<Begin Segment 12>

AI: But in the meantime, his talk with you did have an impact on you.

MY: Yeah, right, I just really thought oh, that's right, you know, I really -- and then of course I had not gotten all the, his FBI files at that point. But I recognized the fact that he, I mean, I believed him, you know, that he was being questioned for every acquaintance that he had met, or even talked to. You just have to be very careful of who befriends you and things like that. And it kind of makes you paranoid, about some reason why people befriend you and so forth. I had a roommate, my friend Rose, whom I met in Cincinnati came to live with me, and we had a third roommate who came out from Seattle. And she kept telling me that, you know, "Some of your friends -- your friend, you know, your relationship with your friends" -- she was kind of perceptive, you know, she said, "In your relationship with your friends, you never make the first overture and you never initiate meeting them, that it's always they have to make the first step and then they have to keep doing it, and then you finally relent." And I thought, oh... the analysis was kind of interesting because it was probably true. You know, I just kind of kept my distance until, and if a person kind of persisted in trying to make friends with me, then I would... but she kept saying to me, "You never initiate," you know, you never look -- Jo Ann would say you know, "When I see somebody and I just feel like yeah, that person seems like the kind of person I would like to get to know," and she said, "You never do that. You know, you just wait for the other person to like you," was her impression, and I thought that was kind of interesting. I think that probably has had an impact on having lived through World War II, of not being quite sure of people's, you know, whether they're being friends with you because -- and then there was kind of a double-edged thing there. There were a few people who could make you really very uncomfortable by liking you because you were a victim. "Oh, you poor thing," you know. "Oh, I heard about those, I heard about the camps and I just think it was horrible," and so forth. That kind of patronizing attitude that some people had, that that makes you uncomfortable. So you were quite wary of people, I think, for a long time. And it does affect your relationship with people, I think.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.