Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: The international bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation

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Asian/Pacific American Award For Literature Winners selected", American Library Association, February 3, 2010, accessed July 11, 2011. Mr. FORD: Yeah. She asks him to keep her family photos. Again, this was just one of those things that you read and you ask yourself, you know, did this really happen? There were a lot of people that burned their own family photos if they had photos that they feared would connect them to the war in Japan, if they had photos of family members in traditional Japanese dressing or military uniforms. And so that does - that played a key role in the book. The historical aspects are a close second, though. I love cultural historyand am always pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoy the researchprocess. I feel like an archaeologist, dusting off the past andpresenting it to the reader. And of course, it adds context to my characters,giving them a rich world to splash around in. I find the wholeprocess incredibly motivating as a writer. This is Weekend Edition from NPR News. I'm Scott Simon. The "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet" is an actual place. It's also the title of Jamie Ford's debut novel. It is Seattle's Panama Hotel, where an old man named Henry Lee stands as the book opens and remembers an old, doomed love. The author said, at the end, that he did not intend to make this book about the internment camps...but perhaps he should have put that statement at the beginning because I think maybe people were expecting that to be the focus of this book...

Thank you to Tandis for publishing this book, and a special thank you to Marjan Mohammadi for her hard work and expertise in translating this story. Sue Fawn Chung (2000). "Chapter 12". In Kriste Lindenmeyer (ed.). Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 9780842027540 . Retrieved July 13, 2016. a b Vermillion, Allecia (January 31, 2019). "A Musical Version of Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet?". SeattleMet . Retrieved February 16, 2020. RHRC: You’re part Chinese. Tell us about your Chinese family. And thename Ford, where does it come from? The Panama Hotel represents the way in which memory persists and manages to reassert itself, even when it is thought to have been long since buried and forgotten. While the hotel once served as a place for recent immigrants from China and Japan to rent a room while establishing their new lives in America, by the 1940s (when Henry is a child) the hotel has fallen into disrepair. In Henry’s adulthood, the hotel is finally being restored by its new owner, Palmyra Pettison, and the inciting incident of the novel is the discovery of abandoned belongings in the hotel basement. Evacuating Seattle to be forced into internment camps, many Japanese families left treasured items in the Panama Hotel, hoping to someday return and collect them.

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Power of the Words. The language and images that Ford paints are absolutely beautiful. She creates such a world of nostalgia that forces the reader to reminisce with Henry, and fall in love alongside him. Henry and his father shared one cultural rule - do not express feelings. Otherwise, everything else was a point of misunderstanding and cultural obliviousness between them. Henry attended a local White-race elementary school, which was engineered by his socially important father. Henry was forbidden to speak Cantonese at home! It meant he had to communicate in sign language with his parents, except on occasion when he had to translate for them. When Seattle's Nihonmachi district (Japan Town) is rounded up after the bombing of Pearl Harbour, along with all US citizens of Japanese decent, Keiko and her family are interned for the duration of WW11 and the young couple are forced to lead separate lives.

Through intertwined timelines—one in the 1940s and one in the 1980s— Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet tells the love story of a Chinese American boy, Henry Lee, and a Japanese American girl, Keiko Okabe. Henry and Keiko meet in Seattle during World War II; they both attend an all-white school called Rainier Elementary. Henry is a first-generation American: his Chinese nationalist father hates Japanese people, whose forces have been at war with China’s for decades. Keiko is a second-generation American; both her parents were born in the United States. Henry and Keiko work in their school kitchen together, and though Henry worries about drawing his father’s ire for befriending a Japanese person, he begins spending time with Keiko outside of school. Aside from Keiko, Henry doesn’t have many people to talk to. His father has forbidden him from speaking Chinese at home, and since neither his father nor his mother speaks strong English, Henry’s home life has been incredibly quiet. 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. A rich, tender, personal story so touching and full of history I should know, but didn't. Pulled at my heartstrings and made me longingly linger over and over the last few chapters. Switching between 1942 and 1986 this is an easy read on a complex subject. A historical romance with a Romeo & Juliet twist, this time the doomed love affair between Henry, a Chinese American and Keiko, a Japanese American; its historical focus the internment of Japanese Americans during WW2. Jamie Ford: It really started with the “I am Chinese” button, which myfather mentioned wearing as a kid. There was a bit of an identity crisis inthe International District in the wake of Pearl Harbor. Many Chinesefamilies feared for their safety, especially as the FBI was rounding upprominent members of the Japanese community. It piqued my curiosityand really led me to research the whole period.RHRC: What about people like conservative columnist MichelleMalkin who have spoken out in favor of the Japanese Internment, evenwriting a book about it– saying it was a just endeavor? Though Henry writes many letters to Keiko, he receives very few in return. The mail clerk, a young girl around Henry's age, sympathizes with him, and when Keiko does not appear at the Panama Hotel for the last meeting Henry had tried to arrange with her on what turns out to be V-J Day, the mail clerk brings him his returned envelope with a bunch of star lilies. Henry turns his attention to the girl, named Ethel Chen, and eventually marries her. On his deathbed, Henry's father insinuates that he had something to do with stopping the correspondence between Henry and Keiko. Henry and Ethel celebrate their 30th wedding anniversary, after which Ethel falls ill with cancer for seven years and Henry devotedly cares for her in their home. Though he thinks often of Keiko, Henry never lets his wife know and is a caring and devoted husband till the end. Henry also supports his son Marty at college, and welcomes Marty's girlfriend, a non-Chinese girl named Samantha, into their family. The novel concludes with Henry's son Marty locating Keiko in New York City, and Henry goes to see her. SIMON: Jamie Ford. His new novel is "Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet." Nice talking to you. Henry’s Inner Conflict. Henry is most conflicted in following his father’s rules and expectations. He ends up doing things that outright defy his father, and others that are done on the sly. Regardless, Henry spends three years being ignored by his father entirely, and told during such highly emotional times that he is a stranger, that he is dead to his father. Henry must choose between what is right and his father’s hatred for the Japanese. For a highly traditional family, it is not something that is easy for Henry, but it is something he must do.

World War II caused prejudices to explode within and without the enclaves, both from national patriotism and personal considerations. To some White Americans, there were no differences between the Japanese-Americans, Chinese-Americans and the enemy Japanese. Likewise, to many immigrant first-generation Chinese-Americans, all Japanese were enemies since Japan had been slaughtering Chinese in China for a decade, long before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. Henry's father hated the Japanese whether American-Japanese or not. He had suspicions about Japanese-American loyalties the same as many Whites did. He forced Henry to wear a large button declaring Henry to be Chinese in English to protect him from abuses from White people (in spite of the button, Henry still suffers from beatings by a white student at school). Jamie Ford tells Henry and Keiko's story in a flowing style which switches regularly between past and present. His characters are generally decent (or at least well-meaning) people and the story is fast moving with some excellent scenes including a memorable chase. However my overriding feeling for the book is a degree of poignancy that I have not experienced for some time.

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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. Also, growing up in Seattle my grandfather would always take me tohis favorite seafood restaurant, which was in Rainier Beach between asoul- food restaurant and a Hispanic grocer. I was always fascinated withhow Seattle’s ethnic communities ended up right on top of one another.Turns out it was because of the zoning laws in the ’30s and ’40s. It was illegal(though how well enforced, I don’t know) to sell land to certain minoritiesoutside of certain zones.