He had a lucrative dry cleaning business in Los Angeles in the Wilshire area, and George’s mother did tailoring for the customers. George’s mother was born in America, an American citizen, and his father had come to America from Japan and grew up here. They lived in a small house, and his parents had saved their money to provide for their children. What Takei and the able writers who assisted him in this endeavor are able to do is share the emotion and experience of Takei as a child and at the same time bring in the historical information that makes clear the extent of the horror that was perpetrated on people of Japanese descent during this shameful time in our past.įour-year-old George lived in Los Angeles with his parents and his younger brother, Henry, and their baby sister, Nancy. I’ve read about the internment camps for Japanese Americans during WWII, and there are many historical fiction books for children that are set in those camps (see some listed at the end of this review), but George Takei’s powerful memoir instilled in me a broader sense of what this country was like when this atrocity was implemented - taking away the property and rights of American citizens because of their ancestry and separating them from their homes.
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