Properties of Thirst

“There was a thirst for betterment as plain, as basic, as the thirst for water and the satisfaction of its need was as expected and assumed as rain from heaven, rain in summer, rain in Spain. If you could not make it here, in this land of opp, you did not deserve to call yourself American.”

Schiff recounts his parents’ ambitions and ideals as they emigrated from Europe to Chicago. He understands instinctively that because of the ways in which they had to struggle, his parents expect him to take advantage of the opportunities afforded him—specifically education. His description of his parents’ aspirations as a “thirst” aligns with the symbolic meaning of water throughout the novel.

“The good thing about Lone Pine was that there was nothing here, as Schiff was learning, of any interest to the world in general, not to anyone at all, especially an enemy combatant.

Except water.

All the water that the fifth largest city in the United States needs to survive.”

The importance of water and its state as a limited resource is frequently on Schiff’s mind as he plans Manzanar. Supplying enough water for such a large number of people is only one challenge he faces. The size of the “city” that will result when the camp is full will make Manzanar the fifth largest in the US, and Schiff fears that this will make it a target of future attacks by Japan. Thus, Schiff feels a responsibility to keep its residents safe, evidence of his moral character.

“All that night and all the next day—and all through the following weeks and years—that whipping noise, that cracking sound, the sound of that flag flying in relentless wind, was the sound that would dominate the camp—more than all the sirens, more than all the mess hall sirens, curfew sirens, air raid drills and fire drills—the noise, at night, the noise all day, of that flag battling the wind is what would keep them all awake. Some people said it was the sound of a cracked whip, some people said it sounded like doors slamming—but for Schiff that first night as he tried to get some rest all he heard was the persistent sound outside of a noise reminding him of distant shooting.”

The American flag that Svevo raises in Manzanar is an ironic reminder of the freedoms that the detainees have been denied. Although they haven’t violated any laws or committed any crimes, they’re imprisoned and presumed dangerous for racist reasons: their ethnic backgrounds. Schiff recognizes the hypocrisy of a government that asks Japanese American citizens to pledge their loyalty to it while denying them their civil rights in return.

“[Sunny] had no way of knowing how old her mother might have been when she’d left the exclamation mark, but there it was, in black and white (well, purple) as fresh as if her mother had just set it down. This was a direct contact to the way her mother thought and even though Sunny hadn’t understood (could not have understood, at ten) what le desir imparted, she had guessed, rightly, that whatever this meant, in any language, it embodied something fundamental (exacte!) to the way her mother had lived and cooked.”

As Sunny studies her mother’s cookbooks and recipes, she learns more about her mother. Sunny is keenly aware of this process of discovery, and through it she seeks to grow closer to her late mother, to understand who she was as a person outside of her identity as Sunny’s mother. Seeing a note her mother made in French that she’d ended with a definitive mark of emphasis, Sunny revels in the feeling it conveys even though she doesn’t understand the words.

“With their manila camp identification tags tied to their coat buttons, the arrivees looked like merchandise themselves—discounted and reduced in value—especially the children, on whom the five-inch tags looked so much larger, by proportion […] When Schiff had said ‘ten thousand’ Sunny had not foreseen so many of them as children. Nor had she foreseen the elderly, the infirm, all the women, wives and mothers, women who had maintained homes, cared for families, shopped for groceries: cooked. Now, they stood in their best shoes in the mud with dazed looks of displacement as if, in their distraction, they’d failed to bring along the thing they loved the most.”

This passage highlights the demeaning and dehumanizing aspect of the forced imprisonment of the Japanese Americans. Until now, their presence has been an abstract concept for Sunny, but the extreme number of imprisoned, and the reality of their predicament, becomes real as they arrive at Manzanar. The impact of their rushed displacement to internment camps is obvious, and she views them as humans and not as would-be threats.

“When the water thieves, the L.A. bastards, hit the Valley—when they’d invaded here—Rocky hadn’t folded like the others; he’d stood up to them (according to his legend) and waged a brand of Native war. Perhaps the memory of that day was why he’d stayed away today—you had to pick your battles, and this one wasn’t his. The J*ps had killed his son. Three months since the day and though they had no proof he was dead they had to face the fact that Stryker wasn’t coming back. But these people crowded in behind the barbed wire, these aliens imported to her neighborhood, were Californians, every one American, and this—this cattle call—was a far more egregious act than when the other bastards, the real ones, had come to steal the only thing on Earth that makes life possible.”

Unlike the common viewpoint at the time, Rocky’s viewpoint separates the Americans of Japanese ancestry from the nation that bombed Pearl Harbor. Sunny explains that, in Rocky’s mind, they’re not guilty by association. He strongly believes that their imprisonment is unjust. Given Rocky’s long-held grudge against the Los Angeles Department of Water, this speaks to the complexity and nuance of his character.

“[S]he read them [her mother’s cookbooks] only at night, in bed, a habit she’d developed in her youth when she was stumbling through her self-taught French. She’d stay awake at night like someone committed to the study of religious texts, transposing recipes in French onto the left-hand pages of her notebook, translating them, with effort, into English on the right. It was here that she’d discovered her mother’s margin notes, those exclamation marks in purple ink, those exuberant exacte!s that made her feel a living rapport with her. The pleasure of her mother’s company, the intimate discoveries, became a source of trust and comfort, which had carried over, through the years, to reading all cookbooks in bed.”

Sunny connects with her mother and comes to better understand who she was by reading her mother’s notes in her cookbooks. Sunny is keenly interested in learning to know Lou as a person beyond just her identity as her mother. Because of her mother’s association with food, cooking becomes a lifelong comfort for Sunny. For example, when she learns of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, she consoles herself by cooking.

“There were women who owned restaurants—there had to be—but looking back on her experience in New York—and on the train—she’d realized women hadn’t figured into that landscape, had been not so much erased (they’d never been there in the first place) as rendered immaterial. In Paris, it would be the same—women in the daily markets with their baskets and their net bags full of onions but men at the door in restaurants, serving at table, in the kitchens. Women were the cooks; and men, the chefs.”

Sunny’s trip to New York, then Paris, when she’s an adolescent proves eye-opening regarding the lack of opportunities for women and the societal expectations about gender roles. That women are regarded as unfit or unworthy of the prestige of the title “chef” is something Sunny recognizes as unjust, though she doesn’t say it in so many words. Indeed, even Schiff provides evidence of this bias when he first eats at Lou’s and assumes that its chef must be male.

“The Paris notebooks, as Sunny would come to think of the journey’s diaries collectively, lived on the far end of the lower shelf above the kneading table in the kitchen where the cookbooks were amassed along with all the menus she’d collected and her mother’s recipe cards and she rarely referred back to them once she’d returned to Lone Pine because whenever she did they made her sad. Not sad in the way of missing someone or some distant thing or place that you can never re-create but sad because of all the gaps, because of how little evidence they contained of her emotional life. Sad the way her mother’s notecards made her feel—not because of what was written on them, but because of what had been left out.”

Sunny recognizes that though she has a window into her mother’s identity through her cookbooks and recipes, the view is partial and incomplete. She’ll never be able to know all the details behind what she uncovers, and this truth saddens her. In keeping with the theme of Loss and Remembrance, however, she cherishes the reminders she does have of Lou.

“She likened reading through her mother’s cards to reading an anthology of silences, the lost history of a soul…and on the few occasions she’d gone searching for her younger self in those Paris notebooks she’d come up with as little authentication of personality as she’d found in Lou’s recipes. Neither of them were diarists. Both tended to jot half-thoughts in code. Where Lou came most alive to Sunny was in the margin exclamation points, exuberant exacte!s—made in her trademark purple ink—to this day Sunny was still uncovering the in the faded pages of Lou’s culinary library.”

Through reading her mother’s recipes, Sunny attempts to learn who her mother was. It’s a difficult task, however, because the notes Lou left are sparse and cryptic. The task of translating the recipes will become a lifelong task for Sunny.

“The three inks, her mother’s, Schiff’s, her own, appeared to have been drawn from the same source, from the same well: identical.”

Sunny is taken aback when she discovers that Schiff, too, uses the unusual purple ink. Since purple ink connects Sunny to her mother, she views Schiff’s use of it first as alarming and then as significant and telling that he’s meant to be in her life.

“‘May I ask how many internees refused to sign?’

‘You know I can’t tell you that.’

She nodded.

—and even as she did, Schiff slid six prepared pages toward her on which were listed those internees who had refused to sign the Oath, along with each one’s barrack location, one hundred and twenty-one souls. It was the same list he was going to have to send the Washington later in the day and each person on it was going to need a lawyer—and good one—and there was nobody better suited to that task than the woman in front of him.”

Schiff is committed to carrying out his job effectively and with care, and he recognizes that the government trusts him. However, here he chooses to bend the rules as such in favor of his personal moral code. By indirectly providing the lawyer with information about the detainees, Schiff helps address their legal plight but maintains a spirit of commitment to his job.

“You want to ‘speak plainly’ about sacrifice? About what they’ve ‘given up’? They’ve given up their homes. They’ve given up their neighborhoods. They’ve given up their pets. Forget ‘gas rationing’—they’ve given up their cars, they’re denied the freedom to travel, the freedom to congregate after dark, the freedom to earn a living, pursue a college education, even to own a bank account or communicate in writing with their relatives without a censor reading every word.”

When confronted by local women about potential ration violations at Manzanar, Schiff doesn’t withhold his frustration. Instead, he points to the injustice of the imprisonment of the detainees—many of them American citizens. This is explicit evidence of Schiff’s disapproval of the government’s actions.

“[Rocky] tucked the picture in the pocket of his shirt and stood up—the dogs, anticipating, already at the door. He latched the wooden shutters from the inside and, once outside, found a heavy stone to roll against the door, thinking as he did it how fucking Biblical the gesture was, that whole thing about Christ’s body disappearing from its stone-locked grave only to be met again, re-animated elsewhere. If only, he told himself. If only our metaphors made better sense the first twelve hundred times we heard them.”

Rocky enters the small house where Stryker had been living before he joined the Navy. Searching through the objects Stryker left behind calls him back to Rocky. Rocky’s allusion to the resurrection of Christ, he knows, is fraught with irony, because Stryker, likely killed in the Pearl Harbor bombing, will never return to Three Chairs.

“[Sunny] had wondered what she would have asked her mother, through the years, had her mother lived—she’d wondered what she would have learned from her, the little things, stupid things, how to brush her hair, or dress or how to wear a slip, or sit.”

When Sunny enters into a physical relationship with Schiff, she longs for her mother’s guidance regarding sex. This leads her to think of the other guidance she was unable to receive from Lou. These small lessons are innumerable and, given her mother’s absence, much more important to Sunny than they would have been had Lou lived.

“When Sunny was ready to drive from the Main Gate with his rocking chair and books loaded in the truck [Schiff] asked her to pull over so he could get out for one last look and was caught off guard by the memory of Svevo hauling up the Stars and Stripes for the first time. He was almost tempted to salute but stopped himself. This was not the place for patriotic gestures. Whatever patriotism he had in him was built on more external human principles than the ones that had built Manzanar.”

Schiff maintains his certainty of the injustice of imprisoning Japanese American citizens and Japanese immigrants. Despite his fleeting memory of feeling patriotism, as symbolized by the American flag, he regards Manzanar as a source of shame and a stain on American history.

“Just come back, Sunny had countered all his marriage proposals: Don’t make any promises don’t promise you won’t die just show up at the end of this get out alive and then come back to me and Three Chairs and back to California:

Promise land.”

Schiff recalls Sunny’s words as he finds the jar of dirt that Stryker took with him from Three Chairs. Sunny’s insistence that Schiff not make any promises to return indicates her understanding that such a promise is out of Schiff’s control—just as was true for Stryker. Schiff’s closing thought—“promise land”—has a double meaning: It reinforces the notion that California was deemed the “promised land” (i.e., a land of opportunity where many achieved wealth and success) when “promise” (or “promised”) is read as an adjective; however, the phrase becomes a command and a call to action when “promise” is read as a verb.

“THE GREATER GOOD—that’s what the signs said, a buddy read for him—the signs that the Water boys plastered around town in answer to the ranchers’ protests. […] Rumor had it that Rhodes had been the money and the brains behind the opposition taking the out-of-town concern all the way to the Supreme Court in an attempt to rule Los Angeles off-limits, out-of-bounds up here, illegal. As a stall the whole thing worked, kept everybody sitting on their hands for months until the Big Bull Moose, Teddy Roosevelt, himself (another Easterner) overruled it from the White House with an ‘executive’ order giving the L.A. boys the nod to start up work again on the grounds that ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few,’ the ‘many,’ here, meaning the City to the south and the ‘few’ meaning Owens Valley ranchers. The Greater Good.”

Snow’s account of the justification for diverting the Owens Valley water to Los Angeles reveals a logic similar to that at work in the imprisonment of Japanese Americans at Manzanar. In both cases, the personal liberties, rights, and freedoms of one group of individuals are disregarded in favor of those of another group. In being told that he’s on the side of the “greater good,” Snow takes pride in his work and comes to feel morally obligated to protect the interests of the Los Angeles Department of Water.

“‘She died,’ McCloud had said.

That’s not the way God works, Snow remembers having thought right then:

If God was going to punish someone then God would punish [Rocky Rhodes].

Or maybe that’s what God had done.”

Snow is saddened upon learning of Lou’s death, finding it unjust because Lou was kind and caring. This concept is often echoed during times of war: Many who are undeserving of death ultimately die. Snow realizes, however, losing Lou will certainly be devasting to Rocky, causing him to suffer. In this way, Snow indirectly obtains a kind of revenge over Rocky.

“[Snow had] been thankful to the Company for place-keeping his spot—he didn’t need it; he was set up pretty good with what he’d put aside—he was grateful for their loyalty to him but the reason he had come back on the job, the real reason to return to Owens Valley was to sort this out, do justice.”

Snow vows to obtain revenge on Rocky for bombing the aqueduct, determined not to allow Rocky to pass by without repercussion. Snow’s determination to act against Rocky isn’t unlike Rocky’s determination to battle the Los Angeles Department of Water. Later, however, when Snow has the opportunity to shoot Rocky, he doesn’t take it.

“[Schiff] had lost his voice with Sunny in his telegram, and their conversation had ended, the written word proving deadlier than the spoken. And he’d be damned if he’d ever let that happen to him again and that was why he’d carved his words into the Japanese Constitution, and that was why he was here, back in this state, a state he never thought he’d see again:

California.

Do not suffer future pain.”

Schiff fiercely regrets his failure to respond to Sunny’s telegram or to go to her when she requested him, when she desperately needed him. He fears that he has permanently destroyed their relationship and becomes determined to try to right this wrong.

“Then he noticed the chairs again. Three chairs. The force of them almost brought him to his knees when he looked more closely and saw across the top of one of the chairs, his own name, like a placeholder, in Rocky’s elaborate Gothic script.”

Schiff immediately knows that the restaurant indeed belongs to Sunny because the chairs from Three Chairs are there. In this way, Sunny symbolically brought her lifelong home with her. Symbolically, too, she has kept Schiff with her by keeping the chair bearing his name that Rocky carved for him. Schiff finds this heartening because it encourages him that Sunny may be willing to renew their relationship.

“You can’t save what you don’t love.

But what if love does not save you?

[Rocky] had loved Lou, and she had left him. He had loved the land and had watched it parch and buckle, water tapped and stolen by…he didn’t even like to think the name. Los Angeles.

You can’t save what you don’t love—and even when you build a fortress around the ones you love, life will come at you and them in ways you never thought, all your faith can’t save the people and the places closest to you.”

As he reaches the end of his life, Rocky resigns himself to defeat. He’s disheartened not only that he was unable to prevent Lou’s death but that despite his unrelenting pursuit of his rights to the Owens Valley water, his efforts weren’t enough.