<Begin Segment 9>

AI: And you had an independent life. You weren't at the boarding house where the Japanese Issei were living and kind of watching over you --

MY: [Laughs]

AI: -- you weren't, your older brother had left for Seattle. You were there with your peers, other young women.

MY: Yeah, right. Yeah, it was really a wonderful period for me. Then I left there to --

AI: What were you, you had decided that you wanted to continue on with your studies, and to continue on...

MY: Yeah, I decided to -- I think it had something to do with my peer group, too. Many of the fellows... one of my classmates became president of Rutgers University. I think it was Rutgers? Cornell? Something like that. Many of my classmates went on to rather serious academic lives, and were applying to different graduate schools. I wasn't really interested in teaching but I had heard, somebody said, you know, a master's degree from University of Chicago is -- I just couldn't imagine going on to getting a Ph.D. It just didn't seem like, oh, four more years of school. But a master's, you can get a master's degree in one or two years and I thought that I would like to, to do it, work in a field of concentration in something. I wasn't quite sure at that point what that would be. It was in maybe the literary field of some sort or other. And so, and I heard that University of Chicago had the best graduate school in the English department and so forth, so I just decided to go to Chicago. And then it just so happens that my dad was offered a position at the Chicago Resettlers and was going to move there so we, my mother, I think my brother went to Seattle and lived in our house, the one that eventually was moved. Mike came to Evanston. He graduated from Boston University, had decided to go to seminary to become a priest, and he came out to Evanston -- I don't know whether he chose Evanston because we were there or he just happened to go there, but it was kind of -- well, that's a lot of coincidence, isn't it? [Laughs] We must have, my parents decided to go there and I had already decided to go to University of Chicago, it seemed quite appealing to me, appealed to me. Also I was tired of working and I was just happy to be home and not have to worry about paying rent or food because my parents, again to go home and live at home with my mom. It was kind of an adjustment. It was sort of an adjustment for my mom, too. Because she thought I was, had become a little bit too brash so... [laughs] You know, "You weren't like this when we left," that kind of thing. But I changed a lot in those years, and Joe was in high school and Tosh was still at, was coming -- I think he was going to University of Washington at one point and -- yeah, he was already in Washington, I think. And so everyone was there, the whole family, all five of us again and so Tosh was the only one who wasn't with the family so we were all together again in Chicago.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2002 Densho. All Rights Reserved.