Farewell to Manzanar, written by Jeanne Wakatsuki and her husband James D. Houston, brings the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor to life through the the reimaging of the hardships and discrimination that Jeanne and her family endured while stationed at Manzanar. After the events of Pearl Harbor, seven year-old Jeanne is evacuated with family to an internment camp in which the family will be forced to adapt to a life in containment. Through the writings of Jeanne herself, readers are able to see Jeanne’s world through her words and experience the hardships and sacrifices that the Wakatsuki family had to go through. Farewell to Manzanar takes the reader on a journey through the eyes of a young American-Japanese girl struggling to be accepted by society. …show more content…
The author, Jeanne Wakatsuki, presents a meaningful story filled with experiences that shaped not only her life, but shaped the lives of thousands of Japanese families living in America. The book’s foreword gives us a starting point in which the reader can start to identify why the book was written. “We a told a New York writer friend about the idea. He said: ‘It’s a dead issue. These days you can hardly get people to read about a live issue. People are issued out.’ …, The issue isn’t what we want to write about. Everybody knows an injustice was done. How many know what actually went on inside?” (Foreword, Farewell to Manzanar). Jeanne believed that she could not write this book solely to retell the tale of Pearl Harbor and its aftermath. Instead, she wrote Farewell to Manzanar to share her personal experience(s) during that particular period of time. Jeanne’s argument throughout the book was that America was destroying the Japanese’s integrity. During Jeanne’s middle school and high school years, she struggles to find acceptance from the parents of her friends and the schools themselves. These individuals are afraid of what they’ll look like being involved