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MA: Can you talk about the, I guess, the impact of camp on you, specifically, I mean, we talked about earlier, it kind of forced you to grow up.

CQ: Yes.

MA: And you, what you told me was you kind of made a resolution to yourself that, "I'm going to change and be different."

CQ: Yeah, and I had to. It's true. My dad had always said, "Out of every good comes some bad, and out of every bad comes some good." That was just a Japanese traditional saying. And so out of all the bad that I experienced in camp, the good was that it did make me resilient, and it did make me strong, and I no longer was complaining and whining as much. I'm sure I complained and whined, because after camp, when I would say anything about camp with my brothers and sisters, they'd say, "Oh, my god, you were such a whiner and a crybaby. Don't even talk about that." When I'd say, "Oh, wasn't camp terrible?" They never wanted to talk about it. I wanted to talk about it and say all the things I hated about it, but I never got to because they would just cut me off. And it was because I was a whiner and a crybaby, and I was the youngest and I just didn't understand anything anyway. And so the whole idea was I knew I had to change, and I knew that we had to relocate, my brother came in from Fort Shelby, he was in the army at this time, and he found us a hostel in Los Angeles. 'Cause you couldn't leave camp unless you were given a place to live or offered a job, and my dad was never offered a job. He just never was. So my brother took us out of camp, and took us over to the hostel, and we rode a bus, of course.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.