“On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford
Recommended for Read Together Palm Beach County, 2010
21 December 02009
by Steve Leveen, CEO Levenger, Blogger for Huffington Post Books
http://www.flickr.com/photos/15939353@N00/sets/72157622988013278/
I’m not recommending On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because of its power to convey history, though it has that power. In its pages you don’t merely learn about the Japanese internment camps of World War Two, you feel them. You feel the injustice of imprisoning innocent people, but also feel the tension of the time—the chilling Pearl-Harbor fear that swept the nation and particularly the west coast, including Seattle, the setting for this novel, after the famously infamous attack. Jamie Ford, in his first novel, displays a seemingly easy talent for making history as unexpected as it actually was. We see Nihonmachi, Japantown, before and after the relocation, including the enigmatic Panama Hotel. We meet young Henry Lee, a twelve-year old, first-generation Chinese boy who his parents literally label, in order to save him from being mistaken as Japanese.
Henry’s on scholarship to a white school, requiring officially that he work in the kitchen, and unofficially, that he withstand the fists and taunts of his mainstream classmates. There he meets another scholarship kid, also assigned to kitchen duty, a Japanese girl. And we’re off to an old, but ever-new love story set in a world at war.
Nor am I recommending On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because it raises enduring issues, though it does. Must my father’s enemy be my enemy? Can immigrants ever really understand their first-generation children, and they their parents? When does normal parental guidance become unhealthy coercion? What is the right path when heart and duty point in opposite directions? Would you ever go to war for a country that imprisoned you? That stole your property? That damaged the people you love the most?
No, I am recommending On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because it is a work of art. Somewhere amidst the fluttering photographs, the boarded up buildings and the jazz spilling from segregated nightclubs out onto wet Seattle streets, I realized that this novel is one of those works of fiction that becomes literature. I might use words such as magical, moving, transcending and other such words people use to describe art, but like others, I would fail—fail to convey by other means an experience that must be had. I recommend On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because experiencing art feels good in ways we can’t describe.
--Steve Leveen
Postscript: On the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is available in paperback, hardcover, digital and audio. I listened to Feodor Chin narrate the unabridged audiobook and loved his voices for the young hero and heroine, as well as the many adults of diverse ethnicity. I also bought the beautiful hardcover, which I wrote in, and then photographed, before passing the book to my own sons.
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