How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #4
On Terminal Island I first saw Orientals, those demon-children who had terrorized me. At Manzanar, past the fear of slanted eyes and high cheekbones, I watched with fresh amazement the variety of faces and bodies and costumes all around me. (1.5.14)
Jeanne's showing how total horror ("demon-children"—really?) and fascination with the foreign Other can co-exist at the same time, in the same person, and in someone who also happens to be "Oriental." A little disturbing?
Quote #5
One of our neighbors was a tall, broad woman, taller than anyone in camp, as far as I recall. She walked erectly and wore an Aunt Jemima scarf around her head. She was married to a Japanese man, and they had adopted a little Japanese girl I sometimes played with. But this woman, I realized much later, was half-black, with light mulatto skin, passing as a Japanese in order to remain with her husband. She wore scarfs everywhere to cover her give-away hair. (1.5.15)
Yet another case of interracial mixing that seems to fascinate Jeanne. Is it the interracial-ness of her neighbor that makes her seem so foreign to Jeanne? We'll just add: Jeanne, as narrator, is definitely treading on some tricky territory when she describes the woman as wearing "an Aunt Jemima scarf"…
Quote #6
Two more white faces stand out in my memory, a pair of nurses I saw from time to time in the clinic. They wore white shoes, white hose, and white dresses. Above their bleached faces their foreheads had been shaved halfway over their scalp's curve to make a sharp widow's peak where starched black hair began to arch upward, reminding me of a cobra's hood. Their lips were gone. Their brows were plucked. They were always together, a pair of reptilian kabuki creatures at loose in the camp hospital. (1.5.17)
"Reptilian kabuki creatures"? It's like these nurses are straight out of some Japanese horror movie. Is all that Otherness really that scary? And why?