Farewell to Manzanar: Part 2

by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston
Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston was only seven when her Japanese-American family was forced to leave their home in Long Beach, California for an internment camp during World War II. This is her story.

Here are links to our lists for the memoir: Foreword–Part 1, Part 2, Part 3–Afterword
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. tolerable
    capable of being borne or endured
    That’s where we stayed until the end of the war, and those trees stand in my memory for the turning of our life in camp, from the outrageous to the tolerable.
    The adjective can also mean "about average; acceptable." This definition cannot describe sand-filled houses, diarrhea-causing food, overflowing bathrooms, and barbed wire. It is also too mild to be the opposite of "outrageous" which means "grossly offensive to decency or morality." But in the three years at Manzanar, conditions did get better and more tolerable.
  2. vie
    compete for something
    Some families would vie with one another for the most elegant floor designs, obtaining a roll of each color from the supply shed, cutting it into diamonds, squares, or triangles, shining it with heating oil, then leaving their doors open so that passers-by could admire the handiwork.
  3. habitable
    fit to be lived in
    If anything made that country habitable it was the mountains themselves, purple when the sun dropped and so sharply etched in the morning light the granite dazzled almost more than the bright snow lacing it.
    The mountains did not literally make Manzanar a fit place to live. Rather, their beauty was a source of spiritual inspiration and symbolic reminders that helped the internees endure.
  4. confinement
    the act of restraining a person's liberty
    What had to be endured was the climate, the confinement, the steady crumbling away of family life.
  5. subside
    wear off or die down
    Once we settled into Block 28 that ache I’d felt since soon after we arrived at Manzanar subsided.
  6. semblance
    the outward or apparent appearance or form of something
    It didn’t entirely disappear, but it gradually submerged, as semblances of order returned and our pattern of life assumed its new design.
  7. lethargy
    weakness characterized by a lack of vitality or energy
    In the government’s eyes a free man now, he sat, like those black slaves you hear about who, when they got word of their freedom at the end of the Civil War, just did not know where else to go or what else to do and ended up back on the plantation, rooted there out of habit or lethargy or fear.
  8. disintegrate
    break into parts or components or lose cohesion or unity
    All around, you saw these signals of neglect, as if the camp itself were slowly, deliberately disintegrating in order to comply with the administration’s deadline.
  9. volition
    the act of making a choice
    A few days before we left Manzanar Papa decided that since we had to go, we might as well leave in style, and by our own volition.
  10. resignation
    acceptance of an unpleasant but inevitable situation
    I had heard Mama say with lonesome resignation, “I don’t understand all this hate in the world.”
  11. amorphous
    having no definite form or distinct shape
    I saw it as a dark, amorphous cloud that would descend from above and enclose us forever.
  12. indication
    something that serves to suggest
    Indeed, if the movements of this city were an indication, the very existence of Manzanar and all it had stood for might be in doubt.
  13. premonition
    a feeling of evil to come
    But those premonitions proved correct, in a way I hadn’t been at all prepared for, on the first day back in public school, when the shape of what I truly had to deal with appeared to me for the first time.
  14. overt
    open and observable; not secret or hidden
    I wouldn’t be faced with physical attack, or with overt shows of hatred.
  15. acquiescence
    acceptance without protest
    Of course, for such a thing to happen, there has to be a kind of acquiescence on the part of the victims, some submerged belief that this treatment is deserved, or at least allowable.
    Compare with "resignation" in this list. Because the nouns both connect to acceptance, they can be used as synonyms. But as the definitions and example sentences show, a feeling of resignation is often a deeper, sadder, individual acceptance of a hopeless situation. Acquiescence is often a show of acceptance, and the lack of outward protest can sometimes be due to resignation, but it can also be due to agreement, social pressure or an unfavorable situation.
Created on Sun Dec 21 19:26:02 EST 2014 (updated Wed Jul 02 16:34:52 EDT 2025)

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