Browse > Theme > Motherhood
15 articles
A Girl Like You (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Historical Fiction
- Coming of age, Evils of racism, Family – blessing or curse, Importance of community, Motherhood, Quest for discovery, Role of women
- Available
Coming-of-age novel by Maureen Lindley that takes place largely in Manzanar and whose protagonist is a mixed-race Sansei girl.
An American Christmas (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Family – blessing or curse, Immigrant experience, Motherhood, Working class struggles
- Available
Short story by Alice Nash centering on an elderly Issei woman in contemporary New York. As she struggles to carry a bag of rice home to her apartment, she reflects on her arrival in New York with her late husband after leaving the concentration camp and the kind Yamaguchi family who put them up while refusing to take money from them. They eventually opened a cleaning shop that helped pay for their only son's college education. A successful businessman in California, the son takes her on a trip every year, but largely keeps her away from her grandchildren due to his white wife's discomfort with her. When she gets back to her apartment, the family of the building's supervisor, the Gonzalez family, invites her to their home to help decorate their Christmas tree.
"Iwao-chan!" (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Everlasting love, Motherhood
- No availability
Short story by Yachiyo Uehara about a Nisei woman's bond with her deceased Issei mother in the years after the war. As the story begins, Yachiyo is on a plane from New York to San Francisco around 1950 with her two-year-old son Andy, the first time since the war years that she would be returning to her hometown. She will be moving there, initially staying with her Issei father. She is saddened that Andy will never meet her mother, whom she last saw in 1944 when she left Heart Mountain for New York and who subsequently died after they returned to San Francisco. She is relieved that her father, who dislikes children, tolerates Andy and even seems to like him. But she is also concerned about the dangerous stairs leading to the small house. She finds that despite her death two years prior, her mother's presence permeates the house. One …
Garden of Stones (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Historical Fiction
- Role of women, Motherhood, Temporary nature of physical beauty, Power of the past, Facing darkness
- Widely available
Popular novel by Sophie Littlefield centering on three generations of Japanese American women whose lives are dramatically shaped by the wartime incarceration of the elder two at Manzanar .
Homecoming (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Fiction
- Love and sacrifice, Motherhood, Wisdom of experience
- Widely available
Short story by Toshio Mori about an Issei woman's first visit with her son Mamoru after he has been severely wounded in combat as a member of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team . "Homecoming" takes the form of a story told in the woman's first person voice to her grandchildren. It is one of several stories by Mori featuring the same woman published in the Pacific Citizen between 1949 and 1952 that later became the basis of his novel Woman from Hiroshima , published in 1978. The first half of the story is about her efforts to see her son after being allowed to leave Topaz to return to the West Coast . She is at first dismayed to learn that he has been moved to a military hospital in Auburn, California, known to be a hotbed of anti-Japanese racism. Arriving in Auburn, they see numerous anti-Japanese signs and are …
I Call to Remembrance: Toyo Suyemoto's Years of Internment (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Rights - individual or societal, Motherhood, Displacement
- Widely available
The memoir of poet Toyo Suyemoto that spans her years of incarceration in Tanforan Assembly Center and later, at Topaz in Utah, from spring 1942 to late autumn 1945. The book, published in 2007 by Rutgers University Press, focuses on the quotidian life in an American concentration camp, while coping both physically and psychologically with the brutality of imprisonment behind barbed wire. The book is dedicated to Suyemoto's son Kay and details his short life from birth in Berkeley, California, to his first steps at Tanforan in a crowded horse stall, and finally to Utah where he developed a serious asthmatic condition and pneumonia in the harsh atmosphere of camp which eventually lead to his premature death. Suyemoto's memoir includes the impact of policies and wartime decisions on her family and the larger Japanese American community, bringing insight on complex and controversial questions of loyalty, citizenship and resistance. She also …
Join Me in Laughter (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Motherhood, Optimism—power of folly, Wisdom of experience
- Widely available
A grandmother tells her grandchildren about the meaning of life, while recalling episodes related to her confinement and return from Topaz . Apparently the same character as in the story " The Remembered Days ," published a year earlier, she recalls her adult children leaving Topaz behind to move on with their lives, acts of both prejudice and kindness upon her return to California, and the end of the war, while encouraging an optimistic attitude towards life.
Kai's Mother (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Historical Fiction
- Immigrant experience, Motherhood, Will to survive, Wisdom of experience
- Available
Short story by Gretel Ehrlich told in the first person voice of an Issei woman as she rides the train back to California from Heart Mountain at war's end. The characters in the story were introduced in Ehrlich's earlier novel Heart Mountain .
The Long Journey and the Short Ride (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Fiction
- Darkness and light, Motherhood, Optimism – power or folly, Reunion
- Available
Seemingly autobiographical story by Toshio Mori about the author and his brother, a paralyzed veteran of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team , recalling the latter's visit to Topaz prior to shipping out for combat in Europe. The author and his mother get a pass to leave Topaz for the first time since they had arrived in order to see the brother off at the train station. Their apprehensions about being outside the camp are eased by a white family—who had also just seen a son off to war—who offer them a ride to town. Shifting back to the present of the story, the author notes the successful recovery that his brother has made since the war and both brothers lament that neither of their parents lived to see that recovery. The same incident is the basis for another story Mori had written in 1943 titled " The Travelers ." "The …
The Loom (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Adult
- Fiction
- Communication – verbal and nonverbal, Facing darkness, Loneliness as destructive force, Motherhood, Power of silence
- Widely available
Short story by R. A. Sasaki that portrays the life of a Nisei woman looking both backwards and forwards after the death of one of her daughters. Born and raised in San Francisco where her family ran a boarding house, the unnamed woman graduated from the University of California before being incarcerated with her family in Tanforan and Topaz during World War II. Returning to San Francisco after the war having married a Kibei man she had known from before the war, she has four daughters while her husband works in the flower industry. Devoted to her daughters, she is at a loss as they leave the house to pursue their own lives and after one dies in a mountain climbing accident. Her daughters' efforts to bring her out of her torpor are largely unsuccessful until one gives her a loom, through which she is able to express the feelings …
The Evacuation Diary of Hatsuye Egami (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Non Fiction
- Chaos and order, Displacement, Family - blessing or curse, Immigrant experience, Inner versus outer strength, Motherhood, Self-awareness
- Available
Translation of the wartime diary of Hatsuye Egami, who carefully describes her experiences and observations while incarcerated at Tulare Assembly Center during World War II.
The Remembered Days (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Motherhood, Wisdom of experience
- Widely available
A grandmother tells her grandchildren about her exclusion and confinement. Told in the first person voice of the grandmother, the story is divided into three sections: (1) recalling the train ride from Tanforan to Topaz ; (2) a rumination of the absurdity of the camp being dubbed the "Jewel of the Desert"; and (3) her remembrances of hearing of her son Yoshio's death while serving with the 442nd .
Unfinished Message (short story)
- Short Stories
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Memoir
- Communication – verbal and nonverbal, Motherhood
- Available
Seemingly autobiographical story by Toshio Mori about his mother and brother. The story begins in 1945 in Topaz , where the author's mother can't sleep one night because of anxiety about her son, who is serving in Europe. She later finds out that he was wounded in battle that night. Later, they arrange for his transfer to a hospital in the U.S, deciding on one near the family home in California. When they leave camp and return home, she is able to visit him at the hospital. However, she later dies in her sleep before her son is released. After her death, the author and his brother hear tapping on the window of the room in which she died, which they interpret as her message to them. Written by Mori in 1947, the story was first published in his 1979 short story collection, The Chauvinist and Other Stories and reprinted …
Why She Left Us (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Historical Fiction
- Family – blessing or curse, Motherhood, Power of the past, Role of women
- Widely available
A 1999 novel by Rahna Reiko Rizzuto that follows the Okada family from the 1920s to the 1990s and includes their incarceration at the Santa Anita Assembly Center and Amache as well as the experiences of two Nisei who serve in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team . The novel is structured as a series of vignettes told from the points of view of four characters. Why She Left Us was honored with an American Book Award in 2000.
Woman from Hiroshima (book)
- Books
- Grades 9-12, Adult
- Historical Fiction
- Immigrant experience, Motherhood, Overcoming – fear, weakness, vice, Wisdom of experience
- Available
Novel by Toshio Mori written in the first-person voice of an Issei woman telling her life story to two grandchildren shortly after World War II.