Kiyo's Story

This is the "unforgettable" memoir of a family's journey from Japan to California-and through multiple internment camps during World War II (Sacramento News & Review).

"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." -Publishers Weekly

Auteur

Kiyo Sato was raised on a farm in Sacramento, California. She was attending Sacramento Junior College at the outbreak of World War II, when her parents and eight siblings were evacuated and forced into the Poston Internment Camp. Her memoirs, Kiyo's Story and Dandelion Through the Crack chronicle her family's struggle to endure these harsh conditions and to rebuild their lives afterward in the face of lingering prejudice.