Search results for ""Author Gene Oishi""

A memoir about the lingering racial trauma of America's concentration camps, from the author of Fox Drum BebopCan one wreak vengeance against oneself? This anguished question hangs over Gene Oishi's powerful memoir about his lifelong struggle to claim both his Japanese and American identities in the aftermath of World War II, when he and more than 120,000 other Japanese Americans were forcibly removed from their homes and incarcerated in America's concentration camps. From the moment he and everyone like him on the West Coast is deemed a threat to national security by President Roosevelt's infamous Executive Order 9066, Oishi finds himself trying to distance himself from his Japanese heritage even as he questions whether he will ever truly be accepted as fully American. Throughout his return to California as a teenager, his postwar service in the US Army and his subsequent career in journalism and politics, the deep wounds caused by the trauma of incar

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Hiroshi Kono is eight years old and only just beginning to question the racial and economic inequities he sees around him, when he and his family--along with 120,000 other Japanese Americans--are packed off to a concentration camp run by the US government. The harsh and barren world of the Arizona desert where Hiroshi and his family find themselves sets sibling against sibling, parent against child and neighbor against neighbor in a complex grappling with duty and disappointment that will reverberate through the ensuing decades. Sexual initiation, kabuki tales, jazz clubs and alcoholism form the backdrop against which Hiroshi, his siblings and his parents struggle to define themselves. Whether describing Hiroshi’s tumultuous postwar coming of age or excavating generational grievances exacerbated by internment, Gene Oishi gives heartbreaking and at times humorous context to the life of a family set adrift by its wartime experiences.

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