carries a symbolic significance, as Papa had previously resisted settling in among other Japanese American families, preferring to assimilate into more diverse communities where he could not be "labeled or grouped by anyone." His disappearance, and the family’s move to Terminal Island to live among other Japanese Americans, thus represents a psychological defeat for the patriarch; despite insistently identifying as American, Papa nevertheless is caught up in the racially-motivated dragnet following the attack on Pearl Harbor.

For Mama, the move to Terminal Island was an opportunity to live among her own kind. As Jeanne describes in the opening passages of Farewell to Manzanar, Mama saw Terminal Island as ideal; her older children were already living there and, more importantly, "once the war began, she felt safer there than isolated racially in Ocean Park." For Jeanne, the move was less welcome:

. . . for me, at age seven, the island was a country as foreign as India or Arabia would have been. It was the first time I had lived among other Japanese, or gone to school with them, and I was terrified all the time.

Jeanne partially attributes her fear to her father and how he used the threat of deportation as a disciplinary tool (a concept particularly frightening to young children who cannot recognize it as an empty threat). Furthermore, Papa's efforts at assimilation had, perversely, alienated his daughter from her heritage and made her view her new circumstances as dangerous and fear-inspiring, a direct contradiction to the relative safety her mother felt as a result of the move. In any event, the move to Terminal Island was not a welcome development for the seven-year-old child.

Near the beginning of the novel, when Jeanne and her mother and siblings have to move to Terminal Island, where the extended family can stay together and feel safer, Jeanne doesn't feel safer at all; she actually reacts with terror and discomfort:

But for me, at age seven, the island was a country as foreign as India or Arabia would have been. It was the first time I had lived among other Japanese, or gone to school with them, and I was terrified all the time.

Ever since Jeanne was in kindergarten a few years prior, she'd lived with a strange, deep-seated fear of other people of Oriental descent. As an adult narrating her own story, Jeanne explains that this fear is probably rooted in a threat that her father often made to her and her siblings in order to keep them behaving properly: "I'm going to sell you to the Chinaman." For this reason, Jeanne figures, she's profoundly fearful of strangers with Asian facial features.

Also, Jeanne had only spoken English as a child, but her new peers and neighbors on Terminal Island spoke Japanese exclusively, in a dialect she didn't comprehend at all. These others were not just incomprehensible but also rude, boisterous, and generally menacing to Jeanne. Even with her older brother to walk her home from school, and even though she was never actually attacked by any of her neighbors, Jeanne describes her time living on Terminal Island as living under a "reign of fear," a time when a period of just a few months actually felt like years.

Farewell to Manzanar is ultimately a story about coming to understand one’s place in the grand scheme of culture and society. Jeanne, a young Japanese girl in the memoir, is entirely American—but because of her racial and ethnic heritage, she is thrust into an internment camp and forced to exist with the label of the enemy of America. The story focuses on Jeanne coming to terms with how her country treated her, the desire to be accepted by mainstream American culture, and how to honor her Japanese heritage.

Strangely enough, Jeanne wouldn’t have come face to face with much of her Japanese heritage if it hadn’t been for the internment. Before the release of Executive Order 9066, Jeanne and her family lived in Ocean Park—a white neighborhood. Jeanne’s father had moved her away from Japanese people, and she never learned to speak the language. It was her father’s eventual arrest and the growing anti-Japanese sentiment that forced her family to move to Terminal Island with other people of Japanese descent.

Jeanne, growing up in a majority white neighborhood, was afraid of anyone who looked remotely Asian. She knew her family, of course, but everyone else was a potential threat. The reason she was terrified relates to what her father would tell her,

This was partly Papa’s fault. One of his threats to keep us younger kids in line was, “I’m going to sell you to the chinaman.” When I had entered kindergarten two years earlier, I was the only Asian in class. They sat me next to a Caucasian girl who happened to have very slanted eyes. I looked at her and began to scream, certain Papa had sold me out at last. (Chapter 2)

Jeanne’s father instilled a fear of Asian people in her by using them as a boogeyman who preyed on bad children. Along with that, Jeanne was terrified because she didn’t fit in—something that would be a large part of her struggles later in the story. Jeanne didn’t speak Japanese, and the other children on Terminal Island would torture her relentlessly because of it. She was cut from a different social class, and the divide was almost too great for others to forgive.

Ultimately ,Jeanne’s fear would be understood as silly, but they are symbolic of the rent she feels from her Japanese heritage. She goes on to disappoint her father in different ways because she is not entirely “Japanese” enough for him. Despite that, she finds a way to appreciate her heritage while also living a life that is true to her experience as an American.