Book Review: The Hotel at the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, by Jamie Ford

I wish this book had a less-manipulative, more-informative title. I've heard author Jamie Ford say that his original working title simply named the real hotel that was, before World War II, a fixture of Seattle's Japantown. Though that does somewhat less tugging on heartstrings and doesn't mislead that there are actual streets in Seattle with these names, it still doesn't give any clearer idea of the content. You see, the Japanese citizens of Seattle who were displaced to internment camps are really only a hook for Ford's story. The real story is loosely based on Ford's Chinese-American father and his experiences, fraught though they were, in that time and place.

Okay, there is interesting information throughout the book, about all the races and their interactions in Seattle in the 1940s, and I'm grateful for that. I didn't even know the city had an "International District." I hadn't thought about non-Whites having to establish their own jazz clubs and perhaps skirt liquor-licensing laws. I hadn't frankly thought about what Chinese citizens faced when the Japanese were interned, in a dominant culture that failed to distinguish among the varieties of "Oriental." And I'd just recently read a novel of Chinese sisters who wound up in Los Angeles at the same time (but stayed fairly isolated in Chinatown), Shanghai Girls. But I do find myself resenting that the disruption suffered by the Japanese was no more than a subplot for Ford.

Maybe that was exacerbated because the Chinese-American character is the boy and the Japanese-American the girl in this puppy-love story, and because Ford doesn't seem to have much familiarity with the emotions and behavior of a lovestruck 12-year-old girl. (I can't speak to filially pious Chinese boys of the period.) At least twice, the couple meet, unexpectedly to the girl, and play strange little games of delaying their embrace, acting as if they don't care who it is on the other side of the curtain. But then, the story is being told from the boy, Henry's, memory forty-some years later, and maybe it's more important to him to have been witty than to have acted from or inspired real passion.

At the start of the book, I thought it might be heading to an interesting interplay of points of view, since the chapters are labeled with the years in which they take place and the characters who figure in them (later the places they happen). But no matter whose name is at the head of the chapter, it's Henry's story. At least Ford was consistent in maintaining Henry's point of view. And perhaps I found the mix of scenes and the braiding of time more confusing than was necessary because I "read" the audiobook and could not handily flip back to clarify where and when I was.

I do appreciate that Ford documented several of the important real elements of his story, at the end of even the audiobook. But there are a few implausibilities that I wish he'd researched a little more carefully, such as a postmaster intercepting stamped U.S. mail at the request of a third party (albeit the sender's father), and these make me wonder about authenticity where I don't know enough to question. There are also major gaps of significant events we're prepared to share with the characters, but never learn whether they happened. (Did Henry indeed go to China before he married Ethel? What ultimately became of Keiko's family's photographs?)

All in all, a pleasant enough read, but not nearly as compelling as the subject matter would seem to deserve. I understand Ford is hoping to publish a collection of the minor characters' backstories, but I would encourage him to keep that knowledge in his files and move on to something on which he can do an even better job. I'll remember this one by the button Henry (and I understand Ford's father) was forced by his father to wear from the "day that will live in infamy" to the end of the war: "I Am Chinese."