Well-Read Life™

When reading becomes art (you can feel it)

I’m recommending Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet for my community’s 2010 Read Together campaign. Not because of its power to convey a feeling for history, though it has that power. I’m recommending it because in its pages, you don’t merely learn about the Japanese internment camps of World War Two, you feel them.

You feel the injustice of imprisoning innocent people. You also grasp the tension of the time—the chilling, unprecedented Pearl-Harbor fear that swept the nation and the West Coast in particular (including Seattle, the setting for this novel) after that famously infamous attack.

This is author Jamie Ford’s first novel, and yet he displays a seemingly effortless talent for making history as unexpected as it actually was. We see the shock of Japanese Americans as they are suddenly ostracized and then rounded up for relocation. We meet young Henry Lee, a twelve-year-old, first-generation Chinese boy whom his parents literally label, in order to save him from being mistaken as Japanese.

Henry is on scholarship to a white school, requiring officially that he work in the kitchen, and unofficially that he withstand the fists and taunts of his mainstream classmates. There he meets another scholarship kid, also assigned to kitchen duty, a Japanese girl. And we’re off to an old, but ever-new, love story set in a world at war.

Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet examines enduring issues. Must my father’s enemy be my enemy? Can immigrants ever really understand their first-generation children, and they their parents? When does loving parental guidance become unhealthy coercion? What is the right path when heart and duty point in opposite directions? Would you ever go to war for a country that imprisoned you? stole your property? damaged the people you love the most?

But I’m recommending Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet not only because of how powerfully it raises such timeless questions. I’m recommending the book because it is a work of art.

Somewhere amidst the fluttering photographs, the boarded-up buildings, the jazz spilling from segregated nightclubs out onto wet Seattle streets, I realized that this novel is one of those works of fiction that becomes literature. I might reach for words such as magical, moving, transcending and others people use to describe art, but like others, I would fail—fail to convey by other means an experience that must be had.

I recommend Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet because experiencing literature feels good in ways we can’t well describe, yet makes us want to try.

How about you, dear reader? Are you participating in your community’s Read Together campaign this year? I’d love to hear what you’re reading. Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).

Postscript: Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet is available in paperback, hardcover, digital and audio. I listened to Feodor Chin narrate the unabridged audiobook and loved his voices for the young hero and heroine, as well as the many adults of diverse ethnicity. I also bought the beautiful hardcover, which I wrote in, and then photographed, before passing the book to my sons.

Calling all proverbs Language Learning Magic Part III: Proverbs

Today’s digital docents—our phones, cameras, DVDs, car navigation systems, and iPhones—can create a virtual language-immersion experience any of us can dive into. This fortuitous conspiracy happened rather suddenly, and by accident, and it’s magical.

Even more magic awaits the language learner in the form of old-fashioned proverbs. Not only do they teach language but culture as well. Proverbs often embody what can be most pleasing about learning another language—a surprising change in perspective. Besides, they can make us laugh.

The power of proverbs to be all those things is what motivated Levenger to publish Gnomologia, the original source material (from several different languages) that inspired Ben Franklin to write his Poor Richard’s Almanack. (Sorry, we’ve sold out. Remember that old saying about the early bird.)

Lost and found in translation

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contrasts Franklin’s American “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” with the Chinese “No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.”The proverb shows the Chinese emphasis on the kind of brutally hard work necessary to grow rice profitably in tiny plots, and illustrates the different perspectives in Eastern and Western cultures.

When it comes to Spanish, all of us already know one proverb: Mi casa es su casa. It’s more poetic than the English Make yourself at home. Perhaps it’s this, along with its easily understood translation, that explains why Americans have adopted Mi casa es su casa in its original Spanish.

There are other cases where the Spanish equivalent is better than the English version. For example, El que madruga, Dios le ayuda. (He who gets up early, God helps.) Not only does this rhyme, which is an advantage for a proverb, but in my opinion, it’s far more appealing than the English, The early bird gets the worm. I still remember hearing that utterance as a child and thinking, “Yuck! I’ll stay in bed.” Who wouldn’t prefer God’s help to a gooey worm?

In other cases, I consider the English version superior, as in the Spanish proverb Quien mucho abarca, poca aprieta. (He who grasps for too much, holds on to little.) That’s not bad, but it’s not nearly as vivid or persuasive as the English A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.

I have to give the nod to the Spanish in two other proverb contests: For the English, Don’t make a mountain out of a molehill, the Spanish say, No te ahogues en un vaso de agua. (Don’t drown in a glass of water.) And for the uninspired English saying, It’s a small world, Spanish speakers knowingly offer El mundo es un pañuelo. (The world is a handkerchief.)

But my favorites are rhyming Spanish proverbs that have no English equivalent.

El que no oye consejo, no llega a viejo. (He who doesn’t listen to advice won’t arrive at old age.) And especially De medico, poeta y loco, todos tenemos un poco. (The doctor, poet and lunatic, we all have a little.) Think how often you could use that one, like when you hand someone an aspirin or a bit of wisdom, or forget something obvious.

My hat’s off to Simon and Schuster’s Pimsleur language instructors for these proverbs they wisely add to their Spanish audio program.

From mala to worse, with a smile

I was attempting to show off my new Spanish proverb prowess to my friend Tami Jordan Brook, who listened with the patience of the grade-school teacher she is. She teaches French, but tossed a delicious Spanish saying back at me:

De Guatamala a Guatapeor.

This, Tami explained, is the wordplay Spanish speakers use to say “from bad to worse,” since mala means bad and peor means worse. There is no actual Guatapeor, of course, so it’s hard to say the line without smiling.

Part of Latino culture, I’m learning, is to joke in the face of difficulty, and what a happy and useful habit that is, especially these days.

So how about you, dear reader? Can you share a proverb from another language? I’m all ears.

Just click on the Comments link below with your submission. (If you’re reading this as an email, click here and you'll connect to Comments).