in the noval
‘Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet’ is a historical novel, where the author instructed Henry’s story in two parallel storylines. One following the duration of the Second World War and the other is forty- four years later as a widower with a college-aged son. In 1940, the time of the Second World War, twelve years old Henry was sent to an all-white school to learn English. Young Chinese American Henry met a Japanese American girl there named Kaiko, and he fell in love with her. Hanry and Kaiko’s journey was not that smooth, because of Henry’s father’s mentality. His parents especially his father hates Japanese which made his love of life harder. When he refused to through Kaiko’s family album, everybody in his family stop talking with him while they were living in the same apartment. He was only thirteen years old at that time. He had a big communication gap with his father because of his father’s dictatorship mind. For all of the reasons, Henry’s childhood love didn’t reach a good ending at that time. After several decades: Henry is now an old man whose wife Ethel has just died. His college-aged son’s name is Marty who likes a white girl named Samantha. Henry is different from his father, he is not worried about Samantha’s country name, but Marty is thinking, his father might be angry when he will hear about his girlfriend, but it didn’t happen. Henry wants to see his son happy with his loved one because he knows how painful it is when you lost your love. Henry’s father never tried to fill up their communication gap, but Henry has overcome that. He started to share all of his memories with Marty through Samantha. After heard his history, Marty and Samantha suggest he find out his lost love Kaiko. The main purpose of comparing the two different times is to show how was the people’s family life, social life, their way of thinking before. Also, how people suffered in the time of the war.
