While some German-Americans experienced unlawful discrimination and personal assaults during WWII, they were mostly left to live their lives in whatever community they had settled in and to continue keeping their businesses, jobs, houses, property and money. Imagine being born in a country and to all intents and purposes being an American Citizen but having Chinese descendants makes you different.

While my memory of the time is going to be different than that of a 50 year old character, I wound up being very tired of the repeated anachronisms. This is an entertaining and often illuminating tale that no doubt will be appearing at a cinema near you soon. Then the story fast-forwards to decades later, when Henry Lee is an old man with a grown son of his own.

Check out this in-depth discussion with author Jamie Ford about his novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet. It sounded like the perfect book for my mood: Not too highfalutin or literary, but a good story I which I can immerse myself and escape to a different time and place.

It meant he had to communicate in sign language with his parents, except on occasion when he had to translate for them.

the exploration of Henry’s changing relationship with his family and with Keiko will keep most readers turning pages. The characterisation is second-to-none, the story is intriguing, to say the least, and throws up some issues I wasn't even aware of.

In the opening pages of Jamie Ford’s stunning debut novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet, Henry Lee comes upon a crowd gathered outside the Panama Hotel, once the gateway to Seattle’s Japantown.In Henry and Keiko, Jamie Ford has created an unforgettable duo whose story teaches us of the power of forgiveness and the human heart. Those years are seen through the eyes of a 12-year-old Chinese-American boy at first, and then of a 56-year-old widower, both of whom are Henry Lee. World War II caused prejudices to explode within and without the enclaves, both from national patriotism and personal considerations.

The discovery of belongings left behind by Japanese American families at the Panama Hotel brings on a rush of memories, and Henry embarks on a journey to look for Keiko again, hoping to right the past. Unfortunately, diversity is difficult to tolerate in actual practice, particularly when cultural differences are perceived as putting others of different cultures in mortal danger.

America was created with a written Constitution defining us as a Republic democracy with certain laws. America suspended Constitutional rights for Japanese Americans during the war and imprisoned them in concentration camps as if they were prisoners-of-war. It is historical fiction for the Nicholas Sparks set -- an emotionally heavy-handed novel that is well told, but not particularly well written.