<Begin Segment 18>

MA: And what was that like, coming back and entering high school and being back in Hawaii after being in camp for three years?

GH: For me it was harder because it was going to intermediate school. They call it intermediate because on the mainland, ninth grade was high school and here it's intermediate and high school was tenth grade. And so here I am, I feel I'm with kids, because I had to go to intermediate school. And, of course, I knew a lot of the people, because that's from my old, they old days, we grew up in that neighborhood. And so my cousin took me around to see all his friends and he wrote an article about me in the school paper. I was such a novelty for them, because a lot of the kids didn't know such a thing.

MA: That you had been to camp.

GH: They never knew about camp, they don't know what camp is. You know, I had to explain these things to people. And so they interviewed me and got my article in the school paper and all that, and I was like a celebrity. Because I was the only one in the whole school who was in camp and came back to tell the story. And so my two sisters went to high school. And so in high school, you get kind of buried in there, so they didn't get the attention that I did. [Laughs]

MA: That's interesting that your fellow students would be interested and wanting to hear more and there was an article about it instead of, sort of, shaming you or making you feel like, bad about it.

GH: No, treated me like a celebrity.

MA: It sounds like they were just curious.

GH: And funny, a few years ago, I bumped into this old classmate of mine and he remembered me. [Laughs] He remembered me from then. He says, "Grace," he said, "you came back from the mainland. And I remember, I read about you in the paper, in the school paper." And he remembered. He said, "You're the one that came back from the mainland." See, those days, just going to the mainland is something again. People don't go to the mainland, very rare.

MA: But people traveled to Japan, and that wasn't as big of a deal?

GH: They traveled to the mainland, too, but to the mainland on a ship is only for the rich. People traveled to the mainland on a ship, they had the, it's like the cruises today, it's the liners, they called it, like the Lurline. We were on a liner because they transformed it into kind of a combination troop ship. But Japan, the Japanese were going to Japan on a ship. But a lot of them went because as the years went on, as they got established, their goal was always to come here, make enough money, save enough and go back to Japan. And that's what they were doing, is going back to Japan, going home. And then you get people like my dad going back and forth. But otherwise, people didn't travel like they do now.

MA: But it seems like very few people went to the mainland.

GH: Very few, very few. And that's why my aunt told me, "You write it all down now so that you can tell us all about it. You can keep a record of it." So I wrote from there, from California to camp. And then my mother used to remind me, so from camp to, from Jerome to Heart Mountain I wrote another one. And I didn't write the next, the next leg I didn't write any. I don't think I wrote to St. Paul, from there to St. Paul, nothing interesting anyway. But I wrote those two. And then we moved so much, my poor mother, she used to get rid of things each time we moved because we were very limited in what we can keep with us and take with us. And so even the school annuals and things like that, we don't have those. We'd throw away a lot of things. So that's one of those that I should have hung on to. [Laughs] But who knows? At that time, we don't think about it. We don't think about how it would help us, someday it would be so precious.

<End Segment 18> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.