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.
