The Japanese-American Experience
The predominant theme of the memoir is the Japanese American experience a the author knew it first hand. This experience seems to have changes enormously after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor during World War II. This led to distrust of Japanese and Japanese American people and although being sent to an internment camps seemed harsh and unreasonable to the author and her family, it was also understandable in the context of what the nation was facing. In her biography of Olympian turned war hero Louis Zamperini, author Laura Hillenbramd tells of Zamperini's experiences with Japanese Americans in his California neighborhood who acted as spies for the Japanese consulate and thereby threatened the safety and stability of the country. This was the reason for the internment camps. Sone found that she fit in best when around an international community rather than when with entirely American or entirely Japanese company.
Cultural Identity
Sone examines with much insight the way in which she felt hat she fit in nowhere. In America she was seen as Japanese. On a family visit to Japan her relatives thought her to be too American. Consequently she felt that she fit nowhere and it was difficult for her to embrace either sides of her nationality. She struggled with her parents' insistence on the old traditions but she also struggled with her American friends' view of them as "foreign". The memoir shows how hard it was for Japanese Americans at the time to truly identify with one culture or another and also how hard it was to do this when there was so much pressure to "pick one" and identify with it.
