Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese American Family

by Yoshiko Uchida, Traise Yamamoto (Introduction)

Overview

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changed for Yoshiko Uchida. Desert Exile is her autobiographical account of life before and during World War II. The book does more than relate the day-to-day experience of living in stalls at the Tanforan Racetrack, the assembly center just south of San Francisco, and in the Topaz, Utah, internment camp. It tells the story of the courage and strength displayed by those who were interned.

Replaces ISBN 9780295961903

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780295994758
Publisher:	University of Washington Press
Publication date:	04/01/2015
Series:	Classics of Asian American Literature
Edition description:	revised edition
Pages:	184
Sales rank:	1,109,006
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.70(d)
Lexile:	1280L (what's this?)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Yoshiko Uchida (1921–92) was born in Berkeley, California, and was in her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and interned. Traise Yamamoto is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body.

Table of Contents

Introduction by Traise Yamamoto

1. The House above Grove Street

2. On Being Japanese and American

3. Pearl Harbor

4. Evacuation

5. Tanforan: A Horse Stall for Four

6. Tanforan: City behind Barbed Wire

7. Topaz: City of Dust

8. Topaz: Winter’s Despair

Epilogue

What People are Saying About This

Senator Daniel K. Inouye

Yoshiko Uchida has given us a chronicle of a very special kind of courage, the courage to preserve normalcy and humanity in the face of irrationality and inhumanity. Her family’s story, told in loving detail, brings alive the internment experience and is an important book for all Americans. It is not a history of the decisions that were made during this period; rather, it is the story of the human lives touched and molded by those decisions. As such, it is infinitely more important, and infinitely more precious.

United States Senator Daniel K. Inouye

Yoshiko Uchida has given us a chronicle of a very special kind of courage, the courage to preserve normalcy and humanity in the face of irrationality and inhumanity. Her family’s story, told in loving detail, brings alive the internment experience and is an important book for all Americans. It is not a history of the decisions that were made during this period, but rather it is the story of the human lives touched and molded by those decisions. As such it is infinitely more important, and infinitely more precious.

Editorial Reviews

"Desert Exile is a beautifully written personal history. . . . Uchida’s intention was to illuminate the Issei and Nisei internment experience on a personal level for the benefit of later generations. She has succeeded."

Western Historical Quarterly

"A sensitive, readable account that captures with insight and human warmth the feel of what it was like to be sent by one's own government into exile in the wilderness. It is a work worthy of an unforgettable experience."—Pacific Citizen

"In Desert Exile the happy life of a Japanese American family before [being removed to a] concentration camp makes their surrealist nightmare experience after December 7, 1941, all the more inexplicable and horrifying."—San Francisco Review of Books

"Desert Exile is a beautifully written personal history. . . . Uchida's intention was to illuminate the Issei and Nisei internment experience on a personal level for the benefit of later generations. She has succeeded."—Western Historical Quarterly

From the Publisher