Kiyo's Story
A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream
-
- $9.99
Publisher Description
When Kiyo’s father left Japan, his mother told him never to return: there was no future there for him. Shinji Sato arrived in California determined to plant his roots in the land of opportunity even though he could not become a citizen or own land. Education was his watchword.
He and his wife and their nine American-born children labored in the fields together, building a successful farm. Yet at the outbreak of World War II, when Kiyo, the eldest, was eighteen, the Satos were ordered to Poston Internment Camp.
This memoir tells the story of the family’s struggle to endure in these harsh conditions and to rebuild their lives afterward in the face of lingering prejudice. Rejected by several nursing schools due to her ethnicity, Kiyo eventually became a captain in the Army Nursing Corps. The Satos returned home to find their farm in ruins, occupied by another family, but through fortitude and ingenuity, they persevered and ultimately succeeded.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this memoir, originally published as Dandelion Through the Crack, first generation Japanese-American Sato chronicles the tribulations her family endured in America through the Great Depression and WWII. Emigrating from Japan in 1911, Sato's parents built a home and cultivated a marginal plot of land into a modest but sustaining fruit farm. One of nine children, Sato recounts days on the farm playing with her siblings and lending a hand with child-care, house cleaning and grueling farm work. Her anecdotes regarding the family's devotion to one another despite their meager lifestyle (her father mending a little brother's shoe with rubber sliced from a discarded tire) gain cumulative weight, especially when hard times turn tragic: in the wake of Pearl Harbor, the Satos find themselves swept up by U.S. authorities and shuffled through multiple Japanese internment camps, ending up in a desert facility while the farm falls to ruin. Sato's memoir is a poignant, eye-opening testament to the worst impulses of a nation in fear, and the power of family to heal the most painful wounds.
