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TI: I'm going to jump ahead a little bit. So after the war, how did your parents meet? So I'm really kind of jumping, 'cause your dad at that point was here in the United States, going to school, and then became an engineer, and then your mother... I should probably ask, so what did your mother do after she graduated from high school?

JO: She went to Cal Berkeley and she studied... I guess it was maybe biology. She ended up working as a lab technician. Also after the war, just so you know a little bit about what happened to the family, my grandfather came back in not so good health, and so he had, he had several strokes, and so he was unable to work and so my grandmother went to work as housecleaner, which she did for the next thirty years, even when she didn't have to work anymore, she still insisted upon working. So my, my mother went to work as a lab technician and I think, maybe when she got her first paycheck, she got her parents a television or something. Anyway, things were hard at home and yet they did, things had been good before the war, they were actually fairly well-off so they had bought their house, I think that was bought and paid for. So they were in better shape than many Japanese American families who came back after the war. But, so my mother went to Berkeley. After Berkeley she started working as a lab technician. I think for a while she was in Sacramento and then maybe she came back to Berkeley or maybe to Palo Alto, I can't remember, I think she was working at a hospital. And my father was, I guess he graduated from Stanford and was working for Varian. I know that he, he wanted to get his PhD, his English was not very good, and so he actually got it a few years ago, just years later. But I think it was actually through his university in Japan, he wrote a thesis, he just, just wanted to do that. Not that he needed to, he was retired by that point, but he never got his PhD in this country in any case.

So he started working, and I remember once seeing a photograph, looking through some family photographs, and there was a photograph of my father and a very pretty woman and I said, "Oh, who's that?" And he was engaged to, I think, a Filipino woman, or maybe she was Chinese. And then her parents did not like the fact that my father was Japanese, so the engagement was called off and somebody introduced my father to my mother. I don't know if it was the sister of the formerly engaged young woman, I don't know who it was, but somebody made that introduction.

TI: And this was when your father was in Varian or at Stanford?

JO: I don't know if he was still a grad student then or if he'd started working, I don't really know. I could ask him, though, 'cause he's...

TI: That's interesting. So it was the parents of this other, either Chinese or Filipino, who said, "We don't want you marrying a Japanese."

JO: Uh-huh, uh-huh.

TI: Did, had your, did your dad ever talk about that?

JO: No, I'm talking, he just, we just got him online a few years ago, and actually, I should tell him to "Google" her; I don't know what happened to her. [Laughs] He might want to find out.

TI: That's funny.

[Interruption]

JO: And I don't know much about their courtship. I remember, I think my father, I think he took her to symphony in San Francisco, that was maybe their first date, and she fell asleep. But I don't really know much more than that.

TI: That's interesting.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2005 Densho. All Rights Reserved.