 CHILDHOOD
 orn and raised in Long
Beach, California, I am the
youngest of six children, and
a second-generation Japanese
American. My parents immigrated to
the U.S. in the early 1900s, got
married in 1921, and pursued the
American Dream. They had a Mom-and-Pop
grocery store in downtown Long Beach, built a
beautiful Spanish stucco home and had six children.
Prior to World War II, in the mid-1930s, when there
was a lot of prejudice towards the Japanese, a group | of young Caucasian men yelled racial
slurs at my sister and two brothers on
their first day of school. They drove
their car dangerously close to my
siblings to scare them. Unfortunately,
my six-year-old brother Henry’s
overalls got caught on the bumper of the
car and he was killed instantly. When my father went
to identify my brother’s mangled body he had a heart
attack, and would remain an invalid for the rest of his
life, until his death when I was seven years old.
After the outbreak of the war in 1941, 120,000
Japanese Americans were uprooted from their homes
and sent to concentration camps. My early childhood
was spent in three such camps: Santa Anita race
track, Jerome, Arkansas, and the last, in Gila, |