Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford Ballantine Books HK$192
Jamie Ford's debut novel will do little to change the minds of readers unconvinced that 12-year-olds can fall in love - despite his best efforts. Ford tries too hard, too often with this story about a Chinese boy in Seattle's Chinatown who befriends (and falls for) a Japanese schoolmate during the second world war.
Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet introduces us, several decades later, to a now middle-aged Henry Lee, when the sight of a Japanese parasol at a long-dormant hotel sparks memories of his puppy love. Other events have happened since 'the war years': 'a lifetime', Ford writes. 'A marriage. The birth of an ungrateful son. Cancer, and a burial.'
The narrative flips back and forth between the early to mid-1940s and 1986, when the recently widowed Henry tries to track down his parting gift to sweetheart Keiko: an Oscar Holden jazz record, bought for a birthday, lying in the hotel basement among the packed-away belongings of Japanese internees.
Beneath the frame of this love story Ford's novel navigates a shameful episode in American history, particularly hard to swallow in retrospect; and it is difficult to read about US suspicions of Japanese Americans then without considering American attitudes towards Arab-Americans at the high-water mark of post-September 11 fervour. The novel's approaches to racist sentiment then, especially as experienced by Henry as a bullied Chinese child 'scholarshipping' at the all-white Rainier Elementary School, cut through the more syrupy writing with a clean intensity.
But Ford sometimes stumbles in his efforts to contrast bitter and sweet. Hotel is easily digested, often because it becomes too predictable. The author reaches for metaphors about broken records, for example, or breaks up phrasing to drive home an especially poignant moment. Tender details become saccharine and the narrative's foreshadowing aches for subtlety.