Back in the camp, a call goes out for volunteer workers, and many Japanese sign up. She works in order to pay the warehouse in Los Angeles, where she has stored the family furniture. She worries about Papa, from whom she receives occasional letters, but starts to ignore Jeanne. Jeanne looks for attention elsewhere and begins to observe the other people in camp. In hot weather she watches the 10, people walking around the camp at night.
She pays special attention to a half-black woman who is masquerading as Japanese to stay with her husband; an aristocratic woman who whitens her face with rice flour; a pair of pale, thin-lipped nurses who look like traditional Japanese kabuki theater actors; and Japanese nuns. The nuns run an orphanage in the camp with Father Steinbeck, who is white, and they nearly convert Jeanne to Catholicism before Papa intervenes.
Jeanne is attracted to the stories of saints and martyrs, and spends nearly every afternoon and all day Sunday with the sisters. Walking home in the hot sun, she likes to imagine that she too is suffering with the martyrs. One day, however, she suffers sunstroke and does not go back to her religious study for a month. When the bus door opens, the first thing Jeanne sees is a cane.
Papa is thin, and withered, and he favors his right leg. He and the family look at each other in silence, and only Jeanne has the courage to approach him. She runs to him, hugs his legs, and begins to cry. In general, young Jeanne focuses on immediate concerns rather than broad ones. However, the family members themselves contribute to their own breakup. Ironically, the government itself tries to reestablish family life by requiring families to eat together. Unfortunately, in a camp of 10, people, where many family members are missing, forcing families together is as impossible as it is absurd.
For Wakatsuki, the true tragedy of Manzanar is not the abstract injustice of imprisoning a people but that it stripped her of something very precious to her—her happy family.
His arrival does briefly counteract the disintegration of the family, as most of the family comes out together to welcome him. The family is united in their excitement, but when the bus door opens, their expectations are dimmed. The first thing they see of Papa is a cane, a sign of lameness and an immediate indication that he has changed for the worse. She can see him only as the same man she has always known him to be, and only later does she realize the deep changes that his time in Fort Lincoln brought about in him.
Papa is the oldest son of a samurai family that was stripped of its warrior status when Commodore Matthew Perry arrived in Japan. In Hawaii, Papa saw an advertisement for a job. He bought a new suit and went to find out about the job, but on arriving he found that the ad was for work in the sugar cane fields. He soon found a job as a houseboy in Idaho for an American lawyer.
After spending five years with the lawyer, he enrolled at the University of Idaho and began preparing for a law degree.
Mama was born in Hawaii to a sugar cane worker from Niigata, Japan. Her family moved to Spokane, Washington, after her birth. When Mama was seventeen, she had already been promised to the son of a well-to-do farmer.
She met Papa one morning when he was unloading vegetables at a market. Her family did not like him because he lived a fast-paced life, but the two eloped and got married in Salem, Oregon.
They moved frequently over the next eighteen years and had ten children. Papa did not finish law school and worked many odd jobs. A few years before Jeanne was born he started farming near Watsonville, California. During the Great Depression he moved to Inglewood, but he then turned to fishing in Santa Monica, where he acquired two boats, a house, and a Studebaker. She recalls that her father stood looking elegant in his double-breasted suit and demonstrated how to carve a pig with a few swift strokes of a cleaver.
Jeanne says that her father was not a great man but that he held on to his self-respect and dreams, and whatever he did, he did with flourish. She adds that the other men at the detention camp at Fort Lincoln remember him because he helped the government conduct interviews, taught other inmates English, and gave comic readings of the news every morning. The U.
0コメント