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AI: I'd like to take you back a little bit and ask you about your awareness of the camp experience, and ask if you recall when you first heard about that from your parents and realized that something had happened there?

LB: I don't have a clear recollection of the first time, but I think my experience was very typical of many Sansei, where you kind of grow up, and around the house you hear these references from time to time about, "Oh, yeah, I knew him from camp." Or, "Oh, yeah, when we were in camp this," or, "Yeah, the food in camp was terrible." And it's funny. You think back now, and I don't recall ever asking, "Well, what's camp? What are you talking about?" But it was something that we were all very much aware of that there was some point in time during their lives that my family was in this place called "camp." But it was something that we didn't talk about and we didn't pursue, and maybe we knew somehow not to pursue it. I suppose when I did ask direct questions about camp, they were answered in a really brief, cursory fashion. "Well, during the war, we went to camp." And, but there wasn't really an explanation about why they went to camp or what camp was like. I suppose if I have any recollection at all, it was really kind of a downplaying of what camp was like. You know, "Oh, it was bad, but it wasn't that bad." "Other people had it much worse," I suppose is probably the sentence I remember the most. "Other people had it much worse." Very much a downplaying of the impact on their lives. But I remember hearing, "Well, I was in high school, so it really wasn't that bad for me, but it was really bad for those who had just started out on their careers or really bad for those who were just starting to work." And so, what I do recall is just the sense that something had happened. It was not a very good thing. We didn't talk about it. But whatever it was, it wasn't as bad for them as it was for somebody else. I suppose I didn't really start understanding the camp experience until I started taking Asian American Studies classes during college at UC Santa Barbara.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.