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PN: And what I liked about East Asian Studies was it helped with my own identity. And I'd never considered it, I didn't know it, I transferred the second semester of my junior year, which is the very last time you could transfer to a different major and still graduate on time. But it was significant for me to learn about Asia, and I wanted to do my senior thesis on the Japanese American Supreme Court cases.

TI: Oh, interesting.

PN: That was in 1972. And my thesis advisor, Professor Bunnell, said, "What are you gonna say about those cases after you say that they were racist decisions?" So I actually switched my thesis topic to Japanese politics. So Japanese politics from 1945 to 1969, the Zengakuren and the student movement. So I often joke that if I had done my thesis on the Japanese American internment cases, maybe I would have found all those documents in the National Archives. That was a significant time and a significant change in point in terms of my own identity.

TI: I'm curious, did you ever go back to that professor after the coram nobis case?

PN: You know, I'm not sure I did. I kept thinking that I wanted to, but I'm not sure if I really did. I don't know if I wrote to him. I wanted to go back, though, and also talk about an incident in high school. 'Cause I was the valedictorian in my class, and it was 1969, so the anti-war movement and the student power movement. And the graduation speech that I gave, first of all, I turned the podium away from the audience and to the class and started talking to the class and saying, and not doing the traditional graduation speech where you thank the high school and you thank... I really felt like I had not gotten a great education there. I was pretty outspoken, I was the honor society president, and we went to a prison, we started a scholarship. But I also was outspoken, in, like, school policies. Like I wanted the dress code to be changed, you couldn't wear jeans, you couldn't wear pants. And so I fought the administration on that, and they did not give me the satisfaction of changing the policy when I was a senior, they changed it the next year. And one time, the principal hauled a bunch of us into his office and said, "I don't know if you all did it, but if you started this underground newspaper, that is not being a leader." And none of us said anything. And so we got hauled in for that. So I was a, sort of, curious mixture of being a cheerleader and a class officer, and also pretty rebellious.

TI: And what, I guess, what do you take away from that in terms of, in terms of when you, I guess, go against authority, when the system is a certain way and you see change needs to happen, back then, how did you think about this? Because here you were, in some ways, part of the system by being the cheerleader and being a good student, and yet you did these other things that were, perhaps, not acceptable or condoned by the administration. I mean, so by doing all these different things, what did you learn?

PN: Well, I think I followed my father's lead, right? He was on the school board but he spoke out, he didn't care what other people thought, he just spoke out. He was the JACL president, but he also spoke out against things. He was also religious, even though he didn't go to church much, but believed in religion and Christianity. So I think that's the role modeling that I had. So...

TI: And that role model is it's important to be at the table, to be inside, to be able to speak out so that the people inside can hear? Is that kind of the message?

PN: Boy, I haven't thought about this message. But it's how do you be successful... it's kind of like being inside the system and outside the system at the same time. So in grade school when there were cliques of girls, I belonged to several different groups. I did not want to be with one clique. And I think because I always felt like I was outside the group, or didn't quite fit in, even though I was a good student, got straight A's when I was in the fifth grade, all my teachers loved me, I still had the sense of being outside. And I think from that insider/outsider perspective, I think that's what an insider/outsider would do. And that's how I felt, and I think that's how I acted.

TI: But then when you were inside the, I mean, when you were in the group, you would be outspoken, though. I mean, if you saw something that was, that you didn't think was right, you sometimes brought an outsider perspective and would speak that.

PN: But I was an insider, yeah. And I think the message -- and I guess when you say that, I've sort of done that most of my life. And you do kind of pay a price, because you're not totally accepted. So, you know, my graduation speech in which I said, "Leave this area. Take your little box of knowledge, go out, see the world, experience it, this is not the end, it's the beginning." They said it was the worst graduation speech in the history of the high school.

TI: "They" meaning?

PN: My favorite teacher said it was the worst graduation speech. He was my sophomore English teacher and my senior English teacher, Mr. Crow. So I really respected him, liked him, got good grades from him, he said it was the worst graduation speech that they'd ever heard. And the next year they started censoring the speeches because of me. And so the next valedictorian handed in one speech to them and gave another speech. But if was, in some ways, a product of the times. Because in 1969 when I was graduating from high school, on the cover of Newsweek, there was, you know, the fist and the graduation, whatever you call that, of college with a peace symbol on it. So, I mean, Martin Luther King had been shot, Robert Kennedy had died, it was anti-war.

And I had gone to a humanities program, and this was significant for me, too. Between my junior and senior year, I had two different high school counselors. The first one was great, the second one did not like me. So the first one talked my parents into allowing me to go to this humanities program at Claremont College, you know, the Claremont Colleges. I hadn't been outside of Oregon. I mean, I would say that I was kind of an educationally-deprived kid. But when I went there, it was a humanities program, so we went to prisons, we heard from filmmakers, we had African Americans from L.A. come and talk to us, all those things. And it really opened my mind. I was very fortunate to go to that program. So that's why when I was the Honor Society president, we went to a prison, we started a scholarship, we had racial dialogues, because I'd been exposed to that. And I took sort of a staid kind of organization and made it politically active, is what I tried to do. And the other thing I remember when I was at --

TI: Well, before, so I'm sure you came across quite a bit of resistance by the administration and others when you were doing some of this? Or there were some raised eyebrows?

PN: Yeah.

TI: And you went through and you did it. At the end of the day, how did you feel about that? Was that something that you really felt good about?

PN: Uh-huh.

TI: So talk about that a little bit.

PN: Well, I think, looking back, my, one of my missions or purpose is about justice. And when I see injustice, it's really important for me to speak out. And so those were the sort of early days of speaking out, and you don't get much support from the system for speaking out, because obviously you're speaking out against them. And so I did have this, I did have this dichotomy about being inside the system but also speaking out against the system. Again, I think it was because I had the pedigree of the All-American girl, but I didn't have the blond hair and blue eyes, and I knew that, I sort of had two roles. I saw myself as having two roles. And partly the pedigree was to try to fit in, try to be accepted. And the other part was just me, just sort of plain me.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.