<Begin Segment 5>

TI: Now, going back to your, your mother, she was, you said, 1931, so she was about eleven or so when she went into the camps.

JO: Right.

TI: Does she talk very much about the camp experience?

JO: She, there are a few anecdotes that I remember her telling to me when I was a kid, and, and this is why I never thought camp was such a terrible place, because the anecdotes were sort of amusing. And she would mention camp, she would mention camp: "when we were in camp," or, "we knew these people in camp," so I knew about camp, but I didn't, it just seemed so, it was just a normal, just another word in our family vocabulary, but I didn't, we didn't talk about it once we left home. I don't know why, but as a kid you just intuit these things, I just knew that maybe people might not know what I was talking about. But when I was a kid, the stories that I remember her telling me are about when she was in Topaz, the time, there was a young boy who, I guess the bathhouses were segregated; there was one for women and one for men, and one day a young boy, he was probably seven or eight, crawled up onto the women's, the roof of the women's bathhouse because he wanted to spy on the women below as they were bathing. And then the roof caved in and it collapsed and he fell into the baths below. And then she would tell me about the time in, when she was in Tanforan, which was the assembly center at San Bruno where they spent the summer of '42. I think the cook there, one night he used baking soda by mistake in the -- or Ajax by mistake in the biscuits instead of baking soda. So these were just sort of funny stories, so camp seemed, it seemed fairly harmless.

I also remember her telling me about her last day at school, and this is, it's sort of what I'm interested in, is what was it like for the children who were left behind after the Japanese left, or how do you explain to a classroom full of kids why some of them are leaving and some of them aren't. And she might have been the only Japanese American girl in her class or maybe one of two. But in any case, the teacher asked her to stand up and had the entire class say goodbye to her. My mother felt really humiliated. I think she was very embarrassed and didn't like being singled out, but I, I actually think that the teacher meant it as a, it was a gesture of goodwill, I think. I don't think that the teacher meant to embarrass my mother, I think that's just how my mother took it. And so, so she said goodbye to her class. And I remember when she came back after the war, that the -- I guess the quality of education that she received in the camp was not so, not so good, and she came back... I don't know if she was starting, she might have been starting at Berkeley High, and she told me that she was in English class and that they were reading (Sir Walter Scott's) Ivanhoe and that it just seemed very, very hard to her and she was very scared. She didn't know if she'd be able to keep up with the class work or not, but in the end she was able to. And so those, it was really the story about the boy on the roof of the bathhouse that I think I heard over and over as a kid.

TI: Well, you mentioned that it was your grandmother and two children, so your mother and another sibling of your mother?

JO: She had a younger brother, and then there was also a cousin that -- this is, her, (my grandmother) had another sister who lived somewhere in Southern California, who had had a son, and the sister died. This is the sister she was estranged from, and I remember, I think my mother, my grandmother was living in Berkeley when she, her sister was dying of tuberculosis of the throat. I think she took the train down to see her dying sister whom she hadn't spoken with in years. I think even on her sister's deathbed, I think they couldn't speak. Or it was, it was something very painful, I don't know what happened. Something went down between the two of them, we don't know what. But anyway, her sister died, leaving behind a son, George, who was actually murdered years later, he ended up being a lawyer. And he, the son was, I think for a while he lived with his father, and then he ended up, he was, he was with a foster family, white parents, when the war broke out. And he was actually taken away with, from them, and sent to, I don't know which -- I know that there was Manzanar Children's Village, right, for orphans. I mean, orphans were even pulled out from orphanages. I don't know where he went first, I think he was in a separate camp, and then during the war, my grandmother, I think, maybe sent for him to take care of her sister's child, because that seems like the right thing to do, and yet somehow it didn't work out; I think he stayed with them maybe for a year and then she sent him away. Something went wrong, I don't know what happened. I know it's a painful story for my grandmother -- well, she's dead now, but I don't, I don't really know the details. And my mother now has Alzheimer's, so I can't, I don't know, I'll never, there's so many things that I won't, I just won't know. So George, the cousin, was with them for a year.

TI: But in terms of the nuclear family, so you just talked about your grandfather, your grandmother and then your mother and your uncle. It almost parallels the characters in your book in terms of...

JO: Right, even the ages parallel, also.

TI: We'll come back to that later, but I just, I didn't realize that.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.