Much of Jeanne's commentary reveals scholarly grounding in sociological research. In evaluating the damage done to families, she concludes, "My own family, after three years of mess hall living, collapsed as an integrated unit." In Manzanar, she yearned for the early years when her family shared abundant meals at a great round table in their Ocean Park home. Eventually, authorities perceive the importance to a family unit of shared meals. From that point on, internees are encouraged to dine in intimate, supportive family groups, but their efforts are too late.
The narrative recounts Papa's return, then segues back into his history as a strongly individualistic teenager grown into an entrepreneur and autocratic father. The experience of internment and separation from Ko forces Jeanne into soul-wrenching evaluations of his character and behavior. She concludes as generously as the facts allow with a brief analytic character sketch:
He was not a great man. He wasn't even a very successful man. He was a poser, a braggart, and a tyrant. But he had held onto his self-respect, he dreamed grand dreams, and he could work well at any task he turned his hand to: he could raise vegetables, sail a boat, plead a case in small claims court, sing Japanese poems, make false teeth, carve a pig.
The severity of Jeanne's estimation suggests the high cost of so scathing an evaluation of her highly valued father. To redeem her father, she recreates a prison scene with a twenty-nine-year-old interrogator in which Ko demonstrates his humanism by saying: "As long as military men control the country you are always going to have a war."
