Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet in Ultimate Popsugar Reading Challenge

Aug 23, 2019 Sarah rated it liked it

Shelves: immigration, american-fiction, fiction, asia-fiction, china-and-taiwan, japan

I had mixed feelings about this novel and I'm still sorting through them. Ford was perhaps trying to write an ultimately-uplifting story (which it is) while dealing with Japanese interment in the US, a topic that until recently has been largely neglected in US writing. The problem with this goal is that it feels like Ford, in the interest of not making the book a terribly, terribly depressing read, opts not to describe Japanese internment, when we see it in detail, in stark terms; the Japanese c I had mixed feelings about this novel and I'm still sorting through them. Ford was perhaps trying to write an ultimately-uplifting story (which it is) while dealing with Japanese interment in the US, a topic that until recently has been largely neglected in US writing. The problem with this goal is that it feels like Ford, in the interest of not making the book a terribly, terribly depressing read, opts not to describe Japanese internment, when we see it in detail, in stark terms; the Japanese characters are "American!" he repeatedly insists - ok, but there's nothing wrong with being both Japanese and American, right? - and almost relentlessly upbeat, as some people might have been, but is a bit disingenuous for a community that's just lost everything, as a whole. The living conditions in internment camps are described, but not really felt. Life in a converted barn in horse stalls is described as (I'm paraphrasing) "surprisingly not-smelling-like-horses." He has also noted that his goal was not to write a novel about "social justice," but that "...I mistakenly assumed everyone knew about the internment. But then I quickly realized it wasn’t common knowledge and there are segments of society that really had no idea." (http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/an-...) I think this statement explains a lot of his intent and its results. I also think that the current US administration has resurrected the issue of internment in horrifying ways, and that this book's light steps on this topic now seem more egregious than when they were written, when it seemed more like a historical relic that the vast majority of Americans would no longer back. I was also, at first, a little concerned about a man with a name like "Jamie Ford" writing a book of almost all Asian characters, until I read that Ford has Chinese ancestry, which made me a lot more comfortable that he was personally invested in this history and the tragedy of it.

The story between Henry and Keiko is beautiful and I did feel all the feels reading it. That part felt very real and very genuine, which is why it seemed that this was story Ford set out to write. I liked that there were basically very few white characters in the book, and that we got to see two kids of color and their families interact with each other and that was the primary story, and I thought it centered some China-Japan history that many Americans wouldn't know much about in a way that was not heavy-handed. I did also feel like the writing was atmospheric, which is one of the things that I liked best about it. I could definitely feel myself in Chinatown and Nihonmachi, as well as at Bud's Jazz Records and the Black Elks Club. I'm not sure how realistic it is that Henry's Cantonese-speaking father refuses to allow Henry to talk to him in Cantonese (it's definitely common to insist kids speak the target language, but not generally to a parent who doesn't understand that language), and Henry does seem far older than 12, but that may have been normal for a 1940s pre-teen. Overall, I'd recommend this if you particularly like historical fiction; are interested in Seattle, Asian-American history, or books with child/pre-teen protagonists; or need a very basic, fictional intro to Japanese internment, with the caveat that you need to read more than just this book if it's the last one. ...more

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