Dandelion Through the Crack | Kiyo Sato | An Uplifting Story of Family Survival

Dandelion Through the Crack | Kiyo Sato | Everyone Should Read This Book

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Dandelion Through ...

	Dandelion Through the Crack Kiyo Sato Willow Valley Press, 2007 - 416 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Dandelion Through the Crack: The Sato Family Quest for the American Dream tells of a real Japanese-American family, formed both by ancestry and by the American way of life. We see mother, father, and children, and their challenges over seven decades. There are the extraordinary times of the Depression, wartime emergency, internment in the Poston "relocation" camp in the Arizona desert, oppressive prejudice, and the struggle to recover from near-total loss. But there are also many simple, almost-pastoral moments. The wise fables of the author's father -- tales of his old and new homelands and his haiku poetry -- are interwoven throughout. This is Kiyo Sato's first-person account of the family's struggles and triumphs. The result is a work of literary grace, emotional power, and historical and social importance.

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An Uplifting Story of Family Survival

Readers might expect a book about being banished to an internment camp to be depressing, but Dandelion is not the story you would expect. First and foremost, it's a heartwarming story about an American immigrant family's daily life on the family farm in Sacramento.

Here you have the young man, Shinji Sato, coming to America with nothing, working as a farm laborer to make a living and save for the future. After a few years, he returns home to marry, and realizes America is his new home. Together, he and his new bride, Tomomi, return to California to farm and raise a family. Against great challenges and prejudice, they manage to lease and then buy a farm, build a home, and raise award-winning strawberries and grapes, as well as other crops.

Kiyo is the eldest child of this struggling young family, and her portrait of their family life is intimate and touching. She describes the hard work in the fields, playing on the farm, the family baths in an enormous hot tub, daily meals and holiday dinners prepared together, school days in a one-room schoolhouse, church life and neighbors, and her dad's wonderful stories and haiku poetry which the children could not get enough of.

Into the middle of this sweet, idyllic family life and a now thriving farm, World War II intrudes. The family is forced to give up everything for the duration of the war and live in an arid, dusty concentration camp in Arizona. Yet even in this, these Japanese-Americans survived and transformed the desert into a garden and their prison camp into a town and the semblance of a home.

The return to their homes and farms after the war brought many heartbreaks and struggles as families like Kiyo's had to start over again. Many had lost everything, yet in true American fashion, they were indomitable in spirit and managed to struggle back and rebuild their homes and their places in the community.

Kiyo Sato's book is destined to become a classic. As the cliche goes, I laughed and I cried when I read it because in presenting such an intimate portrait, Kiyo makes the reader feel like a member of the family. Their struggles, their losses, their joys, and their successes seem almost as though they are our own. Their story is unique to their situation, yet it is also the timeless story of a typical American family, the story of modern-day American pioneers.

Don't miss this book. It's a book you will remember for a lifetime.

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Everyone Should Read This Book

I've finished "Dandelion through the Crack." It is a book that should be ready by everyone. I especially became personally inthralled because I lived in the area she spoke of 25 years ago. This book really should be required reading for history. I wasn't born and didn't live in CA during the interment but as an older adult I had become aware of our country's paranoia and the shameful thing they did. In her straightforward yet eloquent style she so clearly describes her family and their circumstances. And yet she does not dwell on the negative. In its reading I was able to appreciate the hard work, love of family, and quiet dignity with which they are noted.

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Read this book!

I am a caucasian American of German descent who grew up on the east coast in the 60's. I had heard, vaguely, about the internment of Japanese citizens during WWII, and I was always a bit curious about it, but it's not as if my own history brought me to this book predisposed to hang on its every word. Yet hang on every word I did; I was desperately short of sleep three nights in a row because I read until my eyes closed. I would love to make this required reading for all citizens, especially in our current time of mistrust against Middle Eastern immigrants. Not only did I love the family Ms. Sato described, I loved their farm, their trees, their dogs. I felt very strongly her family's hopes and bewilderment, and I rooted hard for their triumphs. She writes in a very poetic voice, and it creates out of her family's story a sort of literary flower, individual, delicate and beautiful. Don't miss this book.

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Heartfelt family memoir

This is a heartfelt, heartwarming family saga of an immigrant Japanese American family and their struggle to survive despite war, racism, poverty, farming misfortunes, and many obstacles that would have defeated the toughest among us. It is a story of hope, devotion, love, faith, endurance and steadfastness against staggering circumstances that the World War II era had to offer new Japanese immigrants as well as native born Nisei Japanese Americans. While the protagonists are a Japanese family, their story has many commonalities that will resonate with any family that came with little and struggled to achieve the American dream. Everyone alive could only hope to have as remarkable a family as the Sato clan. Congratulations Kiyo on telling your story so well.

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Dandelions through the Crack

It was a great read. Both poignant and humorous at times. Personally knowing the family made it even more enjoyable. My reading group is now involved in reading it and more are asking to read. One of the group has purchased a copy for herself to keep. There were several issues of which I was not aware. Knowing the area, I could picture all that happened.

reviews: page 1, 2, 3

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