<Begin Segment 7>

AI: Well, speaking of stress, there was something else that you had mentioned in your earlier interview, which was that, that you were raised up to expect discrimination and that that was painful.

FY: Discrimination, again, this strange -- like I said, I didn't think we were poor because we were all poor. And growing up, discrimination was a part of the environment that we grew up in. So if we were in a area where we could anticipate certain discrimination, there's a kind of a safeguard that we were prepared. So even if we are discriminated, it doesn't -- there isn't the pain. But when something happens, discrimin-, racial discrimination happens when, when you're not expecting it, that's when, that's when it, it hurts. And the, the kind of pain that doesn't leave one for a long time.

AI: Do you have any memory of how you learned to expect the discrimination? How, who taught that to you or how you got the idea that you should be expecting it?

FY: The, I'm not sure. It's, it's the kind of thing we grew up with as a child. I think that we just grow up with a certain condition, and I'm not trying to say that this is acceptable situation, but when one grows up with this type of condition, it's not as pain-, physically painful, I don't think. I could be wrong. Yes, I think I'm wrong because I know the experience at the camp where we were uprooted. And at that moment, the, where it's the fear or the, the changes of things, things we had to do, everything came so fast, there wasn't really time to reflect. Coming into the assembly center, trying to adjust to the muddy ground, getting our rooms settled, meeting different friends, going into a routine of the, eating at the mess hall. It happened so rapidly that again, the moment of reflecting isn't there. But I know, later on as the years go, the pain is there. This -- it shouldn't happen, really. It's...

[Interruption]

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2001 Densho. All Rights Reserved.