Struggles and challenges can make a person feel different. Farewell to Manzanar, a memoir by Jeanne Wakatsuki, a Japanese American, who describes her struggles and challenges she had to face after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. One of the struggles she faces is being teased by Asian kids due to her only being able to speak English growing up. Another struggle she faces is trying to be accepted by others in middle and high school. A third struggle she faces is being discriminated against by other people in middle and high school. Through these events, Jeanne wants to move away from Japanese culture and wants to be a part of American culture due to how she was treated for being Japanese American. When Jeanne and her family moved to Terminal Island, she was getting teased by …show more content…
During middle and high school, Jeanne was trying to have others accept her but most of the people in school would ignore her, making her feel like she should act like she disappeared. However, she felt like there might be other people who would accept her and become friends with her. Causing her to continue her search of finding people that would accept her for who she is instead of ignoring her. Another thing that happened during middle and high school was that Jeanne was being discriminated against by other people due to being related to Japanese people. This meant that she couldn’t join the Girl Scouts, clubs, or any of the activities that were offered at school. However, she didn’t get angry at those people who discriminated against her and instead, moved on with her life because she thought that it wasn’t necessary to cause commotion with them. Jeanne was a Japanese American girl who lived happily with her family at Ocean Park. However, when they move to Terminal Island, Jeanne doesn’t like being there because she was getting teased for only being able to speak
The novel, Farewell to Manzanar, by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, tells her family’s true story of how they struggled to not only survive, but thrive in forced detention during World War II. She was seven years old when the war started with the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942. Her life dramatically changed when her and her family were taken from their home and sent to live at the Manzanar internment camp. Along with ten thousand other Japanese Americans, they had to adjust to their new life living behind barbed wire. Obviously, as a young child, Jeanne did not fully understand why they had to move, and she was not fully aware of the events happening outside the camp. However, in the beginning, every Japanese American had questions. They wondered why they had to leave. Now, as an adult, she recounts the three years she spent at Manzanar and shares how her family attempted to survive. The conflict of ethnicities affected Jeanne and her family’s life to a great extent.
But for some of the Japanese Americans, it was even harder after they were discharged from the internment camp. The evacuation and the internment had changed the lives of all Japanese Americans. The evacuation and internment affected the Wakatsuki family in three ways: the destruction of Papa’s self-esteem, the separation of the Wakatsuki family, and the change in their social status. The destruction of Papa’s self-esteem is one effect of the evacuation and internment. Before the evacuation and internment, Papa was proud; he had a self-important attitude, yet he was dignified.
She focus mainly on ethnic diversity in the U.S. From my perspective, Jeanne wrote this book, so she can heal emotionally wise. She went through a lot of things when she was young and she also wanted her friends and family to feel where she was coming from. Jeanne and her husband did not want want to write about the live issue that went on during World War II. As she stated in the book “I’m issued out myself”(pg IX). They wanted to express the life inside of one of those camps. Her family stayed three years at the camp. Jeanne did not enjoy living in these camps. The memories of the past still haunted her as she grew older. “Writing it has been a way of coming to terms with the impact these years have had on my entire life” (pg
Soon after Papa’s arrest, Mama relocated the family to the Japanese immigrant ghetto on Terminal Island. For Mama this was a comfort in the company of other Japanese but for Jeanne it was a frightening experience. It was the first time she had lived around other people of Japanese heritage and this fear was also reinforced by the threat that her father would sell her to the “Chinaman” if she behaved badly. In this ghetto Jeanne and he ten year old brother were teased and harassed by the other children in their classes because they could not speak Japanese and were already in the second grade. Jeanne and Kiyo had to avoid the other children’s jeers. After living there for two mo...
“Never give up, and be confident in what you do. There may be tough times, but difficulties which you face will make you more determined to achieve your objectives and to win against all the odds” (Marta).All the people have hard time during their lives and they need to deal with tough situation, but it is important how mange and overcome to this situation. In hard situation important to think positive and face with problem with confidence help to face to the problem. The book Farewell to Manzanar was written by Jean Wakatsuki Houston is a historical book about the experience to internal of Japanese American people in to the camp in world war two when Japan had bombed harbor Island. The government sent Japanese people to Manzanar for security and control
It shows that people’s opinions of her matter to her more than her opinion of herself. Also, it is shown that her mother is the one who gave Jeannette the confidence to tell the story of her past, which later provoked her to write this memoir.
Jeannette was angry at her grandmother for not accepting her having a black friend. She wanted her parents support to justify that all people are the same however her parents really needed a place to stay and would rather not back up their daughter than challenge Erma in fear of being kicked out. Jeannette realized how people become hypocrites and having to be forced to go against their own beliefs.
Night is an account of a young Jewish boy sent to a concentration camp with the rest of his family, with no idea of what is to come. Farewell to Manzanar is about a young Japanese-American girl who was sent to an internment camp after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Both are stripped of their freedom and their rights without any say and are forced to live in a camp and give up everything they own. In Farewell to Manzanar Jeanne described this scene as such, “About all he [her father] had left at this point was his tremendous dignity.and he would not let those deputies push him out the door. He led them.”
Jeannette is on a quest to better herself. Jeannette and her sister Lori always talked about growing up and escaping to New York City (Walls 222). They dream of making it big unlike their parents. Lori began to see New York as “this glowing, bustling place at the end of a long road where she could become the person she was meant to be” (Walls 222). This idea began to rub off on Jeannette so she too felt that way. By viewing the city this way, Jeannette created a goal for herself. She went off to seek the person she was meant to be. She had a purpose now and this gave her a quest. She never gave up because she wrote the memoir from New York City and even sees her homeless mother as she passes by in a taxi on her way to her city apartment (Walls 9). Jeannette was determined on her quest and persevered through it all to become the person she is
“It is your reaction to adversity, not the adversity itself, that determines how you life’s story will develop” (Dieter F. Uchtdorf). Most people can deal with difficulties, but their reactions to the hardships are different. Only some people can manage their problems. We should try to manage our behaviors in tough situations. If we can deal with our situations, we can overcome difficulties easily. In the story of Farewell to Manzanar written by Jeanne Wakatsuki, the story shows how war can change humans, their life, and their ranks. Although all of the characters of her book face the same problems due to the war and the camps they had to live in, they responded to those situations differently. All of them presented
Ever since she was a young girl. Jeannette had set high goals for herself. Since she was so advanced in school and genuinely enjoyed learning, it made sense that she would want to do big things with her life. Whether it was being a veterinarian or a geologist, her dreams extended far beyond her homes in little desert towns or Welch, West Virginia. However, because of her poverty-stricken home life, many people believed it didn’t seem likely that she would be so successful. One day, while living in Welch, Jeannette goes to the bar to drag her drunk father back home. A neighborhood man offers them a ride back to their house, and on the ride up he and Jeannette start a conversation about school. When Jeannette tells the man that she works so hard in school because of her dream careers, the man laughs saying, “for the daughter of the town drunk, you sure got big plans” (Walls 183). Immediately, Jeannette tells the man to stop the car and gets out, taking her father with her. This seems to be a defining moment in which Jeannette is first exposed to the idea that she is inferior to others. Although this man said what he did not mean to offend her, Jeannette is clearly very hurt by his comment. To the reader, it seems as if she had never thought that her family’s situation made her subordinate to those
Most of her life Jeannette spent living among poverty. Whenever her family moved, they always moved to areas of high poverty and low economic standing. In these communities a lot of trauma, similar to events she had experienced, happened. It was hard for her to get away from all the bad things that happened, since she was constantly submerged in communities with it. Thus being said, this ultimately contributed to her become resilient to a lot of the traumatic events she encountered later on. Since she had witnessed some already, she was prepared to handle others traumatic events that might arise in her future. For instance, one day the neighbor decided to shoot his BB gun at Jeannette’s house. “I yanked the pistol out of Lori’s hand, aimed low, and pulled the trigger” (88). After witnessing her father handle his gun, she knew what a plausible solution to the problem would be—using the gun to defend herself and siblings against the boy. This set her up for recovering faster when encountering these traumatic events because had already been exposed to so many. Additionally, her parents were constantly on the move. Being constantly on the move never really gave her a sense of having a community to identify with, so when traumatic events occurred, she never had anyone to talk to about it other than her family. This contributed to why she was so distraught when her
Towards the middle of the memoir, the theme is shown through the irony of Jeannette’s mother’s situation as well as Jeannette’s feelings towards
Jeanne Wakatuski is a young girl who had to endure a rough childhood. She thought herself American, with a Japanese descent. However, with WWII and the internment camps, Jeanne struggled to in understanding who she really was. It started with Manzanar, at first she knew herself as a Japanese American. Living in Manzanar gave her a new perspective, “It (Manzanar) gradually filled me with shame for being a person, guilty of something enormous enough to deserve that kind of treatment” (Houston and Houston 161). Jeanne faced the problem of being someone who was not wanted or liked in the American society. A good section that shows the discrimination at the time was when Jeanne tried to join the Girl Scouts, which is on page 144. She was turned