After Leaving Manzanar Book Report

Describe the Characters: Before the war, the Wakatsukis had a relatively decent lifestyle. Ko, Jeanne’s father, was a hardworking man, who did his best to provide for his family, by whatever means necessary. Throughout the novel, Ko seems to take on the most drastic changes in personality. Jeanne recalls memories of her dad, before the war, making a big show of carving a pig for dinner one evening. She says he was a bit of a poser, always trying to make people see him in the best possible light. She doesn’t remember her father being a great man, but she knows he held on to his self-respect (Houston, 42) After returning from his imprisonment in North Dakota, Ko became much more hardened and distant. He had taken to drinking, and he rarely left …show more content…
Surely living in Manzanar for all those years must have been difficult, but at least there she was protected from the prejudice she would soon grow accustomed to in her later years. After leaving Manzanar, Jeanne’s life became a constant struggle between trying to fit in with society around her and trying to please her family by maintaining her Japanese heritage. It seems like everything she did, her father would scold her for, saying it was unbecoming of her. He argued that, “if you put a sack over her face you couldn’t tell she was Japanese,” (Houston, 126). Jeanne constantly felt like she had to try harder and go above and beyond everyone else just to be accepted. When she was nominated for the position of Carnival Queen, she knew she would have to be unique to win. She couldn’t dress like a “bobbysoxer” like all the other girls, and she certainly couldn’t dress all “japanese-y” either (Houston, 124). In order to win the crown, she had to ascend above the others and make herself more desirable to the crowd. However, after being awarded the title of Queen, she realized that wasn’t who she wanted to be. Her mother tried to convince her that she was not like those other girls, and by the end of the pageant, she realized her mom was right. She was not the girl everyone had voted for, and she certainly wasn’t the traditional and proper Japanese lady her dad wanted her to be either. She was Jeanne Wakatsuki, a Japanese-American girl who was tired of trying to please everyone. Instead, she decided to carve her own path and find her own way through this crazy thing called