<Begin Segment 19>

TI: So I'm gonna switch gears a little bit.

HU: Okay.

TI: About your, the family life, so your mother, your sister, you, how did the family life change going from the farm to Manzanar?

HU: Well, it changed in a good way, maybe, in a bad way. We were very close, closely knit family before the war. When we went to camp my brother's family and my mother's family, we slept in one, just one room. There was, what, three, six of us, and later when there were vacancies we, we were able to move. We were able to separate. (When we first moved into the block, there) were fifteen buildings, residential buildings. One was reserved as a community building, like in our case, in our block it turned out to be a kindergarten preschool, and there was barrack number fourteen, which they reserved it thinking that maybe they might have to use it as a community service building, but later on they found out that they don't need that space, so (...) they used it for residential. So we went, moved in there and my brother's family moved into another place, so we got separated, so we were at the opposite end of the block. So it sort of separated us from my brother's family. (...) So my mother, my sister and I were living together, then we also got separated in terms of, say, eating together for example. I would eat with my friends, my sister would go with her friends, so there was no, the family cohesiveness sort of dissipated there. So we sort of, but of course, we stayed in the same room, so it was a drastic change from what we used to have.

TI: And what would your mother do at camp? I mean, so you were with your friends, your sister was with her friends, what would your mother do?

HU: First they got the only job that they could get, camouflage, and that's, there's some conflicting stories about that. Camouflage was operated by this outside company that paid the workers at piece work prices and then there was, so they were able to make, if they wanted to, maybe eight dollars a day or sixteen dollars a day, which is one month's, sixteen dollars, regular pay, so there was controversy there. But I think that lasted only a short time and they went into regular sixteen dollars a month pay. So by the time we went into camp it was on the sixteen dollars a month, so camouflage factory was one of the places where people didn't want to work because with all that lint and things and the conditions out in the sun, so anyway my brother, my sister and mother, they worked at the camouflage factory. And then after a while there was this controversy, there was this problem, incident where the hardcore Kibei group, they start rattling them. They said, "Hey, you traitor. How come you're helping the government while you're sent to this kinda place?" It was, became sort of uncomfortable, and I remember the morning when they just came back and I asked them what happened, they said, "There's trouble. We don't want to work there anymore." So my brother got a job as a cop and then my sister got a job in the sewing factory and then my mother worked in the mess hall.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.