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AI: Well, now I'd like to turn to the, the point where you're, you had graduated from high school, and you had made the decision that you were going to go on to more education. What happened next? You decided to go to college, and how did you end up where, at UC Santa Barbara?

LB: My sister was already at UC Santa Barbara, so certainly I was aware of the university then. It was about an hour and a half north of Los Angeles, so kind of far enough away that I was away from home, but not so far away that I couldn't go home every weekend if I wanted to. Probably the same criteria many kids use in choosing where they're going to go to college. UC Santa Barbara seemed like it had some interesting things that I might want to pursue, so I ended up there, started my freshman year there.

AI: And tell me a little bit about how you, in starting out in college, what you were, what issues you were exploring, what subjects you were going into. Did you have in mind an area for a major at that time when you started out?

LB: Well, I'm going to share with you a story that I'm a little embarrassed to tell. I knew I wanted to go to a UC. Number one, they're very good schools; and number two, as a resident, they were less expensive schools, so I knew I wanted to go to a University of California. I went through every University of California catalog to find a major that I could take at a campus where I did not have to take a blood test and I did not have to take math. [Laughs] And I went to UC Santa Barbara. I chose UC Santa Barbara because they didn't require a blood test. I had not had a blood test before then, and I was just frightened to death of them. And I looked around for a major where I didn't have to have math as a requirement in a major.

Fortunately, the major that I chose was Environmental Studies, and it was very interesting to me, even though it didn't require math. Environmental Studies was a new major at that point in time. It was really the beginnings of the environmental movement, a lot of issues then going on around oil spills and polluting the environment and the Clean Air Act and all of that stuff. And it was an interdisciplinary program, one of the first interdisciplinary programs in the colleges, which suited me really, really well. I wasn't so interested in taking four years of physics or four years of chemistry or four years of English Literature, but I was very attracted to a major where I could take a little bit of everything. I could take one quarter of history, one quarter of religious studies, one quarter of science or whatever, and learn from all those disciplines, how to look at a particular problem, in this case Environmental Studies, and actually, interdisciplinary study has been something that's really interested me ever since that time. It was interesting also because it was one of my first exposure to a kind of a political movement at that point in time. There was obviously a lot of activism around the environment, and so I chose Environmental Studies as my major.

AI: And as you were getting involved with your major, and you had mentioned in an earlier conversation about how you had also taken some Asian American Studies. How did that come about, and what happened when you started taking those classes?

LB: Again, I had grown up during this period of time with a great deal of activism in the wake of the Civil Rights movement. I was certainly aware of the Asian American Studies movement and of so many Sansei being involved in trying to learn more about the Sansei identity and the history of the Japanese American people and the internment, so when I got to campus, I was very much attracted to Asian American Studies classes and wanted to take them and find out more about this movement and about this activism and about this history. And fortunately, they did have Asian American Studies classes. There, it was a very, very, very small department. I think it might have been just one professor at the time, and it was probably a very brand-new program.

So I started to take some of their basic classes that introduced us to, again, issues of identity, roots, the Roots Reader, the Asian American reader had come out, exploring issues of identity and who we are and how we fit into this society. We look different, we're treated different, perhaps, when people see us, and how do we live with that and how do we break out of whatever stereotypes exist? And aside from issues of identity, of course, issues of history. We learned about the emigration, Asian American immigration -- Asian immigration to this country, learned about the treatment of Chinese, Japanese, and the various Asian, Pacific American ethnic groups. And as part of that, of course, learned about the internment of Japanese Americans. And it's the first time that I really learned about what had actually happened during the camps. After hearing references to camp just very sporadically during my youth, it was the first time that I was able to actually read about camps and see where the camps were located and what they were like and what had happened to give rise to the camps. It was a very eye-opening experience.

AI: What was your reaction? Excuse me, when you, with that first exposure to that amount of detail about the camps and what gave rise to them, what was your personal reaction to that?

LB: It was just so shocking because I could not learn about it without seeing my parents and my grandparents and my aunts and uncles there. And, it was so difficult to realize that they lived in these horse stalls and lived in these desert camps, and seeing the pictures of Manzanar and the snow and the wind and all the snow on the mountaintops and how cold and how hot it must have been, and the guard towers and the guns. It was just really, very shocking and very sobering and frightening to think that this is what they were referring to when they were referring to camp.

AI: When you learned some of this information, did you have an impulse to ask your parents or grandparents more about it or how, what happened then?

LB: I'm sure I did go home and ask them about it. I'm sure I went home and I asked them what it was like and what camp were you in and what (were) your barracks like and who else was there and all of that, and I know that the answers I received must not have been very comprehensive. It was probably, again, much more of the, "Well, I didn't have it as bad as other people did." Kind of like it was really just not that bad. And I have to say that you can't take that as true on face value. They were bad, and they were very desolate, and they were really frightening places under frightening circumstances. And I can only think that the way that the community and my parents and my grandparents dealt with it is to just take it one day at a time and not think it was a horrible experience because otherwise, they could not have survived it.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2000 Densho. All Rights Reserved.