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

Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This is the second time I've read Houston's memoir. I remember being fairly stunned by it when I read it as a teenager, and asking my parents about the internment of Japanese and Japanese Americans during WWII. I think it was a little discussed topic until this book became popular in the 1970's. (Since we have German-American friends, I was curious about why the Japanese were singled out but later found that some German-Americans were also interred, as were some Italian-Americans. Nevertheless, the number of Japanese-Americans who lives were upended was much higher.) When I was a teen I just couldn't wrap my head around Wakatsuki Houston's experiences of being locked up as a child. While perhaps less dramatic in the magnitude of suffering that was seen with German concentration camps, the idea that my splendid America kept people in camps with insufficient food, shelter, abysmal medical care, and the resulting disintegration of the Wakatsuki family was shocking to fourteen year old me.

As an adult, I notice different things in her account, such how her father was completely undone by the loss of opportunity and status, his spirit broken by losing everything, or by the perceptions of collaboration/race traitors between the Nisei and Issei internees, or by the domestic violence in her family that ratched up due to the stress of their situation. I'm also struck by the lack of insights into the plight of her siblings, particularly her brothers, who fought in the war for America while their family was locked up in a camp, and by the lack of overt anger, resentment, or perception of rights to reparations in this book. Wakatsuki Houston delivers the facts of her circumstances, including memorable moments like when her mother breaks all their fine china rather than sell it to a salesman who makes an insultingly low offer when the family is being forced to leave their home with few possessions to move to the internment camp, or her family member who bleeds to death after giving birth in Manzanar, due to insufficient obstetric care. Although in some respects her account is simplistic because we see the internment experience through her childhood eyes, I am struck by her insights into her need to choose very classically American hobbies (such as baton twirling) as she matures, in order to remove the taint of her Japanese heritage, her inability to join the Girl Scouts even years after the war ended and the controversy associated with being prom queen, all because of her heritage. My takeaway is that the effect of camps on children, even children housed with their parents, is lingering, complicated, and clearly the emotional scars of child internment don't even have to be because of war. These scars are centered on racism.

While not a perfect book in terms of its depth of analysis (again, it is a very personal account, told from her perspective as a child or young person), the accessibility and simplicity of Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston's story is what makes this a good read for children at this moment in time.

Farewell to Manzanar was my June non-fiction read, in part due to my reading current headlines about children in camps, and in part due to reading Misa Sugiura's This Time Will Be Different, a novel of fiction that deals with the legacy of internment for families whose businesses were lost/stolen during the WWII era of internment camps.



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