<Begin Segment 42>

LH: When were your children born?

FG: In the '60s. Let's see, one what was born in, my daughter was born in '61 and my son was born in '63.

LH: And so at this time and you started going to the library school in what year?

FG: Seventy.

LH: Seventy. So you had --

FG: Well, actually I was in library school from '69 because I was taking, but I went back full time. You have to spend the whole, the last year on campus.

LH: Studying full time.

FG: Yeah, full time.

LH: So almost like your mother who had two children, here you were going, working, going to school, studying too...

FG: Yes. But the difference is that my mother helped me with my children. See, because I was also by that time I was single again, I was divorced. And so my kids, my mother helped me raise them. They were in school and after school and things like that. And so that's how I could go to school and work at the same time.

LH: So it wasn't any, it wasn't just juggling, but the fact that your mother was able to help you look after your children and keep going to school. Was it difficult for you to do that though in terms of knowing that you had to have your mother look after them or...

FG: It wasn't difficult for me. I think it may have been for them, for my kids. It wasn't for me because, see, what happened was when part way through our marriage, my marriage with their father, he was in finance. He was a banker and he got a real good position up in Anchorage when Anchorage was just still growing and what it was was he decided he wanted to go up to Anchorage. I didn't know anything about this, but he decided that, and I thought I wasn't really sure I wanted to go to Anchorage 'cause my mother and father weren't there. Well, I guess quite early on when he decided to go up to Anchorage -- and he did -- I decided that and my rationale, right or wrong, was that I felt that I wanted my kids to have a Japanese background. I wanted them to be culturally savvy and I had doubts that I could teach them language and culture, history, like my mother and father could. I mean, I could do part of it, but not as well as they could, right. The English part I could do, but the Japanese I felt that -- my mother wrote very well and she wrote very beautifully and there is little things that I felt that they could get from my parents better than if I did it myself because their father wasn't interested, even if he was from Japan, he wasn't that interested in Japanese things 'cause he grew up during the war so therefore he wasn't very interested. And so then when I had to go to school and leave my kids with my parents, to me it was no big deal. I mean, not big deal, but I felt that they were in very good hands. If I had to have babysitters, I think I would have thought twice about it, but I felt that they were in better hands, maybe even than my own. That's the way I felt about it. But I think it resulted in something that I had not anticipated at all is that I think it was a lot harder on the kids than I thought it was. But, anyway, I'm sorry, but I...

LH: Well, it's hard to make those decisions at the time and not knowing what the results would be.

FG: I guess it was, in a way it was selfish probably because I was thinking education-wise and I wasn't, I guess I wasn't thinking so much how is this effecting them psychologically or whatever, but I don't know. I felt they were better off, but I don't think that it was really my decision to make who is better off how. I don't know who makes those decisions, but after the whole, after all the cards are on the table then you look at it and you think, well, maybe it really wasn't yours to make that decision, but I didn't know that at that time.

<End Segment 42> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.