Journey to Topaz is a children's book, which is probably why it was less satisfying for me. Yuki, the main character, is 11, and Amazon rates it as for age 9-12 or grades 4-6. It would bore my 14-year-olds. Maybe when they were 9 or 10 it would have suited.
Yoshiko Uchida wasn't a child during the internment, even though she writes about the experience from a child's point of view. She was around the same age as some of my other authors -- born in 1921, two years after Monica Sone and two years before John Okada, she was 20 and a senior at UC Berkeley when she was forced to enter the temporary holding camp at Tanforan (like Toshio Mori and Miné Okubo, who were in their 30s at the time) and then on to the Topaz internment camp in Utah. However, Uchida worked as a teacher in the camps, and that must be how she gained insight into what the experience was like for children.
The story begins on Sunday, December 7, 1941. Yuki is at home in Berkeley with her parents. Listening to the radio during lunch they hear about the attack on Pearl Harbor, but at first they don't believe it. Later the same day, however, FBI agents show up at the house and take Yuki's father away. He is held at Immigration Headquarters in San Francisco for a few weeks and then sent to an internment camp in Montana. Meanwhile, Yuki's mother and brother Ken, a college student, must pack up the house in preparation for their own "evacuation": selling what they can, giving what they can to friends to store. Yuki must give up her beloved dog Pepper and her bird, Old Salt.
On May 1st, 1942, they report to the Tanforan Assembly Center, where they are assigned to live in a former horse stall (as Miné Okubo also describes, in Citizen 13660). Four months later, they are sent to the internment camp in Topaz, Utah, where they spend a year, during which time her father is released from the camp in Montana and comes to join them at Topaz, and her brother leaves them to join the Army. But Yuki's father begins to be threatened by a group of "bitter, frustrated, and fanatical men who seemed to hate everybody, especially those residents who worked with the Caucasian administrative staff."
Fearing for his life, Yuki's father somehow gets permission for the family to leave the camp and move to Salt Lake City. On the last page of the book, they get on a bus that will take them to their new life. Yuki is happy: "It was as though she had climbed out of a cocoon and suddenly discovered the sun." Of course, they aren't going home -- the West Coast is still off limits to Japanese Americans -- and Yuki's father doesn't know what he'll do in Salt Lake City (in Berkeley he worked for a large Japanese firm), and he'll have to report regularly to a parole officer... but it's still better than the camp. At least they hope it will be.
Sections of the book are interesting and moving, while others seem too childish. I was particularly unimpressed by the ending, which seemed written entirely for young children. But this is a book for children, I kept reminding myself. It's good that a book like this exists. Elementary school kids could learn a lot from a book like this. I didn't learn anything, but that's because I'd already read Citizen 13660 and Nisei Daughter.
When I read Uchida's bio on Wikipedia, I realized that she had written a lot of books, and perhaps this wasn't the best one I could have chosen. The problem was that although she published her first book in 1949, the books I would have been interested in reading were written later, after 1972, which is the cut-off for the Classics Challenge this year. So this one was probably the best choice for the Challenge -- but there's no reason why I can't read some of the others too. Thus I put in library requests for three other books by Uchida: Journey Home (1978), the sequel to Journey to Topaz, about what happens to Yuki and her family after the camps; Desert Exile: The Uprooting of a Japanese Family (1982), a memoir about what really happened to Uchida and her family; and Picture Bride (1987), a novel for adults about a young woman who comes to California from Japan in 1917 for an arranged marriage.
I'm going to go ahead and post this now, but I'll update it as the other books come in and I read them.
At the start of Journey Home, Yuki and her parents are living in Salt Lake City, in an apartment in the house of an elderly white couple. The woman expresses doubt that the U.S. would have imprisoned Japanese Americans unless they really were a threat, and Yuki can't convince her otherwise. Later, the family is able to return to Berkeley, but bad things happen there too. Yuki's father can't find work and they have to live dormitory style at the Japanese church. Someone chops down the cherry tree planted next to Yuki's sister's grave in the cemetery. Eventually they join forces with others to start a small grocery store, but someone who doesn't like Japanese sets it on fire. Yuki's brother Ken is wounded in the fighting in Europe and is sent home, but he must use a cane and is very depressed because a close friend of his died in the war.
I suppose if I were a kid, I might not like this book because it's too depressing. But as an adult I find it realistic. The happy ending, when it comes -- and it does come -- feels earned. Yuki grows and changes, as do the other characters. Anyone who reads Journey to Topaz should definitely also read Journey Home to get the whole story.
In some ways the book sounds like a children's book, and since this was Uchida's only novel for adults, it makes sense that she would have trouble changing the voice she's accustomed to using in her writing. The main difference seems to be that the adults have sex, and each time sex was mentioned I found it jarring.
The book has four main sections: 1917-1918, 1920-1921, 1930-1940, and 1941-1943. The first section was the most interesting to me, while the third section was the weakest. The Great Depression isn't even mentioned, which seemed very odd. The fourth section is Journey to Topaz all over again -- Hana and Taro live in a former horse stable at Tanforan and all the rest of it. The characters in Picture Bride act out many of the same incidents that occur in Journey to Topaz. I'm very curious now to read Uchida's nonfiction memoir, Desert Exile (still on its way to me through Prospector).
Picture Bride ends in 1943, with Hana still at Topaz. She plans to stay until she can go back to California (with her husband's remains), even though her daughter lives in Salt Lake City and she could leave to join her there. She has great plans for herself in the future -- she will buy back the shop Taro had to sell when they went into the camp and become an American citizen. In some ways the ending is as falsely cheerful as the ending of Journey to Topaz. This isn't my favorite Uchida book.
I was looking forward to reading this book of Uchida's, and in some ways I was not disappointed by it. I finally learned the sources of many of the stories she tells in her other books. There are no false happy endings. The book actually has a somewhat happy ending, because Uchida and her sister both did well in later life (they were in their early 20s when they were in the camps), but it's an earned -- and qualified -- happy ending. Their father worked a succession of menial jobs after getting out of Topaz and then had a stroke, but never lost his positive attitude.
But Uchida is angry in this book. Of course, she was angry in all the books she wrote about the evacuation, but in this book she makes no attempt to tone down her anger. It's there on almost every page and she makes it clear that her anger is justified. So that was good to read from her at last.
It's funny, though. I kept losing the thread of the story, had some trouble making it through. Maybe I've read this story (told by different people) too many times now. What I started thinking, toward the end, was that the book I really wanted to be reading was Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660. Okubo lived in the same horse stable at Tanforan that Uchida's family did, and Uchida tells a funny story about her:
The artist who lived a few stalls down tried to solve her need for privacy by tacking a large "Quarantined--Do Not Enter" sign on her door. But rather than keeping people away, it only drew further attention to her reluctant presence.
"What's wrong with you?" her friends would call.
And she would shout back, "Hoof and mouth disease. Go away!"
If I were going to recommend a book about the camps to someone who knew nothing about them, which one would I recommend? To a child, of course, Uchida's Journey to Topaz, even though I had issues with it. But to an adult? Desert Exile is good, and Monica Sone's Nisei Daughter is good, but Miné Okubo's Citizen 13660 maybe cuts to the chase better than any of them. I don't know. My opinion seems to change based on my mood. In the end, I'm glad all these books exist, and of course there have been more written since then. They describe a very challenging time in our nation's history, a shameful time, a time that mustn't be forgotten.
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