My next Amazon purchase (along with the aforementioned Secret Identities)

(See Jamie Ford’s with Borders interview here.)

I’d like to take a moment to embarrass some of my contributors.  A few months ago, Winnovative, MinorityMilitant, Larry, and Jason sent me an Amazon.com certificate out of the blue.  I was totally surprised and really touched.  I LOVE Amazon–it’s my favorite store on the web.  Thank you so much!  I used to make a decent living before having kids, but with tons of expenses both in the present and future, I rarely spend these days.  With the cost of diapers, food, and eventual college, I’m most likely going to spend the next 21 years in poverty.

So I just used the gift certificate today by ordering Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet by Jamie Ford (and the Secret Identities book that I mentioned below).  Since Jamie Ford is an Asian American writer from the Pacific Northwest, I heard about this book before it was published.  Reviews have been both positive and negative. I’ve heard good reviews saying it was really emotional, showed great attention to its characters, and heartbreaking, along with bad reviews saying it was predictable, historically inaccurate on details, and corny. It’s not literary fiction, but these days, I’m reading everything, so I’m giving it a shot.  If it falls short of perfection, I’m still happy to spend money on it because:

A. From the description, it seems highly unlikely to be another Free Sex for Rice Chasers where the Asian guy is just a foil to emphasize positive characteristics of the white male characters. (Min Jin, you broke my heart!)

B. We don’t read enough stories about people like us by people like us.

C. An Asian male character with an Asian female love interest?  This is unheard of!  The fact that a White Guy doesn’t jump out of nowhere to save the Asian damsel in distress already deviates from the usual predictable storyline.

In short, I want to be reading more stories about us, AND we need to financially support publishers who publish stories about us. I will admit that I’m a bit uncomfortable with taking the Japanese American internment and turning it into a love story, but hey…we need more books about the internment, and we need more Asian American love stories.  This book just happens to combine the two.

Related posts:

1. Secret Identities
2. Fake Identities on the Net
3. Book World Out of Print
4. Wordstock
5. Japanese American Internment