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

After Papa’s arrest, Mama moves the family from their non-Japanese neighborhood near Santa Monica to the predominantly Japanese neighborhood of Terminal Island. Although Mama makes this decision to feel safer, Jeanne finds this move difficult since she has never lived among other Asian Americans; in fact, she has a fear of “Oriental faces” (11). Furthermore, Jeanne struggles to relate to her new neighbors, who are from tougher backgrounds and do not speak English.

After the family has spent two months in their new home, the US Navy gives all the residents of Terminal Island—the majority of whom were born in the US—48 hours to leave the area. Forced to sell her belongings, Mama struggles to find buyers at appropriate prices for her precious heirlooms. When one buyer offers an insultingly low price for Mama’s china, Mama throws each china piece on the floor while maintaining eye contact; she would rather destroy these items than lose her dignity.

After President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issues Executive Order 9066 in February 1942, the talk surrounding possible imprisonment of Japanese Americans begins to intensify. Right before the family moves to their new home in the Boyle Heights neighborhood, Mama receives a letter from Papa, who is being held at an all-male camp in North Dakota called Fort Lincoln. During this time, the family experiences “days of quiet, desperate waiting for what seem[s] at the time to be inevitable” (16). In school, Jeanne recalls her teacher being distant and cold; she understands many years later that her teacher exemplified the increasingly anti-Japanese attitude that most of the US public felt at this point.

One month later, the family moves from Boyle Heights to Manzanar concentration camp, initially with some relief. Although Jeanne does not realize it at the time, Mama and her brothers are able to accomplish a difficult task: keeping the majority of the family together in the same camp. Upon arriving, they are served “an inedible concoction” (20). The rooms in the barracks are small, and many families must live with other couples. Jeanne does not mind the close quarters since as the youngest child, she sleeps with Mama every night until Papa returns.

With the lack of supplies and increasingly cold weather, Mama moves all the clothes on top of the beds for warmth at night. Woody, Jeanne’s 24-year-old brother, becomes a leader in the family and tasks the boys with filling in the holes in the barracks’ walls and floors. Mama states that they cannot stay in these living conditions since “[a]nimals live like this” (26). Woody assures Mama that the conditions will improve and maintains his positive attitude in front of his family.

While Woody seeks to make good on his promise to fix their dwellings, there is a lack of materials for such construction projects in Manzanar. The camps are not actually ready for people to inhabit. Although the War Department will eventually provide the camps with old army clothes and sewing machines, most of those in Manzanar stay warm in ill-fitting clothing during the first months of 1942.

Jeanne, like many in Manzanar, is continually sick due to the typhoid vaccinations detainees received, as well as a combination of poor sanitary conditions in the kitchen and a lack of kitchen-trained professionals. Frequent bouts of diarrhea, also called the “Manzanar runs,” become a “condition of life” in the camp (31). These conditions extend to the subpar facilities, where many of the latrines neither work nor have partitions between the toilets. An old woman once shares her makeshift cardboard partition with Mama so the women can have privacy as they use the toilets. Privacy is important to Mama and many other Japanese Americans, yet life in Manzanar prevents it.

Being in the camp affects Jeanne differently than other family members. She yearns for the communal dinners she and her family used to have together. Changed eating schedules are not unique to Jeanne and her family; in fact, many of those in Manzanar begin to eat with their friends as opposed to their families. Sociologists studying life in the camps notice a breakdown of the family units and encourage people to eat with their families again. The mess hall eating pattern is critical to the decay of Jeanne’s family structure, which does not recover until many years after the war; even after the camps’ closure, work schedules would force Jeanne’s family to eat in shifts.

Jeanne begins to attend the organized Catholic recreation classes held by nuns in the camp and enjoys learning about the martyrs and saints. She is on the brink of becoming baptized when Papa, now released from Fort Lincoln and in Manzanar, intervenes.

When Papa returns, he is not the same man; in fact, “[h]e had aged ten years” (46), now using a cane to support himself. Although the whole family goes to the bus to welcome him, Jeanne is the only one who actually approaches him, hugging him and crying.