Throughout the rest of her childhood, Jeanne tries to find herself and understand how to live in the world given her race and heritage. She struggles, torn between living the life of Caucasian teenagers and living up to her father's expectations. She does not find total peace with her own identity until she returns to Manzanar thirty years after she first arrived there.

Farewell to Manzanar is not only a story of Jeanne's experience. She also tracks the trials of her family before, during, a

World, and comes to terms with that part of him that is real but invisible-his Japanese ancestry; ironically, he accepts that which he has fought so hard to overcome. As a youth in America, Jeanne tries to deny her Japanese heritage, repressing all the customs, traditions, and beliefs of the Old World. She wants to become totally Americanized; dressing, acting, and thinking like her peers. It is only when she is an adult that she successfully deals with her heritage after thirty years of avoidance. The memoir is her attempt to put the old and the new into proper perspective. The injustice of the war and subsequent detainment of Japanese- Americans is also an ever-present and obvious theme of the memoir. War and paranoia are single-handedly to blame for the sheer existence of Manzanar and the subsequent shame and insecurities that the Wakatsuki family members must face. The racism and discrimination experienced by Jeanne and her family are intolerable and unfair. The very thought that an American organization, such as the Girl Scouts, that stresses the strength of young women would discriminate against a child because she is Japanese is horrifying and unpalatable. Jeanne's awkward age of

Americans, during and after the war.

camps heavily. Although detainees were never tortured or made to do hard labor, camp life was hard and demeaning. In the camp at Manzanar, California, it was particularly dry and dusty, for it was located just outside the Mojave Desert.

In February 1843, all camp detainees were asked to sign a Loyalty Oath, pledging their allegiance to the United States and their willingness to serve in the war against their native country; if they refused to sign, they would be sent back to Japan. Most Japanese-

Provoked by the violent and deadly surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt declared war against Japan. Almost immediately the Japanese Americans on the West Coast began to feel an open hatred expressed against them by their fellow citizens of European descent. The government completed matters by arresting more than three thousand Japanese- American males on grounds of treason after the issuance of Executive Order 9066 by President Roosevelt. Though the arrested were American citizens, they were victims of a nationalist paranoia that saw nothing beyond their oriental faces.

This idea leads to another aspect of the Japanese: their cultural identity. While families may distance themselves from one another, they all share the same traditions, the same customs, however archaic or seemingly intangible. When Jeanne and her family return to the site of the concentration camp 30 years after her internment, she finds a reminder of the internal vulnerabilities of the Japanese people. "It is so characteristically Japanese, the way lives were ma

Some common words found in the essay are:
Manzanar Caucasian, Terminal Island, Japanese Americans, Manzanar Jeanne, Girl Scouts, Woody Japan, Thank Houston, Arkansas Wyoming, America Jeanne, Japanese- Americans, jeanne family, pearl harbor, world war ii, war ii, japanese ancestry, japanese society, world war, family heritage, terminal island, farewell manzanar, japanese americans,
Approximate Word count = 1902
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)