Many other families also stored their possessions in the basement of the Panama Hotel. The Panama Hotel is where Keiko's family stored the greater part of their belongings when they were shipped to the internment camps. He agrees to go on the condition that his father (as part of an association of elders) saves the Panama Hotel from being sold. Henry arrives home one day to find a new suit and a steamer ticket to China in his name. Henry's father is intent on sending him to China to complete his education in a traditional manner. They decide to write each other letters, and Henry returns to Seattle. Visiting her there, he promises to wait for her until the war ends. With his friend, a local jazz musician named Sheldon, he also visits her in the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. He then travels with the lunch lady to serve meals at Camp Harmony, a temporary internment facility on the Western Washington Fairgrounds in Puyallup, Washington, where he sees her. When the residents of the city's Japantown are threatened with evacuation to internment camps, Henry safeguards Keiko's family's photo albums. One day a Japanese-American girl named Keiko Okabe joins him, also on scholarship. But Henry is nevertheless bullied by his white classmates and must work long hours in the cafeteria dishing out meals and cleaning up to fulfill the terms of his scholarship. His father makes him wear an 'I Am Chinese' button so he will not be mistaken for a Japanese boy in the heightened racist climate of World War II Seattle. Henry Lee, the son of Chinese parents in Seattle, Washington, is the only Asian child at his elementary school. The plot centers around the forced evacuation of Japanese Americans to internment camps the book depicts the pain and trauma of separation through the friendship of the Chinese-American Henry and his Japanese-American friend Keiko. The story is told in two parallel storylines, one following 12-year-old Henry Lee's experiences during the Second World War, and the other depicting Henry 44 years later as a widower with a college-aged son. Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is an historical novel by Jamie Ford.

Corner of bitter and sweet hotel