As a student in elementary and high school during the Vietnam War years, I have no memory of ever learning about the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. As a matter of fact, not too much mention was made in school about Vietnam either. But, in college and much more so later in life, I filled in the gaps by reading widely and viewing many films, including documentaries. Most recently, I read a wonderfully moving novel set in Seattle's Nihonmachi also referred to as "Japantown" which bordered Seattle's Chinatown and other ethnic and racial enclaves during the war.
Written by Jamie Ford, a third generation Chinese American, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet recounts the story of Henry Lee, a Chinese American boy of 12 and his Japanese American best friend Keiko Okabe, who is sent with her family to the Minidoka Relocation Center in Idaho. The action shifts from the present (1986) life of 56 year-old, recently-widowed Henry to the past (1942) as 12 year-old Henry struggles in school with jingoistic bullies and at home with a fiercely traditional Chinese father who hates all things Japanese. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, his father gives Henry a button to wear on his coat which reads, "I am Chinese." For Henry it might as well read "Beat Me Up Daily."
The symbolic setting and title character is the Panama Hotel, the center of Japanese American culture pre WWII, which became a secret storage space for family heirlooms and precious possessions that citizens could not take with them as they boarded trains for the camps. The hotel looms large in the past and the present of this beautifully crafted story as the reader journeys back and forth in time with Henry Lee - a character worth getting to know and a time in our history worth knowing about.
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