Desert Exile

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, everything changed for Yoshiko Uchida. Desert Exile is her autobiographical account of life before and during World War II. The book does more than relate the day-to-day experience of living in stalls at the Tanforan Racetrack, the assembly center just south of San Francisco, and in the Topaz, Utah, internment camp. It tells the story of the courage and strength displayed by those who were interned.

Replaces ISBN 9780295961903

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.

Introduction by Traise Yamamoto

1. The House above Grove Street

2. On Being Japanese and American

3. Pearl Harbor

4. Evacuation

5. Tanforan: A Horse Stall for Four

6. Tanforan: City behind Barbed Wire

7. Topaz: City of Dust

8. Topaz: Winter’s Despair

Epilogue