20th-century American history
A01=Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey
American history books
art and history books
art in memoirs
Asian American history
Author_Lily Yuriko Nakai Havey
California Japanese Americans
Category=DNB
Category=DNC
Category=JBSF1
Category=NHK
Category=NHWR7
Category=WQH
childhood in internment camps
coming-of-age in wartime
creative memoirs
discrimination in American history
emotional war memoirs
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
family displacement stories
heartbreaking WWII stories
historical memoir
historical nonfiction
historical trauma memoirs
history of injustice
history through art
internment camp adaptation
internment camp experiences
internment camp hardships
internment camp reflections
internment camp stories
internment photography
internment through a child's eyes
Japanese American families
Japanese American history
Japanese American identity
Japanese American internment
Japanese American memoirs
Japanese American resilience
Japanese internment education
Japanese internment history
Japanese internment memoir
Japanese internment survivors
life behind barbed wire
Lily Havey memoir
memoirs of injustice
memoirs of survival
memoirs with photography
personal war stories
race and war in America
racial injustice in America
remembering internment camps
stories of discrimination
the human cost of war
true accounts of WWII
true stories of internment
wartime incarceration
watercolor memoir
World War II personal narratives
WWII historical accounts
WWII internment camps
WWII Japanese Americans
WWII Japanese internment
WWII memoirs
Product details
- ISBN 9781607813439
- Weight: 1014g
- Dimensions: 178 x 254mm
- Publication Date: 15 Jun 2014
- Publisher: University of Utah Press,U.S.
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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Lily Nakai and her family lived in Southern California, where sometimes she and a friend dreamt of climbing the Hollywood sign that lit the night. At age ten, after believing that her family was simply going on a camping trip, she found herself living in a tar-papered barrack, gazing out instead at the nightly searchlight. She wondered if anything would ever be normal again.
In this creative memoir, Lily Havey combines storytelling, watercolour, and personal photographs to recount her youth in two Japanese American internment camps during World War II. She uses short vignettes - snapshots of people, recreated scenes and events - to describe how a ten-year-old girl grew into a teenager inside these camps. Vintage photographs reveal the historical, cultural, and familial contexts of that growth and of the Nakai family’s dislocation. They reveal the recollected lives of her mother and father in Japan and then America, where they began their arranged marriage and had two children. Havey’s vivid and poignant watercolours depict decades-old memories and dreams and reflect moments of daily camp life illuminated by the author’s adult perspective. The paintings and her animated writing draw readers into a turbulent era when America disgracefully incarcerated, without due process, thousands of American citizens because of their race.
These stories of love, loss, and discovery recall a girl balanced precariously between childhood and adolescence. In turns funny, wrenching, touching, and biting but consistently engrossing, they elucidate the daily challenges of life in the camp.
When, in 1980, Havey travelled across the Pacific and for the first time met her uncle Iwatake, a Zen Buddhist priest, she finally understood, in retrospect, the words her mother had spoken years earlier in camp: “You are American, but you are also Japanese.”
In this creative memoir, Lily Havey combines storytelling, watercolour, and personal photographs to recount her youth in two Japanese American internment camps during World War II. She uses short vignettes - snapshots of people, recreated scenes and events - to describe how a ten-year-old girl grew into a teenager inside these camps. Vintage photographs reveal the historical, cultural, and familial contexts of that growth and of the Nakai family’s dislocation. They reveal the recollected lives of her mother and father in Japan and then America, where they began their arranged marriage and had two children. Havey’s vivid and poignant watercolours depict decades-old memories and dreams and reflect moments of daily camp life illuminated by the author’s adult perspective. The paintings and her animated writing draw readers into a turbulent era when America disgracefully incarcerated, without due process, thousands of American citizens because of their race.
These stories of love, loss, and discovery recall a girl balanced precariously between childhood and adolescence. In turns funny, wrenching, touching, and biting but consistently engrossing, they elucidate the daily challenges of life in the camp.
When, in 1980, Havey travelled across the Pacific and for the first time met her uncle Iwatake, a Zen Buddhist priest, she finally understood, in retrospect, the words her mother had spoken years earlier in camp: “You are American, but you are also Japanese.”
Lily Havey was born in Los Angeles. In 1942, along with 120,000 persons of Japanese descent, she was incarcerated at the Amache Relocation Center in Colorado. After World War II her family moved to Salt Lake City where she attended West High School and the University of Utah. She graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music and pursued an MFA at the University of Utah. She taught in high school for thirteen years before establishing a stained glass business.
