Two appropriate touches round out the preface: a single quotation from a 1947 issue of Harper's Magazine decrying the racist motives behind the Japanese relocation program and a gentle poem written twenty years later by a member of another oppressed, war-ravaged Oriental nation. The cyclical motif of birth and death provides the Houstons a sturdy springboard for a book which carries Jeanne from a child of six to a mother of an eleven-year-old daughter and five-year-old twins. As with most earthly truths, the lessons gained at Manzanar are reasserted to each generation so that, hopefully, subsequent eras will avoid the bigotry of their forebears. Thus Jeanne and Jim Houston familiarize their own children with the place where mother, grandmother and grandfather, Uncle Woody, Aunt Chizu, and Granny spent the war years.
A major factor in the Houstons' success is the skillful inclusion of details, such as the boys' formation of a band known as the Jive Bombers, the absurd spectacle of newly outfitted internees in Chaplinesque GI baggy pants, Woody's gift of fifty pounds of sugar to his great Aunt Toyo, Ko's crude wine still, and the relentless sweep of searchlights during riots that erupt at the first anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Jeanne's skillful separation of meaningful bits from a heap of memories sets her apart from the average autobiographer. For instance, she assigns Mama a diminished role in the dialogue and action of the book, but one scene robes her in unforgettable strength:
She reached into the red velvet case, took out a dinner plate and hurled it at the floor right in front of [the dealer's] feet. The man leaped back shouting, "Hey! Hey, don't do that! Those are valuable dishes!" Mama took out another dinner plate and hurled it at the floor, then another and another, never moving, never opening her mouth, just quivering and glaring at the retreating dealer, with tears streaming down her cheeks. . . . When he was gone she stood there smashing cups and bowls and platters until the whole set lay in scattered blue and white fragments across the wooden floor.
