Dan Wilson kindly gathered some old Placer High School yearbooks for me so that I might be availed of the photographic evidence of Placer County’s demographics before and after the war. Local historian David Unruhe, a contributing editor to The Japantowns of Placer County, offered his time, suggestions, knowledge, and contacts—and a big stack of books and files from his personal collection—and Mike Holmes kindly offered me his research file on local events just after internment. Also useful were the collections of the Auburn branch of the Placer County Library—especially their oral history collection—and the holdings of the Placer County Archives. Paul DeWitt kindly assisted me on a tour of the Japanese American Museum of San Jose, patiently answering my many questions.

Among the dozens of textual sources consulted during the research for this book, the most useful were Wayne ­Maeda’s Changing Dreams and Treasured Memories: A Story of Japanese ­Americans in the Sacramento Region and Sierra College Press’s outstanding collection of Placer County oral histories, Standing Guard: Telling Our Stories. Tomeo Okui Nakae’s Recollections: An Autobiography of the Wife of a Japanese Immigrant provided useful information on life in Newcastle during the first half of the twentieth century. The writings of Mary Matsuda ­Gruenewald, Hiroshi Kashiwagi, Donald Keene, Julie Otsuka, Eileen Sunada Sarasohn, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi were also important. The list of family names to whom this book is dedicated was extracted from the Tule Lake Directory and Camp News compiled and published by H. Inukai and supplied to me by the rangers at the Tule Lake Unit of WWII Valor in the Pacific National Monument, in Tulelake, California.

My friend William T. Vollmann kindly accompanied me to the UC Davis library several times and helped me research agricultural events in California from 1920 until the peach and pear blight wiped out much of the state’s fruit-growing industry in the early 1960s.

I would also like to offer my appreciation to members of two literary conference panels which focused on writers crossing outside their lived experiences and which gave me much to think about as I pondered how to approach this story: Jodi Angel, Skip Horack, Bich Minh Nguyen, Derek Palacio, Rob Spillman, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Naomi Williams. I would also like to thank Matthew Salesses, whose engaging pedagogical work, particularly on the subject of white writers writing about people of color, has been eye-opening and useful, as has the work of Viet Thanh Nguyen, especially Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, which offered ways to consider America’s treatment and understanding of Asia both inside and outside its borders. Edward W. Said’s Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism and Judith Butler’s Frames of War: When Is Life ­Grievable? were important to me as I framed how to handle these same subjects.