<Begin Segment 24>

AI: Well, before you went back to school, immediately after you were released from Tule Lake...

HK: Yeah, immediately after, my mother came out first, and she went back to Loomis, our hometown, and she stayed with a family, three other families in this one cabin. And one family was up in the attic-like, upstairs, and then one family down below, and I don't know where my mother was. There must have been another floor. Anyway, we couldn't move there, I mean, there was no room. So we went, we didn't go to, to that house. Maybe I spent a day or two, and we went to work, and so right away -- and they came recruiting to the camp, that they needed people to cut asparagus, and it was around March when asparagus, they come, start to come up. So they promised us big money, twenty dollars a day, or something. [Laughs] And so we all went, agreed to go, so we went to the asparagus camp, and did that hard work. And asparagus takes warm weather to, to really come up, so we were there and we were paying for board and stuff, and going in the hole, actually, because we weren't really making, it was piece work. And, but as we stayed, they, they started to come up, and the work, we felt, back-breaking work, but we managed to stay there for, we were there hundred days, and we made two thousand dollars. So net, we paid for our board, (the money) we took, we went to town to see movies and come back, have dinner there, and then we had to come back on a taxi, and we'd share rides, several of us would hire a taxi.

AI: Where was that?

HK: In Sacramento, right near the river. And...

AI: Well, I'm curious; this is still fairly soon after the end of the war, how were you treated?

HK: Well, this was a Japanese camp, so it's just like camp. [Laughs] We were in the bunkhouse.

AI: So you really didn't come in contact with the mainstream Caucasians?

HK: No, we didn't. No, we didn't. Across the, there was a... stream, but anyway, across in the next ranch, there were German POWs, just fifty, hundreds of them. And they're huge Nazis, and they were cutting the, they were working there, right at that time, yes. So we were there a hundred days, and then I think I went to work at the grape, grape vineyard, and did two seasons of that. So we worked on the farm again, for one summer, one year, and then the second, after the second grape season, I went to L.A., and I enrolled at LACC.

AI: That was Los Angeles City College?

HK: Yes, uh-huh. And I went there for two years, two-and-a-half years maybe, and I worked at Bullock's department store at night, porter, cleaning. I used to buff, buff the floors with that buffing machine. People are afraid of that machine, so if you don't know how to use it, but once you master it, it's, it's a lot of fun. It's like dancing. [Laughs] And I did that every night. No social life.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.