Editorial content for Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Contributors
Reviewer (text)
The hotel in the title of Jamie Ford's debut novel is not just "on the corner of bitter and sweet"; it is also on the boundary between the predominantly Chinese and Japanese neighborhoods in Seattle. To outsiders, the demarcations between "Chinatown" and "Japantown" might not be readily apparent. But to those who lived there during World War II, they might as well have been two different countries.
Henry Lee is swept back to those times by one evocative image, as, in 1986, he stands outside the old Panama Hotel, which is undergoing renovations. As workers bring steamer trunks, boxes and paraphernalia out of the basement, Henry glimpses a Japanese bamboo parasol, the sight of which takes him back to 1942.
Henry is now in his mid-50s, a widower and an old man in his own mind. But in 1942 he was just 12, often confused by the baffling changes sweeping across the world, the country and even his own neighborhood. The son of Cantonese-speaking Chinese immigrants, Henry has received a prestigious scholarship to a private school, where he is the only non-white student. That is, until Keiko Okabe, a beautiful young Japanese-American girl, joins his class.
The two form a fast friendship, bonding over shared work hours in the school cafeteria and a love of music and adventure. Henry knows that his father, a vehement Chinese nationalist, would be shocked and horrified if he knew about Henry's friendship with a girl of Japanese descent. He also realizes that Keiko and other Japanese Americans are the targets of racial hatred in these intense weeks and months following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But when Keiko's family, along with all the other families of Japanese descent on the West Coast, are ordered into internment camps, Henry must decide for himself where to construct the boundaries between nationalities, if at all.
In brief chapters, many of which merely recount a single anecdote, readers travel back and forth in time, between Henry's youthful past, when he first found both love and independence, and his middle-aged present, when he witnesses first-hand the easier love between his own college-aged son and his non-Asian fiancée.
Ford deftly probes the complex relations among Japanese, Chinese, whites and blacks during the paranoid, intense months shortly after the U.S. entered World War II. Henry's 12-year-old self is occasionally too perceptive, too self-aware to be entirely convincing as the voice of a child; one wonders whether it would have been better to have Henry and Keiko be somewhat older teens or young adults in 1942, thereby allowing the romantic relationship that is only hinted at here to flourish more freely and to allow Henry's youthful voice to be more authentically mature. Ford's decision to keep them as preteens, however, leaves the door open for an optimistic, romantic future for the middle-aged Henry Lee, ensuring that there is more than enough "sweet" to balance out the "bitter."
Teaser
Set during one of the most volatile times in American history, HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET is a love story about two people who come from totally different worlds. Their story is about the conflicts between generations and cultures --- and how, decades later, they can heal the barriers and betrayals that separate them.
Promo
Set during one of the most volatile times in American history, HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET is a love story about two people who come from totally different worlds. Their story is about the conflicts between generations and cultures --- and how, decades later, they can heal the barriers and betrayals that separate them.
About the Book
In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has made an incredible discovery: the belongings of Japanese families, left when they were rounded up and sent to internment camps during World War II. As Henry looks on, the owner opens a Japanese parasol.
This simple act takes old Henry Lee back to the 1940s, at the height of the war, when young Henry’s world is a jumble of confusion and excitement, and to his father, who is obsessed with the war in China and having Henry grow up American. While “scholarshipping” at the exclusive Rainier Elementary, where the white kids ignore him, Henry meets Keiko Okabe, a young Japanese American student. Amid the chaos of blackouts, curfews, and FBI raids, Henry and Keiko forge a bond of friendship–and innocent love–that transcends the long-standing prejudices of their Old World ancestors. And after Keiko and her family are swept up in the evacuations to the internment camps, she and Henry are left only with the hope that the war will end, and that their promise to each other will be kept.
Forty years later, Henry Lee is certain that the parasol belonged to Keiko. In the hotel’s dark dusty basement he begins looking for signs of the Okabe family’s belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot begin to measure. Now a widower, Henry is still trying to find his voice–words that might explain the actions of his nationalistic father; words that might bridge the gap between him and his modern, Chinese American son; words that might help him confront the choices he made many years ago.
Set during one of the most conflicted and volatile times in American history, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an extraordinary story of commitment and enduring hope. In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart.
-Click here to watch an interview with Jamie Ford.
-Click here to watch a video in which Jamie Ford narrates a tour of the Seattle neighborhood where Japanese lives were disrupted at the start of World War II.
