I felt out of place here, tailing behind mom as we looked for evidence of any real connection to the neighborhood.
-- Narrator (Chapter 1)

Importance: Here, Kiku is walking around Japantown with her mother looking for the home her grandmother used to live in. The signs are all in Japanese, so Kiku feels out of place because she does know Japanese. She is only half-Japanese and looks fairly white. She does not know much about her ancestry as she begins to realize in these first couple of chapters. All that she does not know about her history takes on more significance when she is displaced back in time to relive this history.

So I would have been standing in that line with my mom and sister, no matter how white-passing we were. But that certainly didn’t mean we belonged there.
-- Narrator (Chapter 2)

Importance: Kiku has just been asked, back in her displacement, if she belonged there...