Where the Body Meets Memory

by David Mura

"In Where the Body Meets Memory, Mura offers a powerful meditation on race, memory, and the physical body that focuses on America, its promise of equality and its reality of segregated lives."--BOOK JACKET. "Weaving together stories from his childhood in Chicago, his parents' rare recollections of the internment camps, family anecdotes, and episodes of Japanese American history, Mura creates a portrait of a community becoming a "model minority." This process of assimilation, however, failed to reckon with the internment experience and its legacy of rage, silence, and humiliation; the result has been a loss of heritage and wholeness for generations of Japanese Americans, whose bodies, once interned, bear the stigma of racial shame."--BOOK JACKET. "In vivid and searingly honest prose, Mura explores how this shame has affected his own sexuality: an interracial marriage, compulsive promiscuity, and an obsession with pornography that equates beauty with whiteness. In facing his own demons,