“We forgot about Buddha. We forgot about God. We developed a coldness inside us that still has not thawed. I fear my soul has died. We stopped writing home to our mothers. We lost weight and grew thin. We stopped bleeding. We stopped dreaming. We stopped wanting.”
When the Japanese brides start to settle into their new lives in California, they find that they gradually start to forget the vibrance of their home countries. Life is pretty rough for them in America, despite the overall wealth of the country. Their Japanese traditions are unacceptable to many of their American husbands, so they were forced to abandon their religion. Eventually they were ashamed to write home to their families about what was happening to them. Then even their bodies began to break down from stress, and they stopped having periods. It's as if they were completely broken by the culture shock.
"They took us as we stared up blankly at the ceiling and waited for it to be over, not realizing that it would not be over for years.”
One brides speaks for all of them describing their wedding nights. They receive varied treatment by their new husbands, some faring better than others. Universally they are expected to comply and be grateful for their treatment and are abused when they resist. What none of them realized at the time was that this is their lot forever from now on.
“Etsuko was given the name Esther by her teacher, Mr. Slater, on her first day of school. "It's his mother's name," she explained. To which we replied, "So is yours.”
One of the brides talks about the heartbreak of motherhood for an immigrant. When the teacher cannot or refuses to pronounce Etsuko's name, he merely changes it to an American name which sort of resembles the original. Etsuko doesn't care, but her mother is deeply hurt. She had named her daughter after herself and with the name had hoped her daughter would carry on her culture, but here the girl is rejected everything which the mother holds sacred. There's a sort of haunting apathy in the final epithet, "So is yours."
"Overnight, our neighbors began to look at us differently. . . And even though our husbands had warned us -- They're afraid -- still, we were unprepared. Suddenly, to find ourselves the enemy."
When WWII breaks out, Japanese-Americans are suddenly ostracized by their neighbors. Pearl Harbor is resting heavy on everyone's minds. What the Japanese husbands understand is that the rest are merely afraid in a turbulent global environment and an uncertain economy. The wives, despite the warnings, are shocked at the animosity. They can't help but take it personally when old ladies scream and banks cut them off.
