Review of themes in East is East

I recently finished reading the book East is East, and I noticed that there are a lot of themes that stay constant throughout the book. One of these themes is trust and betrayal. There are a lot of different trust interactions throughout the book. Another theme is ignorance and racism. The Americans know nothing about Hiro, so they resort to calling him racist names, and visa verse.

The theme of trust and betrayal is strongest in the book between Saxby, Ruth, and Hiro. Ruth hides Hiro and protects him without telling anyone, even her boyfriend Saxby. She ends up hooking up with Hiro because it's just something she wanted to do. Saxby eventually finds out about both of these things, and feels really betrayed. He has to decide between betraying them and telling the police, which he does because he didn't know Hiro was a good person, but he still had the police keep Ruth out of it.

Another big theme in East is East is ignorance and Racism. I did my last post about this and I'm writing more about it now because it is such a huge theme. The Americans are horribly racist towards Hiro, but they have absolutely no way of judging him outside of stereotypes that all come out of other people's ignorance. Hiro has stereotypes about Americans that aren't true of everybody, but his experiences prove them true. I think the author did that to make a point. He is saying that we have horrible and untrue views of other societies, but we live up to the stereotypes about ourselves.