Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (2009. Ballantine. ISBN 978-0-343-50534-7)
Hmm…The book I am about to review is this year’s “One Book, One Community” selection by the Duluth Public Library. It is (as most such novels selected for community “reads” are) a New York Times bestseller. I don’t know if it’s an Oprah pick but it’s a good guess the novel made Ms. Winfrey’s list as well. And on Thursday, March 24 at 7:00pm, I’ll be talking about the themes raised in the novel in conjunction with my own book on discrimination and the Finns, Suomalaiset: People of the Marsh at the library. So, with all that said, what do I think of the book itself?
Henry Lee, a Chinese American of advanced age, a man who had been a ten year old boy during the Japanese internment during World War II, is the protagonist of this story. His father is vehemently anti-Japanese because of atrocities inflicted upon his family in China by invading Imperial Japanese forces. The story weaves back and forth between the recent (1986) and the distant (WWII and before) past, depicting Henry’s relationship with a young Japanese girl who, along with Henry, is the only other Asian American student at a local elementary school in Seattle. The young girl, Keiko OKabe, and Henry fall into love before she is shuffled off to internment with her family. But Henry, who loves jazz music as much as he loves Keiko, is a very resourceful ten year old. He and an older African American jazz musician travel from Seattle to one of the camps housing Keiko and her family where Henry continues their relationship. And then, predictably, the bond between the boy and the girl, between two warring cultures, is severed and Henry marries another woman, a young Chinese girl who knows of his secret love.
Slow moving, descriptive, well written, Hotel seems to this author to be an odd choice for a community read. Yes, it does portray the bitterness and unfairness of the internment of our own citizens during a war. Perhaps the hope of the selection committee was to foster conversation about how we, as Americans, view a disparate culture, perhaps Muslim culture, in this time of global jihad. Are we on the brink of another round of prison camps, where anyone looking like an Arab, American citizen or not, is interned for the “greater good”? Maybe. But I don’t find that broad a theme in this book. There’s an intimacy, a smallness to the story that simply doesn’t seem to compel such generalized reflection. And while the story of how America treated Chinese Americans (who were not interned) and Japanese Americans (who were) during WWII does break some modest new literary ground, frankly, the story of Japanese internment has been told before with far more art and beauty. David Guttormson’s Snow Falling on Cedars depicts the angst and unfairness of the internment in ways that are broader, deeper, and more believable (Henry’s dialogue is of the same intellect and level regardless of his age in Hotel) than Jamie Ford’s attempt to do so on a smaller canvas.
A reasonably well-written novel and a quick read but no classic. 3 and 1/2 stars out of 5.
