Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: Camp Harmony (1942) 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’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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.”

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.”

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.

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?”