<Begin Segment 16>

PW: My next question was going to be was your politically active on campus, so just go ahead and...

KY: Not really. I went to these demonstrations. I was very shy, passive, could not talk. So I would just go, and I was never in any kind of planning group. And as the years went by, we had, senior year was pretty, a lot of things were going on. It was the Black Panthers and Eldridge Cleaver that first quarter. Second quarter was, Asian Studies started, I mean, all that stuff started. And I felt funny about that, because by that time, I had this white boyfriend. And I remember somebody -- and I almost think it was Floyd Huen who said this, "You Asian women with your white boyfriends." So I felt like, uh-oh, I'm going to back off here. So that was funny. So did not get into the inner planning group at all, I was just on the outskirts. And then the last quarter was People's Park. And so there was just a lot of stuff. And I stayed, I stayed in Berkeley and got a job. Oh, because I had applied to graduate school. I had a really hard time -- oh god, should I get into this? I had a really hard time my senior year. I had this white boyfriend who I knew through Wendy, who I met through Wendy, and he was into my education. He saw me as an illiterate biochemistry major. I mean, so he was into "educating me" at night, and he would lecture me first on politics, that was the first one. And the next one was going to be, maybe it was some reading, because he had a list of things I should read. The last one was going to be metaphysics and philosophy. I mean, he was going to give me all this education, it was ridiculous. But somehow I ended up applying to graduate school and I got accepted at MIT, and I just blew it off. Because he was into alternative education and we were going to move to Mendocino, he was going to start a school, I was going to bake bread and grow vegetables, that's what I was planning on doing after. And so I just ignored that. When I look back on it, I thought, hmm.

But fortunately, I was befriended... well, anyway, I had this older guy, married guy that I met in one of my labs, and he liked to talk to me, I don't know why. And at some point he said, "Well, it sounds like you're just going to stay with this guy." And all of a sudden it was like a lightbulb. It never occurred to me that I could break up with him, it just didn't occur to me. And that was it. I broke up with him, that was right at the end of my senior year. I got myself this nice little studio apartment on Berkeley Way and MLK, and I got a job. This guy actually helped me get a job as a lab technician in molecular biology and virus lab. So that was perhaps, the next two years were perhaps my favorite years because I was working, I had money, making money, and there were all these interesting people, graduate students, postdocs, and the lab technicians, the other lab technicians. And I got treated really well because I sort of came with the reputation of someone who could have gone to graduate school. And I was working for a relatively young PhD who unfortunately had already, by the time I went to work with him, a couple of cerebral bleeds, hemorrhages, and apparently lost something from what I heard in terms of, he was like a boy genius, but lost some of that. Anyway, he was one of these really careful researchers and would repeat and repeat things, repeat the experiments until something didn't work. And he never published anything, so he didn't get tenure at Berkeley, but he was there during the two years I was there.

I met interesting guys, this is when I started backpacking and going camping because these guys were, we'd (take) things from the storage, the storehouse, the warehouse, and we would look at a roadmap, we'd find the end of the road towards the Sierras, and then we'd go to the Earth Sciences building and look in the library and look at their topo maps. And then we'd get a topo map, I don't know if we stole that. And then we would go and just... this was 1970, I guess, yeah. You know, where hiking and stuff hadn't really gotten that big yet. And we would just explore, and I would go with all these guys and have, it was really great. Oh, and then some point along the way I went into medicine. That was the draft.

<End Segment 16> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.