Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Belonging, Bigotry, and Identity
Silence vs. Communication
Family Dynamics and Inheritance
Memory
Love and Self-Sacrifice
Summary
Analysis
The day after Keiko and her family leave for the internment camp, Henry pretends he is sick so he doesn’t have to go to school. Eventually, however, he has to return. On a Thursday morning, he dresses in his school clothes, and stares his father down at the breakfast table. He realizes that “he [doesn’t] know what to blame [his father] for. For not caring? How could he blame his own father, when no one else seemed to care either?”
Henry struggles to work through the anger he feels at his father. This struggle is compounded twofold: first, by Henry’s father’s staunch anti-Japanese stance, and second, by the fact that Henry is essentially forbidden to discuss his complicated feelings with either of his parents. Yet again, Henry feels isolated in his experiences, as no one around him seems to be as devastated by Japanese internment as he is.
Themes
Henry’s father gives Henry a new button, one that says, “I’m An American.” Henry’s mother says that they want Henry to wear the button “now that the Japanese are being evacuated.” Henry is furious about his mother’s word choice; “Keiko,” he thinks, “[has] been taken from him.” Henry leaves for school and throws the new button onto the garbage heap on his way.
Henry’s mother mimics the language used by the government to describe what is being done to Japanese American families. Henry resents his mother’s inability to denounce what is happening to her neighbors. Evacuation would imply that Japanese American families are being removed for their safety, when in fact they are being forcibly imprisoned.
Themes
At school, Henry thinks that Mrs. Beatty seems “genuinely annoyed that Keiko [is] gone.” Instead of the usual unappetizing meals she serves, Mrs. Beatty cooks American Japanese food that she calls chicken katsu-retsu. “Let ’em try that,” Mrs. Beatty grumbles as she goes outside for a smoke break, and Henry realizes with pleasure that “there [is] more to [her] than [meets] the eye.”
Mrs. Beatty’s small act of defiance suggests that kindred spirits can be found in unusual places. Furthermore, Mrs. Beatty’s chicken katsu-retsu teaches Henry a lesson similar to the one he learned upon meeting Keiko: that the first impression a person gives is not always the best or even the truest reflection of their character.
Themes
In the lunch line, Chaz taunts Henry. “They take your girlfriend away?” he asks. “Dirty, backstabbing Jap—she probably was poisoning our food.” Before Henry can react, Mrs. Beatty appears and insists that “there’s not enough food left.” “Kitchen’s closed to you today,” she tells Chaz. When Chaz is gone, Mrs. Beatty asks Henry if he wants to make some money on Saturday. She says she has been asked “to set up a mess hall as a civilian contractor for the army,” and reveals that she’ll be working at Camp Harmony over the weekend. “I’ve got a feeling you’ve heard of it,” she says to Henry. “Thank you” is all Henry can manage to say.
Mrs. Beatty comes through for Henry more dramatically than ever before by putting an end to Chaz’s taunting, and even singling Chaz out as someone who does not deserve her kind treatment. On a plot level, this scene is also important because Mrs. Beatty’s invitation will allow Henry to see Keiko again—something he otherwise never would have been able to do. Mrs. Beatty may not be warm or even emotive, but she still shows kindness to Henry, thus offering yet another example of an unlikely yet triumphant friendship.
Themes
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On Saturday, Henry meets Mrs. Beatty at school; he’s told his parents he’ll be helping her in the school kitchen. Henry asks Mrs. Beatty questions as she drives, and learns that her father was in the Merchant Marines. Mrs. Beatty used to work in the kitchen of her father’s ship when it was in port. “His best friend, the ship’s steward—he’s practically my uncle, you’d like him—he’s Chinese, too,” she says.” Henry also learns that Mrs. Beatty’s father was captured by the Germans and imprisoned in a POW camp; she hasn’t heard from him in more than a year.
Unlike in Henry’s relationship with his father, the silence that dominated Henry’s relationship with Mrs. Beatty was never particularly oppressive. However, in this scene, Henry experiences firsthand how much more enriching a relationship (even one previously thought insignificant) can become when communication is allowed to flow and develop organically.
Themes
Mrs. Beatty and Henry arrive at Camp Harmony, on the site of the Washington State Fairgrounds. Henry is horrified to realize that the Japanese prisoners are living in chicken coops surrounded by a barbed-wire fence and soldiers armed with machine guns. He worries: “This is a place where someone like me goes in but doesn’t come out […] Just another Japanese prisoner of war, even if I’m Chinese.”
Henry again witnesses the government’s dehumanization of Japanese Americans, who are being forced to live in chicken coops. This passage also emphasizes the obliterating force of hatred: Henry is worried he will be sucked even more forcefully into anti-Japanese sentiment in the camp than he is at school.
Themes
The soldier who checks Mrs. Beatty and Henry into the camp is suspicious of Henry, but Mrs. Beatty provides his school registration and immunization record. Henry is suddenly grateful that he attends Rainier; “without having to work in the kitchen,” he realizes, “he’d never have made it […] this close to Keiko.”
Mrs. Beatty’s forethought suggests that she is deeply committed to reuniting Henry and Keiko. Though she said some bigoted things in the past, Mrs. Beatty has evolved into her better self in the face of formalized, government-sanctioned discrimination.
Themes
In the camp’s mess hall, Henry works the serving line. One by one, prisoners greet Henry in Japanese, “look[ing] brightly hopeful, then disappointed” when Henry points to his “I Am Chinese” button. Still, Henry hopes the prisoners will talk about him to each other, and that Keiko will learn he is there.
Though a minor moment in the overall plot, the prisoners’ hopefulness in this passage suggests that they are optimistic enough to believe for a moment that a Japanese person had managed to avoid internment. As Henry will learn later from Mr. Okabe, many Japanese American prisoners were still willing to believe the best of their government even when the government did not believe in them.
Themes
Eventually, Mrs. Beatty tells Henry they need to leave to set up dinner in another section of the camp. Henry finishes washing trays, and then sits outside the second mess hall. He thinks about Keiko somewhere in the camp. He looks at the soldiers in their guard towers; he’s been told they are “[standing] watch, for the protection of the internees.” “But if that were so,” Henry thinks, “why were [the soldiers’] guns pointed inside the camp?”
In witnessing the soldiers, Henry is made even more acutely aware of the government’s hypocrisy. Though the government is maintaining a façade that internment is to protect Japanese Americans as much as it is to protect white Americans, the reality that Henry is witnessing proves what a thin excuse this is.
Themes
