I am from Bozeman, Montana, have grown up seeing myself as white, kind of like old country music, and am separated by two generational degrees from the events of Japanese internment, which, for my family, has always told a story of loss and assimilation. Both my grandma and my mom married white men, and the latter made the decision to leave home for the rural west. I have been told about grandma Rodjana’s experience many times, about how she was, at the age of six, uprooted with her parents from their small plot of land on the coast of California, and interned for years at Manzanar. She remembers the odd schooling she received while in camp and the confusion she felt as a small child in such a situation. For her parents, internment inspired, as described in Impossible Subjects, an intense “pragmatism.” They aimed to protect their family unit, but Meiji, the father, was eventually taken to a separate camp at Heart Mountain, in Wyoming, having been deemed "higher risk" as a new immigrant. Their years from that point on were spent fighting for their reunion, but they only managed to come together again once the practice of internment was officially halted. Impossible Subjects deals with many internees, who, when pressed with the choice of renouncing their citizenship, thereby eliminating the possibility of forced relocation, were willing to make a sacrifice. Unlike these people, my grandmother and her family did not choose this path, and, thankfully, were not relocated. But my new knowledge of such a choice illuminates more clearly both emotions and thought processes that I had no idea my family had to deal with. After they were released, bearing little other than small personal belongings and a handful of cash provided by the government, Meiji took odd agricultural jobs around Utah and California, trying to earn back what they had lost. But the stigma around their ancestry was too oppressive, and he changed his name in an effort to find better work. Meiji Nakamura became George Nakamura. This was how assimilation began for them, and how, eventually, the family of Meiji and Kazumi Nakamura produced a Logan Benton Yates.