Nearly 80 Alta High students stayed after school one Wednesday anxious to hear the back story of Sandy author Emily Inouye Huey novel, “Beneath the Wide Silk Sky.”

Many of them had read the 318-page book they received as being members in the school’s book club. Later they waited their turn as Huey carefully signed each copy; some students told her they were sharing with friends or family to read this summer.

The young adult novel is a composite of the stories Huey learned while interviewing her Japanese-American grandparents and 92-year-old aunt. Her book shares the story of the racism a young girl, Sam Sakamoto and her family and neighbors, faced leading up to when Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during World War II.

“There was a poll taken at that time and 93% of Americans thought Japanese-Americans who had been born in Japan should be put in these prison camps,” Huey told the students. “I can’t think of anything that 93% of Americans agree on today. I can’t imagine what it was like to live back then.”

Signs were posted on fences and telephone poles informing Japanese-Americans they had to go to camp. 

“They were given between two days and two weeks. It didn’t matter if you’re a kid or a grown-up, you still had to go. If you have 20% of your ethnicity Japanese or if you’re an orphan who had been adopted into American family, it didn’t matter. You still went,” she said.

Through the stories and her research, Huey learned it already was an uneasy time, but signs of racism and of kindness became evident after Pearl Harbor.

“My grandma was a beauty queen, and she had this big dream not to be a farmer’s wife. Things were bad for her family. The people who they rented their house from didn’t even let them have the two weeks that they had to get ready to leave. They moved their things to the back porch,” she said. “My grandpa, who had just graduated from Stanford, and his family’s experience was nicer.”

Huey told students her uncle had just bought a brand-new mechanized tractor. When his neighbors heard he had to leave and was going to lose his crops, his land and his house, they offered to store his tractor so when he came out of camp at the end of the war, he had something to start over with. 

“My family has never forgotten those people; it made a difference to know someone was on your side at that time,” she said.

Huey also recalled a story that their neighbors spoke up to the FBI about her great-grandfather, ensuring them he wasn’t a spy.

“He still ended up having to go to camp, but was able to stay with his family, which made a huge difference. Others would disappear when FBI agents would come in the middle of the night. Sometimes they wouldn’t hear for months; there are some people who never heard from their fathers again,” she said.

The first place her family stayed when taken away were the racetracks.

“They lived in horse stalls. The soldiers had left the manure and just put a board on top of it, and then just painted over the manure on the walls,” she said.

When they built “permanent” camps, the Japanese-Americans were loaded onto trains. 

“They weren’t told where they were going or how long it would be, and the train windows were covered with black paper. My family was on the train for three days; they heard someone knocking on the windows, but the soldiers had said, under no circumstances could they open these windows. The knocking continued and eventually, someone opened it to find a woman on the train platform with a giant laundry bag full of coats and blankets. She started putting as many of them in the window as she could until the train took off. She told them, ‘Where you’re going, it’s cold.’ She couldn’t fix everything, but did what they could, in the very short time she had,” Huey said. “That kindness wasn’t forgotten.”

Her family and 12,000 others were sent to Wyoming’s Heart Mountain Relocation Center, in barracks made of
tar paper.

“You can imagine how much those coats mattered in a Wyoming winter,” Huey said.

Her grandparents dated by walking circles around
the camp.

“My grandma always would tell this story, and she would laugh and say, ‘He was such a fast walker. That’s all I knew about him before I got married,’” Huey said.

They married in a barrack and Huey’s dad was born there. 

At the end of the war, they were given two weeks to leave, but told they couldn’t return to their former states. Her grandparents took down one of the barracks and moved it to the edge of a farmer’s farm where they worked as laborers. 

“It was 13 years when they could afford to move into a real apartment,” she said. “My book is mostly based on my family story. My characters are fictional, but Charlie—my grandpa’s name is Charles—is a little bit like him. My grandpa, like Charlie, had big dreams; he had been valedictorian. It was just a time when everything got interrupted and he couldn’t do anything. And there really was a family who sold my family a farm where, like the book, if they missed one payment, they would lose everything.”

At first, Huey wasn’t going to write
a novel. 

“I had the idea of getting those stories down because it had happened during the war and the U.S. government said not to talk about it as if it didn’t happen. It felt like a secret and people were ashamed. I wasn’t planning to publish it. I put it away for a while, but it gnawed at me why my family had this shame. I eventually returned to my book, and I finished it,” she said.

Huey’s first draft took three years, then she spent another year revising the 57 chapters.

“I love working with the language, rejuvenating a paragraph over and over again until it feels right. I could revise for years. The hardest thing for me is the first draft,” she said.

Huey took time to answer students’
questions. 

“Why did I choose to leave the story where I left it?” she repeated the student’s question. “I chose to leave it there because, I didn’t want to make it too easy. You have to be true to the experience of the people who had this experience. It’s at a time when they were making choices about how to treat people. Who are we going to be? What are we going to do to people? That’s what I want to write about.”

A student wanted to interview her own grandparents. Huey suggested writing a letter like she did to ask permission.

“My grandpa took time to think about it and he said, ‘It’s really hard for me, but I love you. So, I’ll do it.’ It was painful, but it’s such a treasure that I have from him. It’s worth it to ask,” she said.

Second-year Alta librarian Amanda Scott appreciates the setting of Huey’s novel, which won the Society of Children’s Books Writers and Illustrators’ Golden Kite Award and the Malka Penn Award for Human Rights in Children’s Literature.

“Emily made the choice not write about the life in the camp, but to take a sensitive subject and develop characters so we know the characters as her story leads up to the camp,” Scott said. “She chose to write about that time because in a way, we’re always at a point before injustice and question how we will act and how we will define our society.”

Canyons School District High School English/Language Arts Specialist Lesli Morris supports Alta’s book club members, who read seven books throughout the school year.

“Adults forget, and it’s so important, for kids to have a place where they can talk openly about books and express their thoughts and feelings and opinions,” she said.

Earlier this year, local young adult fiction author Jenna Evans Welch, who wrote “Spells for Lost Things” and “Love & Gelato” Zoomed into the book club and provided students with writing tips. 

In December 2024, local author Erin Stewart is planning to talk about her book, “Scars Like Wings.”

“Book club gives a place of community for a lot of these students,” Scott said. “It’s a great place for students to come, make friends and connections, read and learn from books and authors, and have some incredible conversations.” λ