Kiyo's Story: A Japanese-American Family's Quest for the American Dream

by: Kiyo Sato

Published by: Soho Press, Inc.

Reviewed by Beth Cummings

(Originally published in 2007 by Willow Valley Press as Dandelion Through the Crack: The Sato Family Quest for the American Dream)

Kiyo Sato, the oldest of nine children born to John Shinji Sato and Mary Tomomi Sato, has written a marvelous tribute to their ability to overcome adversity.

As she states in her dedication – “the Issei generation (Japanese immigrants born in Japan) navigated the treacherous waters of the Depression, racial prejudice and internment, and delivered …the Nisei (first generation Japanese-Americans born on U.S soil) to safe shores. With non-violence and the safety of their children foremost, the coped with a most humiliating civil disaster and helped our country move forward toward a better America.”

Kiyo Sato’s father left Japan as a fourteen-year-old in 1911. He went with his father and brother to California to pick peaches in the Napa Valley. Eventually he was able to own a twenty-acre fruit farm, growing and selling strawberries, raspberries, walnuts and other produce. On this small farm, he and his wife worked together and raised their children–until 1941. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor the President signed Executive Order 9066: all persons with one-sixteenth or more Japanese blood had to leave their homes and all property they couldn’t carry by hand and move to internment camps. The Sato family, minus the eldest son who joined the U.S. Army, was sent to Poston, Arizona, in the middle of the desert.

Despite having to live with internment, the Sato’s made sure that their children were well educated. Eventually, all nine of the children had professional careers.

Kiyo Sato manages to bring her parents and each of her siblings to life in this memoir. Her father always kept a detailed diary and she used much of that information to fill in information she wouldn’t have otherwise known. She doesn’t say, but I strongly suspect that she also kept detailed journals because her descriptive details and are excellent.

As a memoir this is an endearing story. As a history, it belongs in both school and public libraries for the wealth of information about a black spot in American history and the way a fine family coped with it.

Armchair Interviews says: Most wonderful memoir that is also a history lesson.