Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: The international bestseller and word-of-mouth sensation

Product Information

The story, set in Seattle, opens in 1986 in front of the Panama Hotel, a place that holds both bitter and sweet memories for Henry Lee, a Chinese American citizen, who is in his mid-fifties and has recently lost his wife, Ethel, to cancer.

The emotional heat that should have brewed within a story of this nature, considering the volatile subject matter, failed to materialize. I suspect more families should get a mediator or a family therapist, if that is what it takes to TALK openly. It is incredibly rare to find a historical fiction novel about World War Two that isn't set in Europe! Then, I read the synopsis on the back cover, and learned the novel was historical fiction, another plus. It’s about a guy who meets a girl, falls in love with a girl, loses a girl to the Japanese internment and his father’s racism, and moves on to be a good husband to a different woman.Finding a place for these camps were difficult due to various organizations such as labor unions and even American Indians. Peopled with wonderful characters, with a story that reaches to the very bottom of your heart, this is a novel not to miss. It is a historical fact German prisoners-of-war captured in the fighting and transferred to American prisoner camps received better housing, medical care and humane treatment than did the Japanese-Americans living in their designated camps. While some German-Americans experienced unlawful discrimination and personal assaults during WWII, they were mostly left to live their lives in whatever community they had settled in and to continue keeping their businesses, jobs, houses, property and money.

Not very many books have made me read thru tears but this was such a profound story that needed to be written, with characters believable and heroic. I’ve met Fred Korematsu, whose challenge to internship went all the way to the Supreme Court back in the day.

And because I believe readers—lovers of books, wherever they live, are the best kind of people—curious and compassionate, creative and filled with boundless hope. The 'sweet' is the innocence of love, so fragile, of waiting for that one person and never forgetting about them. Non-combatant German-American and Italian-American citizens were not placed into American concentration camps.