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Flag Duty (1942)
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
Henry arrives in the school kitchen to find a girl his age washing lunch trays. Mrs. Beatty introduces the girl as a new transfer student named Keiko. When Mrs. Beatty leaves the two alone, Henry finds out that Keiko’s last name is Okabe; she is Japanese. Henry’s father, a Chinese nationalist who has organized an office in Seattle to raise funds for Chinese forces fighting the Japanese in China, has forbidden Henry from having Japanese friends. Keiko notices Henry’s cold reaction and says, “I’m American.”
Henry’s hesitancy in befriending Keiko is critical to note. This shows that Henry has unconsciously absorbed some of his father’s anti-Japanese beliefs. Furthermore, the fact that Keiko feels compelled to assert her identity as an American shows how insidious bigotry is: Keiko has to defend herself (to another Asian American, no less) in order to “prove” that she belongs in the space she occupies.
Themes
Henry and Keiko work side by side serving lunch to their classmates, who taunt them with racial slurs and pull their corners of their eyes in caricature of Asian features. When their work is finally done, Henry and Keiko share canned pears in the storage room and Henry thinks that the food “taste[s] especially good that day.”
The fact that Henry has already begun to enjoy Keiko’s company illustrates a difference between Henry and his father: Henry is far less rigid in his thinking, and is open to experiencing actual interactions with a Japanese American person, rather than allowing his preconceived notions about an entire group of people get in the way. Additionally, the cruel, racist behavior of Henry and Keiko’s classmates emphasizes again how monolithic xenophobia is as a structure of thought. Henry and Keiko are both Asian, so they are lumped together as outsiders, despite the differences between them and their cultural heritages (to say nothing of the fact that both of them were born in America). Finally, the fact that Henry’s lunch tastes better to him after having met Keiko foreshadows the power that love will have to transcend painful circumstances in both Henry and Keiko’s lives.
Themes
