How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
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. (1.6.28)
This is Papa, before he gets taken away. But note—even though he may have "grand dreams," he doesn't have real plans… which is maybe how he is able to have so many different skills.
Quote #2
But, like Papa's arrest, not much could be done ahead of time. There were four of us kids still young enough to be living with Mama, plus Granny, her mother, sixty-five then, speaking no English, and nearly blind. Mama didn't know where else she could get work, and we had nowhere else to move to. On February 25 the choice was made for us. We were given forty-eight hours to clear out. (1.2.7)
Not knowing where you're going, only getting forty-eight hours to organize yourselves—that's got to be hard. You can't plan ahead, which also means it's hard to know how to realize your hopes and dreams once you get to wherever you're going.
Quote #3
The simple truth is the camp was no more ready for us when we got there than we were ready for it. We had only the dimmest ideas of what to expect. Most of the families, like us, had moved out from southern California with as much luggage as each person could carry. Some old men left Los Angeles wearing Hawaiian shirts and Panama hats and stepped off the bus at an altitude of 4000 feet, with nothing available but sagebrush and tarpaper to stop the April winds pouring down off the back side of the Sierras. (1.4.3)
Do you spot a trend here? There was no master plan; the whole internment effort was—at the beginning—a haphazard, chaotic experience, with the internees as beneficiaries of all this disorganization.