Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet: Records (1942) Summary & Analysis

Keiko is back in school, and working in the cafeteria again with Henry. One day, she tells Henry she has a surprise for him. “Because I’m storing all your photographs?” Henry asks. “No,” says Keiko, “this is for taking me to the Black Elks Club with you.” Keiko says she’ll show Henry the surprise on their way home from school. On the walk home that day, she takes him to a department store and shows him a vinyl record titled “Oscar Holden & the Midnight Blue, The Alley Cat Strut.” Henry is delighted. “This is our song, the one he played for us!” he cries.

Keiko reveals that she saved her money to buy the record for Henry, and she invites him to her house to listen to it (since the record can’t be played on the Lees’ Victrola). “My parents want to meet you anyway,” Keiko says. This makes Henry nervous. “His parents,” he thinks, “probably would have nothing to do with Keiko. Were her parents that different?”

Henry and Keiko take the record to the checkout counter, but the woman working there refuses to acknowledge them. When Keiko speaks up, saying, “I’d like to buy this record, please,” the woman hisses: “Then why don’t you go back to your own neighborhood and buy it?” She continues: “We don’t serve people like you—besides, my husband is off fighting…” Henry steps forward and puts his “I Am Chinese” button on the counter. “I’ll buy it,” he says.

Reluctantly, the woman sells Henry the record. Henry pockets his button, and leads Keiko out of the store; he thinks that “the joy of her surprise” seems to have “popped like a helium balloon, loud and sharp.” When Keiko can finally speak she says she is used to being teased at school, “but this far from home, in a grown-up part of town” she had hoped she’d be treated better. Henry thinks, “At least we have the record […] A reminder of a place where […] when the music played, it didn’t seem to make one lick of difference if your last name was Abernathy or Anjou, Kung or Kobayashi.”

On their walk home, Henry and Keiko decide that Keiko should keep the record. Henry says, “My mother is always around, and I’m not sure she’d approve—because my father doesn’t like modern music.” As they continue walking, Henry and Keiko notice soldiers near the ferry terminal. They see hundreds of people de-boarding the ferry, and Henry realizes that Bainbridge Island, off the coast of Washington State, “must have been declared a military zone.” When Keiko asks where all the Bainbridge evacuees are being taken, Henry says he doesn’t know—but he silently notes that the Japanese families are being herded toward the train station.

Henry and Keiko fight through the crowd and soon find Sheldon Thomas, who reveals that the Black Elks Club has been temporarily closed after the FBI raid. Henry shows Sheldon the Oscar Holden record he and Keiko have just bought, and Sheldon says he has a copy as well. Sheldon also says that he’s heard of a prison of war camp built in Nevada. “They pass some order saying they can round up all the Japanese, Germans, and Italians,” he says, “but do you see any Germans in that crowd? You see them rounding up Joe DiMaggio?”

Sheldon encourages Keiko to head home to her family. Henry should go home, too, he says. “Your family’s going to be just as worried. Button or no button.” Henry and Keiko say “a wordless goodbye” and then “each [run] in a different direction of home.”