Kim is 16. Her mother is Irish-American, but her father is Japanese. He died before she was born, and had been outcast by his parents for marrying against his parent's wishes.
The story opens with Kim in trouble at school and meeting the school's principal. She's in trouble yet again. Kim has a best friend named Jav, and tells her she plans to run off to California to find out about her father's family.
Apparently Kim's father had been set up for an arranged marriage, but married her mother instead which then really got his parents angry. She gets on a plane for California. She meets a friend of her mother's there, and the woman starts talking about the internment camps. She refers to them as “concentration camps.”
Kim is thoroughly Americanized as she finds out when she goes to a restaurant where all the diners are Japanese and she can't understand them at all.
What is revealed to Kim is that, due to the internment camps, the traditional way of bringing up children, the Japanese culture, etc, all pretty much was considerably upset, so the kids grew up not being acculturated into Japanese culture, but into American culture.
Kim begins a systematic search for her father's family. She meets the husband of the woman she's staying with, and he tells her his grandparents died in Nagasaki. He himself and his parents were sent to Manzanar.
Someone else takes Kim to Tule Lake. This is a person who had been interned there and still has very bitter memories of the experience. Them Kim finds out the person who has been helping her the most has a specific reason for doing so.
She eventually finds the people she was looking for, although things don't go really smoothly.
This is a rather good book, especially about cultural difference even within a particular ethnic community.
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