<Begin Segment 39>

AI: Well, many things happened in this period of 1980, '81.

MY: Yeah, right --

AI: You also were involved in the production of the film Mitsuye and Nellie, and that sounded like a quite significant --

MY: That was. I think it was partly because I worked with Nellie Wong, the two of us, which we had worked very closely together. And we, of course we filmed separately, but we also filmed together. She came to Minidoka with us, and that experience was very eye-opening for her as well.

AI: Had you been back to that site of the Minidoka camp?

MY: That was the first time, and one of the mistakes I think that we -- it took us too long to film that. It was very expensive for them because I couldn't get through some of the poems. It was the first time that I -- the thing is, the whole area was very, very different-looking. You know, when we first got there in 1942, it was very barren, really felt like the end of the earth, you know, like Mars or someplace. And so when we first got, when we first arrived, and drove up there, it looked so different. It was very green, I mean, there were trees -- it wasn't very green, but it was trees and there was vegetation and farmland and then of course telephone wires and so forth, so you didn't get the sense right away. But then once I started reading my poems in front of the camera and kind of recreating that moment, it was very hard for me. I kept breaking down and I'd have to say, "Oh, let's cut," so it just took about, something that should have taken a few hours took two days.

AI: It sounds like it was a very emotional experience.

MY: Yeah, and what I should have done, in retrospect, was to have gone there in advance a day before, and kind of absorb the scenery, and thought about my poems and thought about that period and got that out of my system, and then done the reading. So poor Allie and Irving, they kind of had a hard time trying to record it. But for them, too, and the people who were living there, it was very interesting, because there was a woman who had said that she'd been digging in her garden and she found marbles, she had this little cigar box. Wooden, they used to have these little wooden cigar -- a box full of, sort of artifacts. And she was digging in the garden and she found some marbles and rusted equipment of some -- a rusted barrette or something. And some, a teacup and things like that. Broken teacup. And she brought them out and she said, "I found these. Must have belonged to the people who used to live here, in one of those camps." You feel like gosh, like some kind of a, archaeological artifact, you know, that was dug up from the earth. A piece of history, you know, that she -- but the people who were there, the farmers who had -- the homesteaders there, were somehow very aware that something very his-, they were quite conservative because in 1979 and '80 they had Reagan stickers on their car bumpers, bumper stickers. And so we kind of knew where they were politically. But they were also very aware that something rather momentous, historical had happened on this, on this land. And they were very curious about us. And so -- and then one woman said that they were, yeah, "I remember my parents were German, and we kind of understood what had happened here," you know. That was quite interesting. So I think the making of the film itself touched a lot of lives. And the film was by Allie Light, who's a feminist poet herself, and Irving Saraf, whose parents were in concentration camp in Poland, because he's Polish. And so they had, there's a whole history behind their experiences. And it was just, I mean, they are, they have become very close friends of mine. We have a lot in common and they have made some very significant films since then, that one that won the Emmy award and so forth. So I've been very lucky in meeting some great people in my, because of my writing and because of my poetry, and it has been kind of an in to finding wonderful friends that I've been able to become close to.

<End Segment 39> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.