Looking Like the Enemy: My Story of Imprisonment in Japanese American Internment Camps

by Mary Matsuda Gruenewald

Overview

The author at 16 years old was evacuated with her family to an internment camp for Japanese Americans, along with 110,000 other people of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast. She faced an indefinite sentence behind barbed wire in crowded, primitive camps. She struggled for survival and dignity, and endured psychological scarring that has lasted a lifetime.

This memoir is told from the heart and mind of a woman now nearly 80 years old who experienced the challenges and wounds of her internment at a crucial point in her development as a young adult. She brings passion and spirit to her story. Like "The Diary of Anne Frank," this memoir superbly captures the emotional and psychological essence of what it was like to grow up in the midst of this profound dislocation and injustice in the U.S. Few other books on this subject come close to the emotional power and moral significance of this memoir.

In the end,the reader is buoyed by what Mary learns from her experiences and what she is able to do with her life. In 2005 she becomes one more Nissei who breaks her silence.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780939165537
Publisher:	NewSage Press
Publication date:	04/18/2005
Pages:	192
Sales rank:	1,058,159
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Mary Matsuda Gruenewald was eighty years old when her first book was published in April 2005. With her memoir, Looking Like the Enemy, Gruenewald has broken her silence as a Nisei (second generation Japanese American) who was imprisoned in Japanese-American internment camps during World War II. After being released from her last Japanese-American internment camp, Mary became a registered nurse, and worked as an RN for more than a quarter of a century. She established the Consulting Nurse Service within the Group Health Cooperative in 1971, which has become a national model for numerous health care providers. In 2002, she was a medical delegate representing seniors on behalf of Medicare Plus Choice. At that meeting, Mary was selected along with ten other delegates to advise President George W. Bush on health care issues.

Emily Woo Zeller is an Earphones award-winning audiobook narrator. After beginning her voiceover career with Asian animation, she returned to the United States and began narrating a broad spectrum of audiobook genres. Her multilingual, multicultural framework brings a particularly unique, clear-eyed, and intimate perspective to the Asian American narratives she specializes in.