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MA: And what was your first day like back in Hawaii?

JH: We were moored in Honolulu, okay. So we stayed a week with my auntie's friends. First thing I wanted was, I think I told you, chazuke and koko, is what we say. You know, takuan and chazuke. So I ate that. It was so good, but my stomach wasn't big enough for it and it wasn't ready for it, so I ran out of the kitchen over to the back side and vomited everything out. Oh, I felt so bad. But we didn't go too many places in Honolulu, we just stuck around the house. Did we see anybody off? I don't know. 'Cause each island, they would drop people off. So when we left, we left on the inter-island boat, I imagine it was inter-island boat, I'm not sure. But I can tell you one thing. We stopped in Maui and my mother said she wanted to go see relatives, so they got off the boat and left us. So the crew knew that there were a lot of kids on board, so what they did was give us a jitterbug show. It was one of the best jitterbugs I've ever seen in my life. They did all the things like going -- two men, now, under the legs, throwing over the back, and I have never seen anybody doing that in real life, except on TV. [Laughs] That I remember so distinctly. So when they came back on board, we left again, and then returned to Hilo. And as we're coming in, there's a breakwater because they don't have a natural reef. So as we got in and turned to go to the port, my dream was there. Shafts of light, you know, the clouds, and I think I stared at it until we moored. And my parents and I were looking down to see who came, and it was, her sister had come to pick us up. So we lived with my auntie for a while.

MA: Because your home had been sold, right?

JH: We didn't have any home. It had already been sold. My paternal uncle Ray had kept the family car, and my father decided, well, we don't have money, so he asked my aunt if he could repair appliances. He took appliance repair courses while he was in Arizona, it was correspondence courses. So he built his own radio and we used to listen to Lone Ranger and Green Hornet, whatever came on. But it was very good because we didn't have that in Arkansas. But so he began that. He started to repair appliances, and then decided that he would open up a shop in Hilo town to repair appliances.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.