farewell to manzanar to page 20

Characters:

Kyio: Is the narrators brother that is three years older then him. He is ten

Granny: She is sixty five years old doesn’t speak English and is nearly blind.

May: Narrators sister she is eleven

Ocean Park Teacher: She was a kind grandmotherly woman who used to sail with Papa on the boat from time to time.

Lillian: is fourteen

Ray: thirteen

Woody: He is short, stocky, and has a mustache and he had just turned twenty-four. He is 5”6

Summery

After Papa was arrested, Mama relocated the family to Terminal Island. Mama felt more comfortable in the company of other Japanese, but the new environment of Terminal Island frightens Jeanne. It is the first time she has lived around other Japanese. She traces her fear to when Papa use to threaten to sell her to the “Chinaman” if she wasn’t behaving. Mama and Chizu go to work for the canneries that own the island, and the family takes up residence in a barracks alongside the other migrant workers. Jeanne doesn’t feel comfortable around the other kids who call themselves yogore (“uncouth ones”) and pick on outsiders and people who do not speak their language. She also gets teased at school so her and her ten-year-old brother, Kiyo avoid the other children after school so they don’t get ambushed.

They live on Terminal Island for two months, then the government decides to move the Japanese farther away from the Long Beach Naval Station. The family, including Granny Jeanne’s sixty-five-year-old grandmother, is given forty-eight hours to leave. Mama has to sell her china because it will not fit in Woody’s car. When she is selling it a man offers super low price for the china and she gets mad and stars smashing the entire set in front of him.
The family settles in the minority ghetto of Boyle Heights in downtown Los Angeles. President Roosevelt has signed Executive Order 9066, which authorizes the War Department to remove persons considered threats to national security from military areas on the West Coast, and rumors begin to circulate about relocation. Mama finally receives a letter from Papa, who is being held at Fort Lincoln, a camp for enemy aliens in North Dakota.
The public fears the Japanese, and a month after the Wakatsuki family settles in Boyle Heights, the government orders the Japanese to move again, this time to the camp in Manzanar, California. Many Japanese accept the move because they are afraid of Caucasian aggression but some see it as an adventure. A bus picks up the Wakatsukis at a Buddhist temple, and each family receives an identification number and tags to put on their collars. Jeanne falls asleep on the bus, almost half of which is filled with her relatives, and wakes up to the setting sun of Owens Valley. As they enter the camp, the new arrivals stare silently at the families already waiting in the wind and sand.
The bus arrives in time for dinner, but the Japanese are horrified to learn that the cooks have poured canned apricots over the rice, because Japanese do not eat with sweet foods. After dinner, the Wakatsukis are taken to Block 16, where they receive two sixteen-by-twenty-foot rooms for the twelve members of the family. They divide the space with blankets and sleep on mattress covers stuffed with straw. The younger couples have a hard time adjusting and six months later Jeanne’s sister and her husband leave to help harvest beets in Idaho. Jeanne does not mind the tight quarters, because it means she gets to sleep with Mama.


Rising action: They are taken to Manzanar on a bus