Crisp and Colorful

It's about 50 degrees and sunny now at 9:30 a.m. I had to put a blanket over my flannel sheet early this morning, but I am not ready to put the electric blanket on. Maybe in another week.

I did buy a mum for the front porch. My husband asked for yellow.

Wednesday while the floor installers were here, I kept out of the way and busied myself by taking the metal wreath I bought at Goodwill store and adding some wired ribbon to fill in the gap where apparently a leaf had fallen off. I've never had an autumn hanging on my door and this was a cheap way to do so.

I really like the ribbon with gilded pumpkins that I bought at Joann's. Not sure how it will hold up on the outside door; I will take the wreath down in about 8 weeks.

I don't often buy novels at the library book sales nor the discount section of Half Price Books unless I have heard of the author. I took a chance on Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford. I thought it was pretty good for a first novel. However, when I looked at the reviews, it was panned for lack of character development and being overly sentimental. I would agree that the characters other than Henry and Keiko were flat, but I did care enough about the two leading characters to keep reading. Their thoughts and actions were not age-appropriate at times however for 12 and 13 year-olds, too mature.

This is not the first novel I have read that includes the internment of Japanese American citizens during World War II, though it played a major part of the storyline in this book. 

Henry Lee, a recently widowed Chinese American, reads about the reopening of the Panama Hotel in Seattle and a surprise in the basement. The building has been boarded up and vacant for over 40 years, but now in 1986 it is being refurbished. He joins the crowd to see the items that have sat undisturbed for decades after being stored by relocated Japanese families. As a parasol twirls, Henry thinks of his childhood friend Keiko. He gets permission to rummage in the filled basement and hopes to find a treasured item he and Keiko both loved.

The writing shifts back and forth mostly from 1986 to 1942. The themes include father-son relationships, parental expectations of Asian immigrants for their American-born children, cultural differences and animosities, and the injustice of rounding up Japanese immigrants and Japanese Americans and their children with short notice to take them to internment camps in the interior United States. I did not know that Seattle in the 1940's had a thriving jazz community; Henry's older black friend Sheldon introduces Henry to the music.

 

Henry's father closely follows the Japanese invasion and battles in China and works at raising money for the people of China to resist the Japanese. He hates the Japanese. He insists Henry speak only English at home even though he has a poor grasp of the language himself and Henry's mother knows only a few words; yet he wants Henry to finish his schooling in China once it is safe. Contradictory desires which put Henry in a hard place and impairs communicating his pre-teen difficulties with his parents.

Henry works in the school kitchen/cafeteria at an exclusive prep school in order to attend. He is the only non-white student until Keiko joins him under the same arrangement. Keiko who was born in Seattle to American-born parents and only knows a few phrases of Japanese from her grandfather becomes Henry's best friend. This is a friendship that he must keep from his father who insists that Henry restricts himself to Anglo and Chinese Seattle and does not go to the Japanese district. Henry is torn between his Chinese duty of filial obedience and the blossoming relationship with Keiko.

When Keiko's family is taken to an internment camp, the two young people realize they are in love and promise to keep in touch and "wait for each other". As the war drags on for 3 years, their letters grow fewer and though Henry at the end of the war makes an attempt to meet Keiko in Seattle, he loses track of her.

It is Henry's son Marty who plays a role in finding the treasure in the hotel basement and learns of his father's past, forging a bond that had been strained by Marty's departure from the old Chinese traditions and by the death of his mother. 

The ending is fairly implausible but leaves room for speculating a happy outcome.