Mitsuko Asai was still in elementary school when World War II started, and the U.S. government sent her Japanese American family from their home in Hood River to a series of internment camps. The racism she found upon returning to Hood River convinced her to bury her past and not look back.
But studying in Japan on a scholarship in the 1950s changed "Mitzi's" outlook once more. She writes of the tough times, and coming to terms with her heritage, in the book .
Mitzi Asai Loftus stops by the JX studio to talk about revisiting an eventful life in her memoir.