Densho Digital Repository - Kay Yatabe Interview (Densho ID: ddr-ajah-1-9-22)

<Begin Segment 22>

PW: Okay, so now we are in 1988 roughly, and you are still in New York, correct?

KY: '88?

PW: No, you moved back to San Francisco.

KY: No, I'm back here, I'm back here.

PW: When did you move back to San Francisco?

KY: I moved back at the end of '86, and I got a job at the Southeast Health Center in the Bayview. I worked there for eight years. I think it was okay for the first four, it was an incredibly dysfunctional place. Just famously dysfunctional, dysfunctional for ages and ages and ages. And a Black woman who had come after me and then left to become the medical director in the Western Addition Clinic, somehow she, I don't know, I had breakfast with her and she said, "You know, you don't have to stay there." See, once again, it never occur to me that I could just leave. And it was like another lightbulb. Some of my friends had just gotten tired of hearing me talk about how dysfunctional this place was. And I actually went and joined this woman at the Western Addition Clinic, the Maxine Hall Health Center, and I spent seventeen, eighteen years there. It was a little difficult at first because it was largely an internal medicine clinic and these were internal medicine people from UCSF which is one of the prized residency places in the country, and I come in as family practice. But it worked out and we eventually got more balance, we had family practice people. And it's a great staff, largely female, largely women of color, couple of gay women doctors. It was a good place. I mean, of course, it had its ups and downs and messes and stuff, but basically it was a good place to spend my last seventeen, eighteen years. I also got interested in acupuncture at this time. So for like a number of years I was really into learning to, I wanted to retire and when I retired I wanted to be an acupuncturist. I found out that I really wasn't... I didn't know how to take care of people who had money to pay for appointments. It was hard for me to charge people a going rate. My patients didn't have to pay because they were all either Medi-Cal or county supported. I never worried about billing, but when you say, well, "That's going to be a hundred and ten dollars," I couldn't do it. I couldn't advertise myself, couldn't market myself. And then my mother passed away suddenly.

PW: What year?

KY: In the end of 2001. And I used to spend my days off, I'd take her shopping. And since she was no longer there, I thought maybe I might as well work. And they wanted me to be medical director sort of as a... at least some interim thing until someone who was more appropriate to be medical director until her kids were old enough that she didn't have to be home all the time. So I was medical director for almost four years, which was not really my thing, but we survived.