Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment in Around the World in 80 Books

Aug 02, 2011 Oana rated it liked it

An easy read (took me about five hours to finish). The author was a child in Manzanar and perhaps glosses over some of the details.

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Apr 26, 2017 Sarah rated it liked it

Shelves: owned, nonfiction, young-adult, asian, world-war-two, audio

In April of 1942, when my grandfather was 11, he and his seven-year-old brother were on a bus to Manzanar when someone in charge realized they didn't have any adults with them. Their mother was white, and their Japanese father was in Colorado and was not interned. They were taken off the bus and instead sent to a Salvation Army children's home in Healdsburg, CA where they remained for four years. He never talks about this experience. The only information I have is from the essay linked above plu ...more

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Mar 13, 2013 Julie Griffin rated it it was amazing

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. Jeanne Wakatsuki was living a typical American life as a young girl in Southern California. School, activities with her mom, dinners with her large extended family. Until that day in December, 1941, changed her life forever. She and her mother waved off her dad and the other men heading out to fish for sardines, when the boats suddenly turned around and unexpectedly headed back to shore. It was Decker, 1941, and the base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had just been bombed by Japan. Within three months Jeanne Wakatsuki was living a typical American life as a young girl in Southern California. School, activities with her mom, dinners with her large extended family. Until that day in December, 1941, changed her life forever. She and her mother waved off her dad and the other men heading out to fish for sardines, when the boats suddenly turned around and unexpectedly headed back to shore. It was Decker, 1941, and the base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, had just been bombed by Japan. Within three months, the reaction of the U.S. was to authorize evacuation of ethnic Japanese from the zone established along the West Coast as a security threat. Jeanne and her family watched her dad taken into custody and sent to a camp in North Dakota. Jeanne, an American citizen, was evacuated involuntarily with her siblings and mother to Manzanar, a camp holding at one time 100,000 displaced people on the edge of the desert in California near San Jose. There were no judicial proceedings, no evidentiary standards proving a single one of these people were actual security threats, and there were almost ten other camps around the Western US filled with other people who's only crime was to be of foreign origin and Asian (no German or Italian Americans, by contrast, were interred).
Jeanne was seven, and it was an adventure to her. Once their drafty barracks were improved by her older brothers, her father rejoined the family, and school was established, she tried to live as normal a life as possible surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers. She excelled in her classes, learned baton twirling, explored with the girl scout troop. But the feeling of being imprisoned never left.
Jeanne and her family were thrust back into a society that had viewed them with suspicion and was all too happy to send them away. She learned to thrive in middle and high school, marching with a band and being named Carnival Queen. But she always had the feeling inside that she deserved to be treated with dislike and suspicion, because of her Japanese face. There was darkness. Her father drank too much, they all faced financial insecurity for a long time, and Jeanne's Carnival Queen election was first of all won by her playing to the mysterious and suppliant Asian woman stereotype, and secondly was even almost railroaded by the teachers who didn't want a Japanese Queen. In the end, it was spoiled for Jeanne, who felt like, as ever, she deserved to be viewed with alarm, and she didn't fit in.
Jeanne wrote this book thirty years after Manzanar years, with her husband. I read it in middle school years and so have countless other Americans. With adult perspective and renewed hostility to people coming to America for better lives on the rise, I see new things, such as that Japanese were banned from attaining citizenship by naturalization, no matter how many years they lived in the US.
This is truly a shameful chapter in US history, and reading Jeanne's story in her simple words retains Manzanar's value as a classic for young adults. She does not focus on events or images that would overwhelm her younger readers, but it is clear what a powerful effect these events have had on her life, as well as everyone's who went through them. A sense of unfairness and a desire for justice and acceptance is a lesson that will be imparted to all, young or adult, and a necessary lesson once again in our history. Recommend. ...more

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