How we cite our quotes: (Part.Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
From the wharf we waved good-bye—my mother, Bill's wife, Woody's wife, Chizu, and me. We yelled at them to have a good trip, and after they were out of earshot and the sea had swallowed their engine noises, we kept waving. Then we just stood there with the other women, watching. It was a kind of duty, perhaps a way of adding a little good luck to the voyage, a warding off the bad. (1.1.4)
This is just a basic set-up of how things are at the beginning for the Japanese women in Jeanne's family. It's their "duty" to see the men off on their fishing voyages… which might not be so different from their white female counterparts in this era.
Quote #2
In the barracks facing ours there lived an elegant woman who astounded me each time I saw her. She and her husband both came from Japan, and her long aristocratic face was always a ghastly white. In traditional fashion she powdered it with rice flour every morning. By old-country standards this made her more beautiful. For a long time I thought she was diseased. (1.5.16)
"Diseased" is a pretty strong word, right? It says a whole lot more than I-don't-like-it. What might we deduce about Jeanne's relationship to traditional Japanese femininity from the use of this word?
Quote #3
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)
If there was any doubt about how young (and perhaps even adult) Jeanne feels about the traditional image of Japanese female beauty, this passage ought to put everything to rest. These women are not beautiful—at least, not to Jeanne. They are clearly one step away from being labeled as demon succubi ("cobra's hood" and "reptilian kabuki creatures" really aren't appealing descriptors).