Concat two strings to form an escape character in Java

Question

I'm trying to read a file character by character and get escape characters interpreted as a single character (\b = '\b' instead of '\' + 'b').

I've performed the following experiment:

System.out.println("\\" + 'b');
System.out.println("" + '\\' + 'b');
System.out.println('\b');
System.out.println("\b");

gives me

\b
\b

Any clues? Thanks