Densho Digital Repository - Kay Yatabe Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-9-19)

<Begin Segment 19>

PW: So keep telling me about the trajectory of your profession. So once you had finished that...

KY: I finished and what happened? Oh, that same boyfriend again, the one who was in Cambridge, had gone to, had finished his postdoc, got a job at the Salk Institute. And we had reconnected, right? So I would make trips down, it was infrequent, but I would see him. But then in May of my last year... we finish in June.

PW: What year is this?

KY: '78, he breaks up with me. Ostensibly because he was having trouble getting grants, he was depressed, and he knew I was depressed, right? I mean, I wasn't a lot of fun during these years, and he just didn't want to be with someone who was depressed, so broke up. So in May of that year, when I'm like halfway moved down to San Diego, we break up. So I spent a few months in Seattle looking for jobs and figuring out what I was going to do, and I got a job in East Oakland Public Health Service. It was a national... what do they call it? It was a National Health Service Corps job with loan repayment if you got that kind of loan, but I didn't have that kind of loan. So it was a community clinic in East Oakland where everyone, it was a collective. And everyone was supposed to make the same amount of money, which at that time was $4.50, $5.50 an hour. And I agreed to that because I wanted a job. But I'm supposed to get a National Health Service Corps salary, which might have been $30 or something, but I was supposed to turn that money back. I was supposed to turn it back in to the collective. It was a rough job. There was one other doctor, of course, white guy, his wife was the nurse, main nurse. The doctor, the nurse, the administrator and the social worker, they were all white. They started this collective by gathering people from the community. We had a Native American, we had a Chinese, we had a Puerto Rican, we had a Mexican American, and was a very good selection of people to be in the collective. And as I said, everyone made the same amount of money, which kind of bothered me because I had debts. And these other white people, of course, they came from upper middle class families. They had money. So I eventually I might have been credited with the ruining of the collective, because I asked for my salary at one point. And it was very interesting because when I started, they started hiring, there was a Black administrator, and there was a Black community health worker who's married to a doctor. And there were a couple of, there was a Black nurse practitioner/midwife, and a Black pediatrician, and there was no way they were working for a collective salary. They were working as consultants, and they made twenty dollars an hour. And at some point I kind of became friends with that group of Black professionals, and they supported me in trying to get, keep my whole National Health Service Corps salary. And so I just remember this meeting, and it was, like, silence. So the consultant professionals, they're not part of the collective, so they're not there. And so hardly anyone voted for me to get my salary. Because the people of color who were the community health workers, I think they thought that if I got my whole salary, they wouldn't get what they were making, which was more than they would have made if they had a job in a non-collective place, so they abstained. Even though I was really close to them, they abstained, it was weird. And then I quit. So I worked there, it was just a little over a year. But let me tell you, I was on call every other night for deliveries. I was on call for admissions and deliveries.

PW: Which neighborhood was this?

KY: I was in San Antonio, East Oakland. So we were on East Fifteenth. Oh, moved to East Fourteenth, and like Ninth or Eleventh in there. And it wasn't a Vietnamese (neighborhood) yet, it was largely Black, Mexican, Black and Mexican. And I didn't speak Spanish, but I just knew a little bit. I could get by with the interpretation help from the community health workers. But that was... and at the time, I lived in East Oakland. Because you had to live in the neighborhood, right? You had to live in the neighborhood, right? You had to live in the neighborhood where you were working. So I lived in East... oh my god, my car got stolen twice and I got burglarized twice.