<Begin Segment 29>

SS: Do you ever think about what life might be like had you not taken this path, had you just been a farmer, taken over the family farm?

HW: Well, I'll tell ya, the family farm was stoop-labor farm. The way my back feels now, it would have felt like this twenty-five years ago if I'd stayed on that farm. [Laughs] But you see other people who are recently arriving to this gorgeous United States, doing those kinds of things now that our parents used to do when they came over. Because they're Southeast Asians that are doin' a lot of that stoop-labor farming now in the United States. And the Mexicans.

SS: How did you feel when the government issued an apology and the checks, the reparations checks?

HW: The checks were a token. We expected that it'll be token. The apology was probably, I felt it was a little bit wanting in an apology. But it's an apology that I cannot, personally, I cannot recall anybody else getting or accepting on an individual basis, not on a, you might say, a ethnic-group-wide basis, like we got. Which is by itself something. There is no way, the way things are goin', that the government could have given us complete restitution, which would have amounted to probably a hundred billion dollars or more.

SS: Do you harbor any bitterness or ill feelings?

HW: No, no. For the simple reason that society is like this all the time. We have to be aware. We have to be more knowledgeable to not let society degenerate to that point again. I think that we put in our inputs when people started, politicians started the hubbub about the Iranians, Iranians that live in the United States, as an example. We didn't want to see that happen again. It would be the same sort of thing. They're not here because they hate us, they're here because they like our country.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 1996 Densho. All Rights Reserved.