asianamlitfans | Feb. 16th, 2009

A Review of Jamie Ford’s Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Ballantine Books, 2009).

The struggles of maintaining the possibilities of an Asian American panethnicity during World War 2 are precisely the conflict staged in Ford’s unwieldy-titled novel; perhaps a more subdued version of star-crossed lovers, the story plays out in a relationship between a Chinese American 12 year-old boy, Henry, and a Japanese American girl, Keiko. The setting is Seattle, so we know we are already in dangerous territory because internment is just around the corner and whatever hope that the two have for geographical centrality together is lost. Jamie Ford provides an interesting note that appears just as the novel concludes: “Though this is a work of fiction, many of the events, particularly those dealing with the internment of Japanese Americans, did occur as described. As an author, I did my best to re-create this historic landscape, without judging the good or bad intentions of those involved at the time. My intent was not to create a morality play, with my voice being the loudest on the stage, but rather to defer to the reader’s sense of justice, of right and wrong, and let the facts speak plainly. And while I strove mightily to be true to those facts, the blame for any historical or geographical errors lay firmly at my feet” (287, or what would have been page 287). The self-consciousness with which Ford considers his historical landscape is important I think in situating his imaginative ethics. Viet Thanh Nguyen reminds us that minority writers have the power to harm through their representations. Although Ford states that “my intent was not to create a morality play” and that “the facts” should “speak plainly,” the writer’s intent is always in a dynamic and uncontrollable relationship with reader and the reader’s interpretation. Indeed, I would argue that any story that involves the Japanese American internment is going to be on some level about morality. As the novel portrays Keiko’s family and their struggles to endure their “relocation,” one cannot help but sympathize with their mantra that they too are American. Having recently read Slavoj Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, I can’t help but think that it would have been perfectly fine for Ford to have argued for his novel as a kind of morality play, precisely because he articulates how tragic the Japanese American internment could be in very specific circumstances. While the impulse here is to refract some of that damage onto a Chinese American character and his life, the larger import is of course related to differentially racialized Asian ethnicities during World War II, to the extent that the button, “I am Chinese,” appears again and again in the novel, to act as the embodiment of that differential racialization. This novel also reminds me of the identity politics ennui that I have lately seen emerge in some criticism and theory and I can’t help but think given the infinite variations that the racial experience can be represented, the notion that we are suddenly past the Japanese American internment narrative or some other such proclamation seems not only damaging, but dangerously short-sided. Even as Ford attempts to sidestep a perhaps polemically situated novel, I yet read it that way; this book reminds me inasmuch as John Okada’s No-No Boy does of the incredibly “perilous” place of the Japanese American at that particular time period. In this respect, the love story that falls to ruin is not a universal one, nor I would argue, should it be, especially as it must be contextualized from this specific historical context. However, much must be said for Ford’s imaginative moves. The novel is set in two distinct historical time frames, World War II, as well as the mid-1980s, and these alternating periods as well as the effort Ford makes in distinguishing the adolescent viewpoint from the aging one is certainly evidence of a great talent. In some ways, the novel’s focus on youthful innocence and the love that derives out of that context makes the story all the more tragic and the ending all the more hopeful.