Hotel On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet (Jamie Ford)

 

Although I felt like this book certainly wasn't a great work of literature, I really loved the story. I'm shocked at the things we have done in our past to people because of racism. People in Japanese internment camps were amazingly generous with their response to these camps during World War II. 

This was a book club book and we had a great discussion on it.

In this story a Chinese boy named Henry falls in love with a Japanese girl. 

Favorite quotes:
All Henry could do was sigh and nod. He knew that the concept all too well. Painfully well. Obedience as a sign of loyalty as an expression of honor, even as an act of love, was a well-worn theme in his household. Especially between him and his father. but that wasn't the case now, was it? Did I cause my father's stroke? Was it brought on by my disobedience? As much as Henry reasoned otherwise, he ahd a hard time convincing himself the answer was no. His guilt remained.

p. 233 "How long will you wait ofr me, Henry?"
"As long as it takes, I don't care what my father says."
"What if I'm an old woman?" Keiko said, laughing. "What if I'm in here until I'm old and my ahir is gray - "
"Then I'll bring you a cane."
"You'd wait for me?"
Henry smiled, nodded, and took Keiko's hand. He didn't even look, their two hands just seemed to fall together. They spend the better part of the day beneath that cloudy sky. Henry looked up expecting rain, but the wind, which kept them a little chilly, blew the clouds south of the camp.  There would be no more rain.

...spoiler alert....he did! 

Goodreads says:

In 1986, Henry Lee joins a crowd outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle's Japantown. It has been boarded up for decades, but now the new owner has discovered the belongings of Japanese families who were sent to internment camps during World War II. As the owner displays and unfurls a Japanese parasol, Henry, a Chinese American, remembers a young Japanese American girl from his childhood in the 1940s—Keiko Okabe, with whom he forged a bond of friendship and innocent love that transcended the prejudices of their Old World ancestors. After Keiko and her family were evacuated to the internment camps, she and Henry could only hope that their promise to each other would be kept. Now, forty years later, Henry explores the hotel's basement for the Okabe family's belongings and for a long-lost object whose value he cannot even begin to measure. His search will take him on a journey to revisit the sacrifices he has made for family, for love, for country.