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AI: Excuse me. Speaking of eye-opening experiences, I wanted to back up a little bit in time because you had your own incident regarding job and career and discrimination where you actually ended up bringing suit. When was that, in 1977?

MY: It was in 1977.

AI: Or you filed grievance.

MY: Against my boss. I started working at Cypress in 1969, I think, yeah, 1969, and about ten years -- you know, I'd been working there ten years, I was supposedly a pretty experienced teacher. Well, part of it was I was not -- I was not, no, I was sort of not aware of other people's reactions to what I was doing. My daughter, who's worked with autistic kids, that's part of their problem, they just keep -- you do what you do and you don't watch other people's reactions to what you're doing. I was kind of doing that, because I had become, having a missionary zeal to do with the women in the community. That was in 1977, introducing these things and trying to change the department, and trying to introduce -- why don't we have a course in, you know, let's see, what was that? Women's role in literature, and why don't we have a course in Shakespeare, you know, The Taming of the Shrew and that kind of thing, the Wife of Bath stories. And so I was getting kind of a reputation in my department of trying to counteract the patriarchal structure that was really what we were living in. And I had no idea that I was threatening the chair of the department so much. And he, my office mate was the one who was telling me that, "And then you correct his language and that makes him, really freaks him out." But he was, he was making statements like, "Well, I don't know what you're complaining about, I gave you World, you wanted World Literature so I gave you World Literature." And I'm going, "World Literature is not yours to give me." You know, I mean, it's there. [Laughs] That kind of language, which is very patriarchal and patronizing language that he was using. And so my office mate said that that was kind of not politically correct thing to do, because men hate those kinds of things, you know, being corrected for their gram -- especially in the English department.

And so anyway, he tried to get rid of me by transferring me to Fullerton College temporarily. And he had an excuse by saying that it was because of the necessity, because of the changes in enrollment patterns and so forth. And then I went home and I was thinking about this, and I called one of the other faculty members to find out if this was right, and he said, well, actually he doesn't have a right to transfer you to another school, it was to another sister college in Fullerton. That was where I came from, you know. Because I think there's a board policy that says if you ever move a faculty member into another school, or out of the regular position or even another department, that you have -- when that becomes necessary there has to be a faculty meeting, and you have to ask for volunteers, and if no volunteers are forthcoming, number two, you have to go in order of seniority. And the fact is I was one of the senior teachers there. And so I went back to school and I confronted my chair about that, and he said that couldn't be helped because it was a matter of emergency. I said, "Well, that's what they said, you know, during World War II when they evacuated Japanese Americans, that it was a matter of emergency or national security or something like that." And so I thought about it, I thought, this is very strange.

But it really, it turned out that he was not only a sexist, but he was a racist in some ways, I think. And I don't like to find racist people under, you know, everything that people do because they don't like me or... of course, I have my faults and they might not like what I'm doing, but after I filed the lawsuit, the grievance against him, one of the other women who was Asian American, Japanese American woman who was working in the nursing department said, she had met my chair at a meeting and she had just come in from another, from Fullerton. She had been transferred into our school because they moved the nursing school. And she said that he, she had not met me yet, and didn't know what was, hadn't known the history of what was going on at that time, and that was just in the middle of my grievance and he was still smarting from that. And so he met this faculty member, Japanese American woman, and he said something about, you know, "You people," da-da-da. So she said, "I didn't know what he was talking about, you people who? You people, nurses?" Whatever it was. And then, he really meant "you Japanese American women" or something. It was a couple years later when she got to know me she said, "Now I remember when I first moved to Cypress, you remember..." So you recognize the pattern, you know, of the scene and of course I had a very difficult time having people support me. Members of my committee, of my faculty, my fellow faculty, and sister faculty members, were afraid of losing their jobs. Jobs were becoming very scarce in this college circuit altogether. We had many part-time workers teaching. And so I kind of felt very alone in fighting this, and of course when I won, everybody came by and congratulated me, and thought that, "It was very brave of you to do that." And you know, "Where were you when I needed you?" But I found that this would be like a prize fight. People like to sit around the ring and watch these two people duke it out, to see which side is going to win. I mean it's a kind of -- it's a very good image, you know, because people are afraid of getting, they don't want to get into the ring and get involved with getting bloodied and so forth. They would rather see which one is stronger and which is going to win. But it was kind of discouraging to me for a while. I just thought... but I did have a few very strong supporters, my office mate, a few people were really very supportive. But I thought I was doing it for everybody. It was the first lawsuit, grievance, that was ever filed in the history of the school. No faculty member had ever filed a grievance against an administrator. And I just thought, you know, they think they can do anything they want to because they're your boss, but they really can't. And when your colleagues are not supporting you, it's kind of -- it's disillusioning, actually, and disappointing. And sometimes things like this happened to my children, among their classmates and so forth, and I really understand, you know, how damaging it is to the, but I suppose you can say well, that's human nature, but it's very hard in the beginning. And then I had -- I think I had my older -- Mike in me a little bit, because I kind of got up and dusted myself off and went on, went on with my life. It didn't really destroy me. So that was one part of teaching. And then, and then I retired, actually, in 1989. And after that I've been doing mostly political prisoners work, which has been very interesting for me.

<End Segment 37> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.