The following description comes from the event organizer.

David Loftus, host of “Story Time for Grownups,” will read excerpts from his mother’s memoir about her parents’ immigration from Japan, growing up in Hood River, and the family’s experiences in the Japanese-American prison camps during World War II. No cover, but proof of vaccination required for service.

Mitzi is the eighth child of Sagoro “Sam” Asai, who came to the U.S. in 1904, and Matsu Ito, a picture bride who arrived in 1911. When war loomed in 1941, one of Mitzi’s brothers enlisted in the U.S. Army, and another was drafted. But on May 13, 1942, the rest of the family was sent to camps in Tule Lake, California; then Heart Mountain, Wyoming. Growing up there was strange for a 10-year-old—the harsh land and weather, the lack of privacy, to say nothing of the loss of her civil rights as a U.S. citizen without due process—but the racism and social isolation in her hometown after the war was much harder for a 13-year-old girl.

Order a pint of beer, a pot of tea, soup, sandwich, or cookies while you hear the true story of a dark chapter in U.S. history, from the pen of the woman who lived it, and the voice of her oldest son. Mitzi is a retired teacher of English, French, and English as a Second Language who lives in Ashland. She will turn 90 years old on June 19. David has read to listeners in libraries, coffee shops, Powell’s Books, Borders, and at Umpqua Bank, as well as for recordings for the blind. In May he played a hip-hop rapping blind man in the Oregon Children’s Theatre production of “Last Stop on Market Street.”