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MA: So you went to this school, this one-room schoolhouse that you were telling me about.

CQ: Uh-huh.

MA: How many, do you remember, like, how many students were in that?

CQ: Yeah, about thirteen or fourteen.

MA: Total, or in your class?

CQ: Total.

MA: Total, okay.

CQ: Maybe sixteen. It seemed like a very small amount. I know my (sister) and Linda Rogers were really good friends. She was two years (older), they were, she was the second to the youngest. And then I played with Norman Rogers, Linda's younger brother in the first grade. So Norman and I were really good friends. And then there was Paul Rogers. I remember the Rogers family. And he was the same, or maybe a year younger than my middle brother. And then John Cunha was in the eighth grade, seventh or eighth grade, I guess. I was very fearful of the bigger kids. And then we had some other kids, and I don't remember their names. Because they seemed to sort of play together, you know. And so, and then my brother Tee was there. And at that time, my oldest sister maybe was in the ninth grade, so maybe she was at the high school, 'cause I don't remember her catching the car of Mrs. Skendall's to go to school in the morning. I think she caught a bus, and she had to, she had to walk to the bridge area and across the bridge to catch the bus to go to the high school.

MA: Okay, so the high school was off the island.

CQ: Off the island, yeah.

MA: So what about Japanese community activities? I'm assuming there weren't any on Jersey Island.

CQ: There weren't, no. I never, we never were familiar with the Japanese community. My first, my first encounter with the Japanese community was the Nisei Week, when they had asked me... well, the funny thing is, I heard through some friends of mine that there was this Japanese American festival in Los Angeles, and they had a talent contest, and they accepted all kinds of talent. And I was a poet, I mean, I thought I was a poet. And so I thought, "Oh, I'd really like one of my poems to be a song in the talent show for their Nisei Week." And so I had called, and I had called the Crossroads, I think that was one of the Japanese American newspapers. And I said, "I have a song, that I'd like it to be set to music, and I would like to have it entered. In fact, I have two songs, and so I'd like to enter it in the talent show." And so when I did that, of course, that was... that's my first contact with the Japanese American community. And then they asked this Roy Uno, who worked for the Crossroads at that time, said, "Oh, we need a candidate for the Nisei Week Queen, we're at the VFW," blah, blah, blah, I don't know, Los Angeles, I guess. "And if your brothers were in the VFW, or Veterans of Foreign Wars, then we would love you to be our candidate." And I said, "You're asking me to be the candidate?" He says, "Yes, we've been really looking." So I said, "I'll ask my dad." And then I asked my oldest brother. And at that time, my two older brothers had been in the army, and that was a lot later. But that was my first contact with any Japanese Americans besides my family, and, of course, our relatives.

MA: And what year was this, when you were involved with the Nisei Week?

CQ: That was 1953. And so...

MA: And so your dad, growing up, your father was also, then, sort of not involved in the Japanese community activities?

CQ: Just with the workers.

MA: With the workers.

CQ: And we never saw any of the workers. He had one good friend that would come for dinner sometimes, who was a Japanese fellow. But he died of blood poisoning; that was really sad. He had stepped on a shovel, or he had stepped on something that was metal, and got blood poisoning. And he, and my dad thought, well, if he drank a lot of (blood) -- I remember this because if he drank a lot of catfish blood, 'cause there was a lot of catfish in the river, the Sacramento River, that he would get better, but he didn't. And I think it was blood poisoning, I don't know. That's what my dad said, blood poisoning.

MA: So growing up, and this is, I think, prewar, how aware were you of being Japanese? I mean, I imagine, so you were the only Japanese family on this island with mainly Portuguese people. What was your concept of your identity, I guess?

CQ: There was really no identity problem as far as I was concerned. I had always been babied, and I'd always been talked to, and I never answered, of course. And it was the same at school. I always felt like I was like everybody else, and they all had the same problems I did. I mean, I have a scar here from when I was really little, and I just thought everybody had a scar but I couldn't really see it, you know. And then I had a scar on my foot, on the top of my foot where, when someone was carrying me too close to the stove, I burned my foot. I thought everybody had that. You know, I just thought I was like everybody else and everybody else was like me. I had no concept, and I always thought for a long time I was the firstborn because I was the youngest. But I never discussed anything with anyone. And all these things worked themselves out, thank goodness, in my brain. But I did have a lot of strange concepts about myself in relationship to other people. The only thing I knew that my middle sister had told me when we came home from, when I came home from my oldest sister's home, is she said, I said, "Lil, I really wish this and this and this and this." And they were little things. And she would always say, "Well, Chizu, if you only pray hard enough every night, you'll get your wishes. Your wishes will come true." So I said, "Oh, that's really good." She says, "But you must never tell anybody what your wishes are, because then they'll never come true." And so I listened to all the things that were told to me, and I absorbed everything, but I still was very, very shy. And when we were to give book reports or world news reports in our one-room schoolhouse, I would have my notes with me and everything, and I would just burst into tears 'cause I couldn't talk. So Mrs. Skendall would put me behind the piano. And I'd be left there, 'cause I was so quiet, until after lunch. And then she'd discover, "Oh, my god, where is Chizuko?" And so she'd remember that she put me behind the piano.

And that one-room schoolhouse, I remember vividly, a dentist came once a year and a nurse came once a year. And the dentist would fix everybody's teeth. And I remember my brother Sammy, who was four years older than me, was getting his teeth drilled, we could hear, he had set up and everything. And then my brother Sammy just yelled out and punched the dentist in the nose and ran home, all the way home, and that was like (five) miles, you know. And that's probably the reason why I remember the dentist came every year. And the nurse would come and she'd say, she'd say, "I'd like you to take this note home to your mom and your father," and I said, "I only have a father." And so she says, "Well, take it home to your father." Every year she'd suggest that I would be sent to summer camp because I was so skinny, and she felt that I was malnutritioned, that I didn't have good nutrition or something. And then my dad would get very, very angry, of course. My sister who was in the ninth grade or tenth grade by that time, she'd say, "You just have to eat more, you just have to eat more." And so I'd go, "Okay, okay." Anyway, so I know that we had a nurse that came, and we had a dentist that came. And then we moved from Jersey Island to Anaheim, 'cause my dad wanted to open a nursery.

MA: And this was prewar still, before World War II?

CQ: Yes, prewar. And so we came when I was eight. So I lived on Jersey Island maybe two years, and then I think I was in the third grade when we moved to Anaheim. And it was the outskirts of Anaheim, in the farmland area, and not too far from Knott's Berry Farm. My dad opened a nursery called Evergreen Nursery. And he had always had bonsai all his life at home. And so we went, we took all the bonsai, and then he had started a nursery business. 'Cause that was his goal, to have a nursery. And so he started his nursery, and then the war broke out.

MA: I was going to say, it seems like you weren't in Anaheim for too long.

CQ: No, it was like a year and a half.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.