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

#52Title: Farewell to Manzanar: A True Story of Japanese American Experience During and After the World War II Internment
Author: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston & James D. Houston
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Year: 1973/2002
Genre: Memoir/American History
177 pages

Linked to the paperback edition. Jeanne Watatsuki Houston recalls her family's internment in Manzanar, one of the Western camps to which Japanese citizens and non-citizens alike were evacuated after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Houston's story has a special poignancy because there were aspects of the camp that became familiar and comfortable to her. She describes her family's history before and after their years in the camp as a context for the interpersonal strains during their internment. In addition, she describes the phenomenon of not fitting in as a more general developmental issue, one made particularly acute in her case by the intersection of adolescence and racism.

Since the research shows that most people who were interned in these camps did not discuss the experience with their own children, and that those who did have only a very brief conversation about it, Houston's account is all the more important and moving. Read in conjunction with Kessler's Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family and Wiesel's Night for comparison and contrast.