Yoshiko is also the author of The Invisible Thread, her account of a childhood in detention. An afterword explains the historical events and the redress made by the US Federal government under Presidents Ford and Carter. They see guards with guns and bayonets, and as they pass a boarded up grocery store, we see a sign in the drawing, saying that the store owners are 'loyal Americans.' When Emi loses the bracelet after arriving at the detention center, she learns that a person can remember people and families in the absence of physical items and personal effects.

Emi and her family, allowed just a couple of suitcases, are sent with other from San Francisco to a racetrack which has been converted to a detention center. She gives Emi a gift, a bracelet, with which to remember her by. Is it the FBI? No, it's her friend and neighbor Laurie. Emi and 120,000 other Japanese Americans (80,000 of them citizens) were sent to detention centers due to their ethnic heritage by the U.S. It is 1942, and the United States is at war with Japan. Emi and her family are Japanese Americans in California. Her father has been sent to a prison camp in Montana, and soon the FBI will take her, her sister, and her mother to a detention center and then to a detention camp in Utah. One has a 'For Sale' sign on its front steps. In the first illustration we see two typically Californian homes with cars in their driveways. 'Will find a ready readership and prove indispensable for introducing this dark episode in American history'-School Library Journal * 'Yardley's hushed, realistic paintings add to the poignancy of Uchida's narrative, and help to underscore the absurdity and injustice suffered by Japanese American families such as Emi's.'-Publishers Weekly, starred review 'How will I ever remember my best friend?' she asks herself.

But on the first day of camp, when Emi discovers she has lost her heart bracelet, she can't help wanting to cry. For her mother's sake, Emi doesn't say how unhappy she is. The United States and Japan are at war. Seven-year-old Emi doesn't want to leave her friends, her school, her house yet as her mother tells her, they have no choice, because they are Japanese-American. Yoshiko Uchida draws on her own childhood as a Japanese-American during World War II in an internment camp to tell the poignant story of a young girl's discovery of the power of memory.Įmi and her family are being sent to a place called an internment camp, where all Japanese-Americans must go.

The bracelet by yoshiko uchida audio