Nisei Daughter

“One day when I was a happy six-year-old, I made the shocking discovery that I had Japanese blood. I was a Japanese.”

Sone’s discovery of her ethnicity shocks her. Suddenly, the world as she knows it, one in which she is happily unaware that she can be classified as a particular type of person, is over.

“Up to that moment, I had never thought of Father and Mother as Japanese. True, they had almond eyes and they spoke Japanese to us, but I never felt that it was strange. It was like one person’s being red-haired and another black.”

This quote describes how multiculturalism is so natural for Sone that she is not even aware that she is growing up in two different cultures. Her worldview is that language and physical attributes such as eye shape or hair color do not define people as being American or not.

“Shod in spanking white tabis—Japanese stockings—and scarlet cork-soled slippers, the young women stood in tense excitement at the rails of the ship.”

This description of Benko and her sisters sailing into the Seattle port shows how the young women in traditional Japanese clothing look to their future both nervously and enthusiastically. By describing their posture at the rails of the ship, Sone paints a picture of anticipation and hints that these women’s lives are about to change immeasurably.