With a brisk narrative style full of lively dialogue, Uchida writes of two decades of American life thrown into sharp contrast during a 1930's family visit to Japan when she and her sister felt totally foreign. The author's experiences as a girl growing up in Berkeley, California, were thoroughly American; she had a bicultural childhood, as well, because of the unseen thread she describes as binding her parents to the Japan they left behind long before World War I. Her account of the family's forced internment in 1942, just as she was completing her university degree, unfolds within the context of their previous life as U.S. citizens. Uchida emphasizes her youth, the internment and a bit about early vocational attempts, rather than her development as a writer and her successful career yielding more than two dozen published books. Two of Uchida's novels for children concern the internment: JOURNEY TO TOPAZ (Scribner's, 1971) and JOURNEY HOME (Atheneum, 1978). Several of her other novels fictionalize Japanese-American California life during the 1930's. (Ages 9-14)

Growing up in California, Yoshi knew her family looked different from their neighbors. Still, she felt like an American. But everything changed when America went to war against Japan. Along with all the other Japanese-Americans on the West Coast, Yoshi's family were rounded up and imprisoned in a crowded. badly built camp in the desert because they"looked like the enemy." Yoshiko Uchida grew up to be an award-winning author. This memoir of her childhood gives a personal account of a shameful episode in American history.