The shift in setting is of primary importance to the remainder of the book. The return to more civilized accommodations begins with the flushing of the toilet, a welcome sound to these former internees who are used to foul-odored, stopped-up toilets and standing in line at crowded latrines that worked. The Wakatsukis rejoice in private bedrooms and a kitchen where they can cook what they choose and eat as a family. The environment, typical of government planning, consists of two-story stucco units, plank banisters, community clotheslines, and sparse landscaping. A few years later, when Jeanne is old enough to enter high school, she finally sees Cabrillo Homes for what it is: little more than "a half-finished and undermaintained army base."
A serious theme, the loss of status, reflects a basic difference in male and female adults. Just as post-Civil War and Depression-era unemployment emasculated black males as black females discovered the empowerment of domestic work for real wages, Papa's loss of status contrasts with Mama's return to the position of wage earner. A proud man too status conscious to join her in menial work, Ko absorbs himself in blueprints of a dream neighborhood.
For Jeanne, the battlefield of the sixth grade is tangible proof that detainment has forever labeled her as foreign, "the slant-eyed face, the Oriental." In a significant coming-to-knowledge of her family's ordeal, she concludes, "You cannot deport 110,000 people unless you have stopped seeing individuals." More demeaning is her awareness that she and other Orientals have acquiesced to unjust treatment out of the subconscious belief that their detainment was somehow deserved. With a child's logic, Jeanne, a pre-teen Alice in Wonderland, chooses to shrink into social invisibility, but she offsets the possibility of complete extinction by overachieving through academic performance and athletics, by participating in yearbook, newspaper, and student government, and by asserting her femininity in her gold-braided majorette costume, which displays her gobo legs.
