Book Highlight: Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone

Book Highlight: Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone

by Camille Daw, Graduate Fellow

Born in 1911, Monica Sone’s memoir Nisei Daughter explores the realities of growing up both Japanese and American in Seattle. As a Nisei (the second generation of Japanese American), Sone reveals the struggles that she and her parents faced, especially during their incarceration at Minidoka. 

Sone beautifully describes Seattle’s thriving Japanese community and how her childhood was shaped by it. Her father immigrated to the United States from Japan to attend school. Soon work and age forced him to begin a family instead while running a successful hotel on Skid Row. The family settled into their unusual home, much like typical American families. As Monica grows up, she is confronted with more challenges to her identities which at times conflict with each other. Though racism did not define her childhood, core memories remain flooded by discrimination, which heightened after the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

Sone’s last chapters explain her experiences of incarceration and the betrayal she felt from the United States government. Fear and confusion marked this period as the FBI began arresting community leaders. After President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, the Itoi family sold their hotel just in time for the U.S. government to remove them to Puyallup Assembly Center. The rest of the memoir concludes shortly after Sone left Minidoka to enroll in Wendell College in Indiana, leaving her parents at Minidoka. 

Monica’s memoir delves into generational, racial, and gendered identities that she experienced as a Nisei in Seattle. Her book, originally published in 1953, became an instant Asian American Classic, and addressed themes that others would not address for decades after the Commission on the Wartime Internment of Civilians convened.