Book Blog: The Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet - Jamie Ford

I just finished this book this morning, and it was a great read. I had a little trouble getting into to it at first as it was another that switches between time periods, but I loved it in the end. It was heart breaking and heart warming at the same time. Henry, the main character, is a young Chinese boy living in San Francisco and is attending an all white school. He soon is joined by a Japanese American girl and they become good friends while working in the school kitchen together. Not long after, tensions rose between the US and Japan after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Japanese families were sent away to internment camps, much to the satisfaction of Henry's father.

This is the part of World War II that I, and a lot of others I'm sure, tend to forget about. The fact that over 100,000 Japanese American people (and also German and Italian) were removed from their homes and sent to live inland in large camps fit for prisoners is just unimaginable to me. While many of the people were second generation Americans (like Keiko in the book), they were still feared to be spies or in cooperation with the Japanese. It is interesting to me that studies on racism and discrimination are typically centered on African Americans in the South, but as seen through this story, there are many other groups that have historically been discriminated against within the US, and other instances of clashing cultures, and today I am proud to live in a country where a person of any race, color, or religion can be respected as an American. I know we still have a long way to go, but I pray nothing like this would ever happen again in this country. It almost seems silly that anything like this could happen now, but at the same time that I say that, discriminatory events of a similar nature are still happening around the world.

The Japanese internment separates Henry from his best friend Keiko for much longer than they had thought. Henry has to learn to deal with the distance, only occasional letters, and learn to live as the one left behind where everyone else's lives seem to go on as usual...sounds like a familiar life to mine right now. Reading this, I related to the heartache, the uncertainty, the fear that Henry was going through, but it also made me thankful for the superior circumstances of my own separation. The one I love was not taken from me practically unannounced and for no apparent reason, he is not being treated like a prisoner, I hear from him at least every few days, and I know when he will return. These are the simple positive things that I need to remind myself when I'm struggling with the deployment. It's a daily struggle, but there are still things to be thankful for, things to learn, and I know that my husband is serving our country and protecting the freedoms we are lucky to have.