Through first-person narration, Jeanne communicates intensely personal information in a straightforward, unsentimental style in this final section of the novel. The first of the Wakatsukis to gain a college education and the first to marry a non-Asian, she sets high standards for herself, particularly after the demoralizing three-year detainment in Manzanar. Apparently unencumbered by racist baggage, she gives birth to three mixed-race children and admits to repressing the past by perceiving it as a dream and joking with her siblings about internment. Yet, the experience shared with Kiyo in which an old lady wished that all "dirty Japs" would return to Japan needles Jeanne with an unverbalized hurt.
In a surrealistic montage, Jeanne, like Woody in the post-war milieu of Hiroshima, experiences a rush of spiritual contact with those who died and were buried on Manzanar grounds. Although the outlines of the hospital, latrines, and showers are obscured, the typically Japanese rock gardens remain, a tribute to "something enduringly human." She abstracts herself from the experience of walking the once-familiar terrain and views the site from an archeological point of view. Sounds of laughter and the words from the song "Beautiful Dreamer" invoke a sleepwalking state as past merges with present: Jeanne, the ten-year-old schoolgirl, alongside Jeanne, the mother of three. Rich cultural memories coalesce as she recalls the burning of orange peels as an insect repellent and men passing the time in games of goh and hana.
Symbolic of internees in general and the Wakatsukis in particular, the pear trees, once Ko's personal garden, still survive, "stunted, tenacious, tough, the way a cactus has to be." The sense impressions of twisted branches heady with fragrance rhapsodize the scene for Jeanne, in contrast to the realism of her rambunctious children, who "[demand] to know what we were going to do out here." Returning to the persona of mother, Jeanne agrees that Manzanar, more state of mind than actual place, is "No place for kids."
