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PW: Let's go just a little bit longer. So now we're back to you. So you're born, your parents are married and they settled in Berkeley, tell me about that childhood home, describe it to me.

KY: Yeah. The shoe repair shop is downstairs, right? It's glass windows, and then the stairs lead up to the house. And there was a living room, two bedrooms on one side, another bedroom on the other side, and then the kitchen in the back, and we ate in the kitchen on a table that I have in here. And I think I enjoyed that house. My brother and I would be switched bedrooms periodically, because my parents had the farther back bedroom, and then my grandma had the one that was the west bedroom. And Paul and I seemed to take turns sleeping in the same room with grandma. I'm not sure what determined when or what, but have... I remember being in both bedrooms, my little nightlight, and then I remember all the stuff I had. The other bedroom, when I was there by myself, seemed to be... it was a big room, but it was a storage room. It had boxes. At that time, I wasn't into looking through things yet, but there were a lot of things stored in that room.

PW: And so you have a brother named Paul?

KY: Paul, yes.

PW: An what's the order of the siblings?

KY: Are you kidding? [Laughs] I mean, I can't imagine being a younger daughter, I mean, clearly I was definitely the older, the "good girl." And he came twenty-one months later and was, of course, was more difficult. I was, apparently, pretty easy. He was more difficult, and especially when he got older, I think he was a handful. Growing up, we were probably treated a lot like we were the same age. I didn't get any perks from being older, because he would be like the same size as me, and our bedtimes would be the same. I didn't get to stay up later because I was older. And unfortunately for me, he had a low frustration tolerance, and he would blow up easily or get upset. And he would insist on getting his way a lot, and if he didn't, he'd cry or whatever. So the lesson I got from my parents was they would pull me aside if I was playing some game with him and said, "You should let Paul win, because if he doesn't win, he's going to have a tantrum." So that's how I grew up. I had to... there's a word, but I had to give in to Paul, or I had to make allowances for him. I really like him now, but there were decades, later on, that I had little contact with him. It was a good thing that I really liked his wife and enjoyed her. And at some point, I mean, when was I? It was before my mother passed away, I was in my late forties. We got together and I started to really enjoy him. We have a lot of similarities and tastes and things. No, I really enjoy him, but the teenage years, not good.

PW: Do you think... your parents had such a childhood themselves of gender, kind of, divisions, and allocation. I'm not sure how you feel that might have affected your childhood.

KY: Well, I think there was a problem there, right? Because I was... apparently, I mean, I didn't know it then, but apparently I was really smart. And I heard later, my grandmother saying -- I heard this from my aunt, not from my parents -- that, oh, Kay can do anything. But I'm the girl, right? I'm supposed to be a boy, I think. And Paul was more touchy, and school wasn't as easy for him. And I think... I gather he might have gotten, maybe he was easily upset at school also. I don't know if he got frustrated, probably. So, yeah, I think the gender things were really weird, and the fact that my mother would say things like, oh, if my father and Paul and I were playing some kind of game, like Concentration, you know, the cards, memory game. And I could hear my mother talking to her sister, which she did every night, saying, "Oh, they're smart, they're playing this game, and she was not involved. So I think what was unfortunate for me was that I identified with my father and not my mother, and that would lead to some gender weird stuff, as I was a teenager into college. I do recall for much of my, through college and through, oh, probably even through medical school, I really favored men's clothes. My clothes were, I liked shirts, like men's shirts, I love wide wale corduroy, and I would find wide wale corduroy pants. And at some point, my parents got into these wallaby shoes, do you know wallabys? Well there was some picture someplace where all of us, including Grandma, had on wallabys. And they're not feminine, pretty shoes, but I wore them all the time, because they were comfortable. And like my father, I have very wide feet, and so they were more comfortable. And at some point I bought desert boots, which were kind of simplified. And my boyfriend at the time said, "That is one step too much." He acknowledged that I wore boys' clothes, but he said, "Those shoes were one step too much." I kept wearing them, didn't I?

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.