<Begin Segment 20>

TI: So, I'm going to move on. So you were in Puyallup for several months.

YN: Right.

TI: And then...

YN: April to August.

TI: April to August. So explain, in August, what, what happened then?

YN: Again, the eyes of a child. We took a train ride (from) the town of Puyallup, (...) packed up again what little we had, went on the train, and then shot for a place none of us have ever been to, right? And it went and it unloaded us in the middle of the desert.

TI: Now, do you remember at all the train ride from Puyallup?

YN: Absolutely, because our faces got dirty with soot, you didn't have food as most people think a train ride would have, you didn't have that type of setup, I'm certain we had food. But as a child, the train ride was the prevailing excitement. I don't know what my parents thought when they arrived at the other end of that destination, if they were going to get shot and killed. I'm certain that the anxiety, again because of the nature of the Japanese Issei, was all internalized. I didn't know.

TI: Well, were there, were there, like, armed guards on the trains, also?

YN: There were security, right, so that none of us... but the amazing story isn't that there was security or not, no one had a clue that anybody would ever run out. In that sense, they were beyond belief of law-abiding. They went, they were docile.

TI: Well, how about, how about you? You have a habit of getting into mischief.

YN: Right.

TI: Was there any mischief happening?

YN: Again, it's a simple thing. In my very nature of going, and being excited. All right? And being dumped in a place where there wasn't a train station was not the expectation. It was not like I came to the Puyallup Fair, this is just the opposite. Never been to the desert, dust, sagebrush, no trees, no water. Already in my mind I was questioning how come I'm here. I'm a child, I expected to see another beautiful place. Now if they'd dropped me in the middle of Sun Valley in the mountains and the resort, it would have been true to the dreams of a child. That's the first reality of change. That was my first child shock. But I can't interpret it that I was a brat or I was fighting the system. The question came into my mind, and today that question that was so significant as a child was this: the story of what I saw must be answered by what my mother and father must have thought. Not what the Nisei thought; they were there because of who they were. And so I don't know to this day that story, because my story that I want to write of -- at this point of my life, because of that experience -- it cannot be the Nisei story by itself.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2004 Densho. All Rights Reserved.