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
Samantha cooks a delicious Chinese dinner for Marty and Henry. The three toast to “a successful find in the basement time capsule of the Panama Hotel.” Samantha brings out the special dessert she’s made: dragon’s beard candy. “I’ve been practicing,” she says. “Sometimes you have to just go for it. Try for what’s hardest to accomplish. Like you and your childhood sweetheart.” Startled, Henry replies: “I see my son’s been sharing stories.” Samantha presses Henry to search for Keiko. She “might still be out there somewhere,” she says. “Aren’t you curious where she is, where she might be?”
Samantha shows herself to be a thoughtful and compassionate person, one who is determined to claim her place in her fiancé’s family, while showing respect for traditions that are not her own. Furthermore, Samantha again demonstrates her willingness to ask uncomfortable questions, thereby granting Henry permission to inwardly (if not yet outwardly) acknowledge feelings he has been harboring for years.
Themes
To himself, Henry admits that he has thought of Keiko over the course of the years, and that he does still love her; he loved her even as he was married to Ethel, whom he also loved. However, now as then, Henry is sure that he “love[s] [Keiko] enough to let her go—to not go dredging up the past.” Marty presses the issue, saying that Henry should return Keiko’s sketchbooks to her. Henry insists that “she might not even be alive.” “People didn’t look back,” he says, “and there was nothing to return to, so they moved on.” Still, Henry begins to wonder “what else he might find if he look[s] hard enough.”
Henry struggles between his desire to reconnect with Keiko and his conviction that the healthiest way to deal with a traumatic past is to move on from it and not look back. As Henry is starting to see, though, memories have a tendency to reassert themselves, and Marty and Samantha seem determined to push Henry toward the happy ending they are sure he can still find. Now that he is a widower, Henry feels free for the first time to wonder what might happen if he were to go looking for Keiko.
Themes
