Last Friday night, my brother called me from Beijing, telling me that his daughter in New York was concerned about the anti-Asian violence, and wanted to do something within her power. "Ask her to read or re-read Farewell to Manzanar," I said. Recently, I have read Farewell to Manzanar by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston. I found it at once timely and relevant, even though the book was published nearly fifty years ago in 1973, and its subject matter dealt with the mistreatment and detention of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Along with her nine siblings, Jeanne Wakatsuki was born as a Nisei, the second generation of Issei, the first generation of Japanese Americans. Growing up in Santa Monica, California, she never set foot outside the county of Los Angeles until the Attack on Pearl Harbor (7 December 1941). Her father was arrested on the charge of selling oil to Japanese submarines offshore. Soon afterwards, her mother received an order to leave for a detention camp. The seven-year-old Jeanne followed her family to head for Manzanar, one of the ten American concentration camps to hold over 120,000 Japanese Americans from March 1942 to November 1945. Joined by the father who was released later, the Wakatsukis and their extended families stayed in the camp for a year and half.
The deep-rooted racial prejudice against any non-white could trace back to 1870 when U.S. Congress granted citizenship to all free whites and African descendants, without mentioning any Asian nationalities. At her young and tender school age in Boyle Heights, Jeanne already sensed coldness from her teacher, and outright hostility from many Caucasians. Such hostile attitudes escalated with the outbreak of war after Pearl Harbor. She remembered, "Tolerance had turned into distrust and irrational fear. The hundred-year-old tradition of anti-Asian sentiment on the West Coast soon resurfaced, more vicious than ever." (page 18)
If not at the insistence of Jeannie and her husband James, the Farewell never would come into being. In her Foreword, she mentioned the possibility of writing about the interment of Japanese Americans in the 1940s, but was flatly discouraged by a friend from New York who proclaimed was a dead issue. But the authors knew only too well there and then that eradication of racial inequity and prejudice would not be accomplished overnight, requiring generations' efforts. People might be issued out, as the her New York friend stated, for one generation, but the prejudice will surface whenever time and place are ripe, as with the George Floyd incident and Asian Hate crimes today.
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