In Cabrillo Homes, a cheerless multicultural housing project in Long Beach, Jeanne maintained her new, all-American attitude, twirling her baton, singing the country-western tunes of Roy Acuff and Red Foley, and learning Spanish tunes as well. She coped with overt racism in the form of taunts, exclusion from Girl Scouts, and outright ignorance of locals who considered her a foreigner. To compensate for a free-floating belief that she somehow deserved exclusion, she excelled at school, discovered a knack for writing while working as editor of the school paper, the Chatterbox, and achieved two youthful goals: she became a majorette and a beauty queen. In Beyond Manzanar, Jeanne admits that during the teen period of assimilative behavior, she was "trying to be as American as Doris Day."
Ko disapproved of Jeanne's bold, sweater-girl look and rebuked her for immodestly strutting, a quality she no doubt acquired from him. Although he resisted the Americanization of his youngest child, Jeanne's mother accepted the fact that Jeanne was behaving normally, including falling in love with a soft-spoken neighbor boy from North Carolina, who taught her to kiss, then parted without leaving a forwarding address. In 1952, the Wakatsukis themselves moved from Cabrillo Homes to a rural, more amenable setting in San Jose, where Ko grew strawberries for Driscoll, Inc.
Jeanne, the Wakatsukis' iconoclast, brought two firsts to the family—a college diploma and the first non-Asian dates. She was attracted to Caucasian males, yet longed to meet a combination of American sensitivity and Japanese potency—in her words, "I wanted a blond Samurai." In her sophomore year, she contemplated a career in journalism, but faced the fact that writing jobs were usually reserved for male reporters. Like other Asians, she opted for an "invisible field" and pursued a sociology degree from the University of San Jose, enrolled in San Francisco State, attended the Sorbonne in Paris, and worked from 1955 to 1957 as a social worker at a juvenile detention hall and probation officer in San Mateo, California.
Jeanne and James
While living in San Jose, Jeanne met teacher James D. Houston. Born November 10, 1933, in San Francisco, the son of Texas blacksmith and sharecropper Albert Dudley Houston (a distant kin of Texas hero Sam Houston) and Alice Loretta Wilson Houston, James grew up in a fundamentalist southern milieu. He graduated from Lowell High School in San Francisco, earned degrees from San Jose State College and Stanford University, and achieved the rank of lieutenant in the U.S. Air Force.
James courted Jeanne long distance from Hawaii with a valentine and proposal inscribed on a ti leaf, which withered to brown by the time it traversed the ocean in a mail pouch. She responded by flying to Hawaii to marry her Caucasian sweetheart. The flower-decked couple had a romantic barefoot wedding at sunset on Waikiki Beach.
Jeanne lived a Jekyll-and-Hyde existence—sometimes being engagingly subservient like her mother; at other times, being independent like American wives. That fall, James was transferred to an ROTC post in England and Jeanne got her first taste of bone-chilling English winters, living in a ten-room townhouse reminiscent of scenes from Dickens. In 1962, the year after the birth of daughter Corinne, nicknamed Cori, the family was back in the U.S., where James taught English at Cabrillo College in Aptos, California.
In 1967, James published Gig, earning the Joseph Henry Jackson award from the San Francisco Foundation, and accepted the Wallace Stegner creative writing fellowship at Stanford; that same year, Jeanne gave birth to twins, Joshua and Gabrielle. Following the publication of his novel Between Battles, James advanced to the University of California in 1969.
Manzanar, repressed in Jeanne's memory, resurfaced in 1971 when one of her nephews, her oldest sister Eleanor's son Gary Nishikawa, asked her to share her memories, since other clan members hedged on details. Gary had been born in Manzanar, and his insistence on full disclosure brought Jeanne to the brink of hysteria. Her subsequent attempts to compose a memoir forced a confession of her longing to relieve traumatic childhood insecurity through writing. James, who had known her for twenty years, had no idea of her secret shame. He proposed that she write "a story everyone in America should read."
The next year, while James enjoyed a University of California faculty research grant, the Houston family traveled to Manzanar, where Jeanne confronted the persistent memories that plagued her subconscious. As her children frolicked on the desert, she strolled through decaying relics of the abandoned windswept internment camp. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she admitted feeling "sullied, like when you are a rape victim. . . . You feel you must have done something. You feel you are a part of the act." The return to Manzanar prompted a catharsis as she extracted herself from internment and viewed it objectively as a moment in history.
From Jeanne's confrontation of this undeserved humiliation grew Farewell to Manzanar, a husband-and-wife collaboration recreating Jeanne's childhood memories and adult acceptance of one of democracy's most blatant injustices. The Houstons' working method blended Jeanne's tape recorded dialogue with library research, three field excursions to Manzanar, and interviews with family and other internees. The outcome, more than a publishable manuscript, brought Jeanne a combination of becalmed spirit and will to write. She described her emergent self this way: "I realized I could no longer hide in the country of my husband's shadow."
