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MA: So talk to me about when you retired and then went into your art full-time. How was that transition for you and what did you start working on? What was kind of your first project, or what did you, how did you start that?

CQ: Well, the thing that I did was I retired early to take care of my grandchild who was being born. My oldest daughter went through medical school, so she got married and wanted to have her children after she was through and started practicing. And so she was pregnant, and her baby was due in September. My husband was retiring that summer, and I said, "I'm going to take retirement. I'm going to get out of here, I'm going to take care of my grandchild." And though she wasn't my first, they weren't my first, they were the ones immediate, 'cause my other daughter with the five boys had moved to Idaho, and I no longer had to -- I wanted to, I loved taking care of the kids during the summer and things like that. And so that was my goal, was to take care of my first grandchild from my oldest daughter.

And then I started painting at that time. And I met some artists from Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Irvine, and they had some paintouts, that we would go painting like every Thursday. Well, I couldn't make it every Thursday, but I'd go when I could make it, and my husband would fill in for me when my granddaughter, my first granddaughter got a little older. And I started painting Plein Air paintings, and I met Henry Fukuhara way early in my career when I was still teaching at Palos Verdes High School. And Henry Fukuhara was a watercolorist, and he became sort of my guru. And when I said I was a Sunday painter, I really painted like once a month all day. All day Saturday once a month with his group, and he organized where we were going to go, and this was giving back to the community. And he's a fantastic artist, he's ninety-five now, and has lost his eyesight for the last three and a half years, but he still paints. So we go and paint with him, and I take all my supplies. And he paints blind, and he'll just say, "I think I'll paint the Santa Monica pier." And then he'll, I'll say, "Okay, Henry, what colors do you want?" I put gloves on him, 'cause he's frail now. And he'll do the Santa Monica pier. He has such a love of painting, and his strokes are just so beautiful and everything comes out. He's always been sort of an abstract painter. So he's sort of been my guru, I met him when I was teaching at Palos Verdes High School and I'd taken a class called Innovative Watercolor. And so I would watercolor with Henry's group once a month during my teaching days. And that's why I said I'm a Sunday painter and I would paint on the weekends. But nothing really serious, because I was always preparing my lessons and doing everything else for my regular art classes. And, oh, I did have a lot of advanced placement classes, I had the art history and the drawing and the studio art. So I was very busy with my students, but Henry gave me that break, that I had a full day, Saturday, committed, and nothing would come in the way of that.

And then so when I retired, I started painting in the patio of my daughter's house in Irvine. 'Cause I stayed with her three nights, and my husband would take me from Palos Verdes to Irvine and I'd stay with her Monday through Thursday morning and then I'd come home for the weekend to Palos Verdes. So we finally moved to Irvine, of course. But I started painting with the Thursday group when I could, and then I made some very dear friends, and I'd paint with Bea Reilly, and I'd paint with the people that I knew. And I'd paint by myself a lot. And then, of course, I was introduced to Sandstone Gallery through Bea, who was a free spirit like I was. And she was a watercolorist and I was a watercolorist by then. That's my choice of media. And so I started having shows at the Sandstone Gallery in Laguna Beach. And they were very successful, I would sell half my paintings, and they were all Plein Air paintings of the beach or the mountains or the backyard of people, anything that took my fancy.

And then I decided, you know, my grandkids are growing up, and my kids are growing older and I'm growing older, so I think I'd like to take a writing class and tell my story so they'll know what I went through during the entire World War II. And so I took a writing class, which was really hard, and then I took another creative writing class and worked really, really hard. And I started writing, this teacher said, "Just write down all your thoughts, all your thoughts of what you want to write about, and just write about every thought that comes to you. And then you can put it together later, but just write about all the things that you remember that you want to write about." And that was very good for me, because I remembered all these things that happened in camp. And so I wrote them all down, and I started writing a book. And then on my yellow sheets of paper, I had all these drawings on the side, and sometimes half the paper was drawings. And my writing, the drawings came into my writing, and I go, "Oh my god. I'm really not a writer." I have to write things twelve times to make it make sense, and that I know it's a good sentence, and that I know what's good 'cause I've read a lot, and I know what's not. And so I said, "I'm a painter."

So I, after my second writing class, I decided I would paint for a year, and I painted inside. So I painted the whole year of 2003, painting all my memories. And I had like 250 written down from my writing class, and I had a lot of them just in paragraph form what had happened. And then I had a whole story that I was gonna write. But I had, since I was gonna do a painting, I thought, "I've got to make this so that they'll understand, my family will understand everything that I've been through." So I wanted it to be everything that I felt strongly about and everything that I remembered and things that... just all the things that changed my life in camp. My life was very family-oriented before we went to camp, then it was not family-oriented, I mean, you know... and so I, after I had finished sixty paintings, it was about eleven months. And I said, oh my god, I'm just, I was so exhausted. I thought at one time I could not paint anymore. 'Cause it was so draining and I'd cry. I'd remember things and I'd just cry. And then I'd try to paint it and then it didn't come out like I wanted it to come out. And so I'd just get so discouraged and I'd call this friend who was a really great watercolor painter, Tom Fong, and I said, "I just don't, I don't know how to get inspired. I get so down and so upset from some of my memories that I'm trying to paint." And so he let me talk, and I was just on the phone with him, and I said, "You seem to just be so joyous painting all the time, and I'm really joyous and I really want to be joyous, but I need to get these out. And what can I do? How do I find, how do I find myself through this?" And he just, he talked to me on the phone and he said, "Just do it. Do it, do it, do it. No matter what happens, do it, throw it away, do it, throw it away, do it, throw it away." And I said, "You know, that's all I've been doing, and it's so discouraging. It's not coming out the way I want it to, I feel that it has to come out."

So anyway, so that was really good advice for me. And I did get it, and then I did one more painting, and that was the one about my sister saying, "If you pray hard enough, all your dreams will come true." But in camp I realized my mother was never gonna come back to life, and I was never going to wake up and be a blue-eyed blonde." In camp, reality struck me, and that was the last painting I did. And it was the most abstract, and I must have painted it six times before I got the painting I really wanted, that I felt sort of gave the feeling that I was, that I felt this sort of... you know, it's not going to happen. You're going to have to make it happen. And that's... things aren't going to come to you just because you pray hard enough. You're going to have to do something about it, you have to be the person that changes and makes things happen. And that's exactly what I did.

So everything I did from then on was, you know, I just really worked really hard to make things happen. Even running for Nisei Week Queen, I was really, the most important thing was Emperor Akihito, who was then the crown prince at that time, who was about the same age as I was, was going to come the year I was queen. And so it was going to be really, really important for me to meet him, and I wanted my dad to meet him, and I wanted my dad to have that experience. And that was really disappointing, because when they had this big dinner at the Ambassador Hotel for him, all the dignitaries of Los Angeles, I got to sit at his table, and I begged these three old men who were on the board of this whole thing if my dad could please take my place. I said, "He would have so much more to talk about." And they told me, "You're not going to talk anyway. We don't want you to talk to him. You just smile and answer anything he says, but we don't want you to talk." Because, you know, they didn't want me to... they just wanted me there as the symbol of the community representative. And so, of course, my dad couldn't take my place, which I thought would be the most wonderful thing in the world. And well, anyway...

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.