<Begin Segment 4>

TI: And when you mentioned Los Angeles, that you were born, what part of Los Angeles?

MN: Boyle Heights. I think we lived near Maryknoll church, in a hotel. That's what I remember of that era.

TI: So when you were a young girl, first your father passed away, and you were, I believe, four years old when this happened. Do you have any memories of your father?

MN: Scant memories. I remember we had gone crab fishing, he would sit on the end of the piling of the pier and put a net down in the water, and I still remember that, catching crabs. And then living in a hotel near the Maryknoll church. I remember one instance when he was being taken downstairs on a stretcher to go to the hospital because he got pneumonia. He caught a cold, and in those days they didn't have medication for things like that, and that's the last time I ever saw him. In the hospital, and he had passed away. And I do remember he was very artistic, and he would build things, like he would make beautiful shoji screens and cover it with silk cloth and put calligraphy on it. I remember his sewing something for me, a dress, a lavender-colored corduroy dress, I still remember that. And I guess I wasn't even quite four at that time. But that's the only thing I remember, those three instances of my father.

TI: Do you remember the aftermath of his death in terms of his service or anything like that?

MN: I don't remember the service. I remember my mother's, but not his. We have pictures, but...

TI: Okay. So after your father died, what happened next with your mother, for instance?

MN: She remarried shortly. Because I do recall seeing a family portrait taken of the whole family when my father was still living, and my stepfather is in that photo with another cousin, I believe. The cousin is a stranger to me, I don't know who he is, who he was. But the stepfather must have been a family friend. And so that family picture has him in it. And then shortly after, she remarried, and had his child.

TI: And that's Bill.

MN: Bill, uh-huh.

TI: Okay, so you were four. And going back to your mother, you mentioned her love of music and dancing, the arts, and being rebellious. Personality-wise, how would you describe her?

MN: She was a very gentle person, but she was, well, I guess she had to be strict because she was our mother and there was no one else. We didn't have that much to say about my stepfather, he was always out working or something. And so, but he was, I remember her being a teacher of odori, she was an odori sensei, and she had taught -- by the time that she remarried, we had moved to Venice. And there, she taught all the farmers' daughters, who were wealthier, we were not wealthy at all. And then so she was teaching them, and we never got to learn from her, because we were not paying students. But we learned from watching her students. And so any time we had any recitals, we got to join in the little chorus, but not the individual dances. But we got to dress up like the rest of the girls, and so we have pictures like that. My sister and I both got to dress up and pretend we were one of the students.

TI: Now, how did that feel for you? Because you're like a young girl who's six, seven years old, seeing your mother with all these other girls around her, she's with them. And how was it sharing your mother with those other girls? Do you remember any feelings about that.

MN: We didn't have any feelings of jealousy or anything, but we enjoyed the company of seeing other people. 'Cause we just had our little close-knit family. So when she had these odori classes and we got to see them, we enjoyed having people there. I guess we were all a bunch of social butterflies in our family, so we enjoyed the camaraderie of the students, and we still have, we're still friends, and we still see them.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.