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PW: Tell me a little more about elementary school and junior high school.

KY: Elementary school, I loved school. But I was kind of way ahead, because my father, as a gardener, one of his clients was a school principal, and she would throw books, like readers, away, and he would bring them home. And also by this time I'm going to the library, and I love going to the library and reading. So school -- this is West Berkeley, okay, this is West Berkeley. It's not an academically progressive school in those days. When I was in fourth grade, low fourth, there were no readers, the readers didn't arrive, so there were no books. And so the teacher -- by this time I had a teacher that I really didn't like that much. So she had to occupy us with various things, so I remember we made puppets, paper mache puppets. And frustrating to me, because I wanted substance, I wanted books to read. And oh, I helped out with, I did the report cards for everybody because what else was there for me to do? And around this time -- this was Berkeley -- I think I was talkative in class until around this time, and then I kind of, I clammed up or I just felt too shy and I started getting really quiet, so I got really quiet. Then we moved. I had started school in February, so when we moved to El Cerrito, I was, had done half of fourth grade. So the option was either repeat the first half of fourth grade or skip and go into the fifth grade. Well, I knew what I wanted to do, but they had to argue it, I guess. And I learned my multiplication tables or whatever I needed to do, division or multiplication, with my father, and then I started fifth grade. Because I skipped a half grade, the school puts me in the "dumb" class, that's obvious. I mean, that was their thinking. So there were two classes per grade, El Cerrito, it takes in Richmond Annex and it's like, definitely flatlands across San Pablo. I actually felt like the teacher wasn't that smart, the fifth grade. But you get these, they started, public television started. I guess maybe it was public radio, but they would pipe in something from KQED into the classroom. And because I was in the "dumb" class, I got story time. Because my brother was in the "smart" class, two years, two grades below, he got Spanish, Spanish lessons. And it just didn't seem right. And this is one of the things where I feel like my parents, perhaps because of the internment experience, they would never have gone to the school and say, blah, blah, blah, this is not right. They would never do that, they would never have gone to advocate for me as parents today, I think, would do. So that fifth grade was... fortunately, I had the library close by, I guess. And then sixth grade I got a, it was a brand-new teacher, she had been a student teacher, a brand-new teacher who seemed to understand that I wanted to do more. But, of course, she sits me next to the most yakamashii kid in the school, who was Japanese American, who had "kissing day" on Wednesdays. He would bring candy and he would sit at one end of the schoolyard, and he would give girls candy and they'd get to kiss him, vice versa. Anyway, I am in the so-called "dumb" class, and there was a difference in the two classes. So anyway, I got through, the teacher was good.

And then when I got to junior high school, which in those days started in the seventh grade and went to Portola, which is no longer here, but relocated to Korematsu. They put me in, we were stratified from A to U, and I could tell this because you look at your homeroom card and they had a little letter there. This school, Portola, had the kids from Kensington. So the Kensington are all these white, upper-middle class, well-educated, the kids of professors, etcetera. So heavily stratified at Portola, apparently Portola was doing experiments with education in terms of putting kids in things. So I was, they skipped one whole class at the Kensington Elementary, one whole class got skipped. So that there were siblings often in the same grade, right? So I was in the class with the younger siblings who had been skipped. The smartest kids were in the top one, I was in the next one, and that was, I guess that was, at least academically it was more interesting for me. It was strange, I didn't understand... I didn't understand about class or race, really, or anything. And it was different. I think it was largely class. I felt sort of less-than because all my classmates had piano lessons, music lessons. The families had more literary magazines than my family did. They read the Chronicle, we read the Tribune. I just felt a little bit outside, even though they saw me as one of them.

PW: Was there a big difference in the racial makeup of the schools from Berkeley to El Cerrito?

KY: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Because Berkeley was quite mixed. I think there were at least three Asians in my class. There were several Black kids and Mexican kids, so it felt very, it felt mixed. I get to El Cerrito here and it's all, it's white. There's probably some Italians, there's a famous Italian American family that were bullies later on, and the girl was one of my friends. It really felt like working class white at Fairmont school. And then being at Portola in junior high, a handful of Asians in my class, two or three Chinese. For some reason, I think the Japanese were more in the Annex or in Richmond area, so they weren't at Portola. There were some differences when I got to El Cerrito, though. There were more Japanese, but the Japanese were, they weren't in my classes. They weren't in my classes. They weren't so academically inclined as I was being, as I was raised to be.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.