named a San Francisco Chronicle “Best Book of the
Year,” an Entertainment Weekly “Top Ten Fiction
Pick of the Year,” and an American Library Asso-
ciation “Notable Book.”
Bibliography
Hosseini, Khaled. “An Afghan Story: Khaled Hosseini
and The Kite Runner.” Interview by Terry Gross.
National Public Radio. Aug. 11, 2005. Available
online. URL: http://www.npr.org/templates/
story/story.php?storyId-4795618. Accessed April
25, 2006.
Khaled Hosseini Home Page. Available online. URL:
http://www.khaledhosseini.com/index1.php?p-3.
Eric G. Waggoner
Houston, Jeanne Wakatsuki (Toyo)
(1934– )
Best known for her 1973 memoir FAREWELL TO
MANZANAR, Houston is a writer and lecturer whose
work deals largely with the World War II–era Japa-
nese-American internment camps, particularly
the internment’s effects on families and women.
Her father, born in Hiroshima, immigrated to the
United States in 1904 and married Riku, a Hawai-
ian-born Japanese American. Jeanne, the last of 10
children, was born in Inglewood, California.
When Jeanne Wakatsuki was two, her family
moved to Ocean Park, a primarily Caucasian sea-
coast city, where her father took up commercial
fishing. Jeanne was seven years old in 1941, when
Japanese bombers attacked the U.S. naval base at
Pearl Harbor. On the night of the attack, her father,
fearing acts of retaliation against Japanese Ameri-
cans, burned the Japanese flag he had brought with
him from Hiroshima, as well as any documents
and papers indicating any personal connection
with Japan. Despite this, two weeks after the at-
tack, he was arrested by the FBI on false charges of
supplying oil to Japanese submarines, and taken to
North Dakota for questioning. Deprived of the in-
come from Jeanne’s father’s fishing, the Wakatsukis
moved to Terminal Island, a Japanese-American
cannery community, and later to Boyle Heights, a
racial ghetto in downtown Los Angeles.
In March 1942 the Wakatsukis sold or aban-
doned their possessions and were imprisoned near
the Nevada border at Manzanar, the largest of the
Japanese-American internment camps, where
they were reunited with their father. The Wakat-
sukis would remain at Manzanar for nearly two
and a half years. Upon their release in 1945, they
moved to the Cabrillo Homes housing project in
Long Beach.
While in junior high school at Long Beach,
Jeanne won recognition from her school’s jour-
nalism program for an essay she wrote about her
family’s preinternment life in coastal California.
The response to that essay, she later recalled in
her 1992 entry for the Contemporary Authors Au-
tobiography Series, first made her want to become
a writer. Jeanne Wakatsuki entered San Jose State
University in 1952 as a journalism major, but the
grim prospects for Asian-American women in that
field caused her to change her major to sociology
and social welfare. Throughout college she dated
James D. Houston, a fellow journalism student,
and on Valentine’s Day 1957 Houston proposed to
Jeanne. They were married a month later in Ha-
waii. After living abroad in England and France
for nearly four years, Jeanne and James returned
to California in 1961, settling first in Palo Alto and
then in Santa Cruz, where they continue to live.
For many years thereafter Jeanne devoted her
energies to raising their three children, but a visit
from her nephew in 1971 prompted her to begin
writing down her childhood memories of Man-
zanar and the internment experience. Published
in 1973, the highly praised Farewell to Manzanar
launched her career as a professional writer. In
subsequent years she has written two more non-
fiction books: Don’t Cry, It’s Only Thunder (1984,
written with Paul G. Hensler), about an American
soldier’s experience working on behalf of Viet-
namese orphans, and Beyond Manzanar: Views of
Asian-American Womanhood (1985). She is a fre-
quent contributor to newspapers and magazines
including Der Spiegel, Mother Jones, and the San
Francisco Chronicle, and she has authored several
screenplays including a 1976 adaptation of Fare-
well to Manzanar for Universal/MCA-TV. In 2003
Wakatsuki Houston published her first full-lengthHouston, Jeanne Wakatsuki (Toyo) 113