Densho Digital Archive
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Title: Peggie Nishimura Bain Interview
Narrator: Peggie Nishimura Bain
Interviewer: Alice Ito
Location: Seattle, Washington
Date: September 15-17, 2004
Densho ID: denshovh-bpeggie-01-0049

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AI: Well, what happened next? Because here you are, you're still trying to find a place to live and you don't have a job yet, but what did you do next?

PB: Well, the first thing we did was the minute it got light, we just picked up what we could carry and we headed back to my sister's place. And, of course, it was early in the morning, and she says, "What are you doing here this early?" She peeked out, and she says, "What are you doing here this early in the morning?" We said, "Well, we couldn't sleep because of the bedbugs." And she said, "Well, don't bring 'em to me, I've got enough live things around here." And we could see in the morning, the cockroaches were running all around the stove, and she was trying to make fresh coffee. Then this Jewish man, we told him, well, "Your apartment was terrible." The toilet was running over, and there were so many bedbugs there, goodness, they would have gotten into our stuff. We piled up everything so they wouldn't get into our boxes, 'cause if they ever got in there, you'd take 'em everywhere you went. So anyhow, he took us around looking for a job for us, and he finally did get a job for us.

And we finally found an apartment building down on Thirty-ninth, and it was run by a Japanese family. So we thought we'd take that because it was just one room, one big room and it had a bunch of little tiny windows on one, one end of the room, which kind of overlooked the garden, and we could hear the birds out there and there were trees out there. We thought, well, that was pretty nice, even if it was just one room. And then there was a bathroom right next to us which was shared by... we always had to share a bathroom with a bunch of people. So we moved in and, 'course, there was bedbugs there, too. But we heard that if you use fresh paint, they don't like the smell of fresh paint. So right away, my daughter says, "Oh, I'll paint the place." So then the owner said, "Well, I'll furnish the paint if you'll paint the place." So we did; we painted that whole apartment except the ceiling, we couldn't reach the ceiling. And then she fell off the ladder and almost out the window, but she fell inward instead of out, and she knocked my beautiful lamp over that I had carried all over California and Chicago. She broke my lamp and we couldn't put it together. But anyhow, we did move into that apartment.

<End Segment 49> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.