heart of this defining moment in Asian American literary history, I Hotel also reminds us of other narrative, methodological, and theoretical paths. “As time drags on,” the narrator muses a few pages earlier, “other events step up to the plate, and one begins to wonder why any fork in the road presented the less traveled option” (95).