Desert Exile

Yoshiko Uchida (1921–92) was born in Berkeley, California, and was in her senior year at the University of California, Berkeley, when Japanese Americans on the West Coast were rounded up and interned. Traise Yamamoto is associate professor of English at the University of California, Riverside. She is the author of Masking Selves, Making Subjects: Japanese American Women, Identity, and the Body.

"A sensitive, readable account that captures with insight and human warmth the feel of what it was like to be sent by one's own government into exile in the wilderness. It is a work worthy of an unforgettable experience."(Pacific Citizen) "In Desert Exile the happy life of a Japanese American family before [being removed to a] concentration camp makes their surrealist nightmare experience after December 7, 1941, all the more inexplicable and horrifying."(San Francisco Review of Books) "Desert Exile is a beautifully written personal history. . . . Uchida's intention was to illuminate the Issei and Nisei internment experience on a personal level for the benefit of later generations. She has succeeded."(Western Historical Quarterly)

• Introduction by Traise Yamamoto1. The House above Grove Street2. On Being Japanese and American3. Pearl Harbor4. Evacuation5. Tanforan: A Horse Stall for Four6. Tanforan: City behind Barbed Wire7. Topaz: City of Dust8. Topaz: Winter's DespairEpilogue