United States government

The United States government is a consequential institutional presence in the novel, acting directly through wartime incarceration and indirectly through the wars and legal systems that shape its characters’ lives. Its authority is not presented only as a matter of official policy: it also determines who may serve, whose history is taught, what conduct is punished, and how dissenters understand their own actions. The government’s treatment of Japanese Americans forms a family history for Jenny, while opposition to the Vietnam War becomes the political context for her and William’s bombings and later fugitive lives.

Wartime Incarceration and Jim Shimada

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Jim Shimada went to enlist in the military with some of his friends. Though he was only seventeen, age was not the reason he was turned away: his Japanese ancestry prevented him from serving. In the fall of 1942, he and his parents were sent to Manzanar War Relocation Center in Owens Valley, among the Japanese and Japanese Americans living in California who were incarcerated by the federal government. The contrast between Jim’s wish to enlist and his exclusion from service makes the policy’s racial logic concrete: his ancestry marked him as suspect even when he sought to serve the country.

In the spring of 1943, the government administered a loyalty oath to people held in the camps. Its two questions asked whether they would serve in the U.S. Army if allowed and whether they would renounce loyalty to Japan. The second question generated particular alarm because people feared that answering yes could be treated as an admission of prior loyalty to Japan. The novel places this official demand within a tense camp environment, where a small and violent pro-Japan movement had already contributed to gang violence. The oath did not settle questions of allegiance; it intensified uncertainty for people whose citizenship and loyalty had already been subordinated to ancestry.

A Family History Made Difficult to Tell

The incarceration shaped Jim’s later life and his relationship with Jenny, but the experience was not openly transmitted within their family. Jenny first learned about the incarceration at school in Japan, not in California, where it had happened, and not from her father, who responded to her questions by treating it as long past. The omission made the history, for Jenny, a key to understanding her father and the political forces that had formed him. Yet that discovery did not bring them closer: as Jenny became active in the antiwar movement, their arguments grew fiercer, focusing on her supposed arrogance, stupidity, or naivete rather than developing into a shared discussion of the war or the government’s actions.

Jim’s resistance to the draft during his incarceration brought another consequence. He had been imprisoned for resisting it, and the experience left him embittered enough that, after the family moved to Japan, he intended to expatriate permanently. His hope of finding acceptance there was disappointed; in Japan he remained, in Jenny’s recollection, unmistakably American. When Jenny and Jim eventually returned to California, the history that had helped shape his opposition remained difficult for him to discuss. The government’s policy thus persists in the novel not only as a past event but as a source of estrangement, silence, and conflict across generations.

War, Protest, and Political Violence

The Vietnam War is the other major context in which government power becomes central. Before going underground, Jenny and William bombed several government targets, mostly draft offices, at night. They believed violence would force attention onto the war and intended their attacks to cause no deaths. Jenny later recognized that they had assumed their opposition would be self-evidently justified and had understood mainly people who already shared their views. Their actions were directed against government institutions, but the novel does not present their certainty about the moral meaning of those actions as settled.

In hiding, Jenny read that cease-fire agreements had been signed in Paris to end the war in Vietnam. The newspaper account’s description of the participants’ clothing made the ending feel remote from the lives of the people who had opposed the war: William was imprisoned, and Jenny was still a fugitive for their protest and bombings. She considered keeping the report as a memento, then threw it away. Its formal announcement of a conclusion offered her no meaningful resolution. The passage sets public reporting and diplomatic closure against the personal consequences that remained after the agreements were signed.

Dissent, Power, and the Limits of Legal Judgment

Jenny’s later thinking about the bombings complicates her earlier conviction. She had once understood the attacks as a way to expose the government’s violence and believed that power, though it could seem natural and overwhelming, was ultimately wielded by people and their tools. But she came to question whether she and William had fought power on its own terms, rather than rejecting those terms. Her changing view preserves the political critique while refusing to treat their own violence as inherently good.

The novel also distinguishes criminal punishment from the broader political and historical circumstances that have shaped the characters. Jenny and Pauline are eventually tried and sentenced for acts committed before they met; their time together, and the killing of Mr. Morton, are not entered into the legal record through charges against either woman for that death. Their differing sentences and treatment in prison expose disparities that the legal outcomes alone cannot explain: Pauline is convicted of bank robbery but serves less than two years before her sentence is commuted, while Jenny receives a minimum sentence for the draft-office bombings and is later transferred to work release. Jenny experiences the privileges attached to her good behavior as a new form of racial classification, the expectation that she will be exceptionally well behaved. In this way, the government’s institutional presence extends from wartime exclusion to the unequal meanings assigned to punishment, leniency, and conformity.