<Begin Segment 27>

TI: Okay, and you were, you said about three and a half years before you moved out of the skid row area?

HU: Yeah. Interesting thing happened there. Mr. Muro died. I think he was about sixty when he died and so Mrs. Muro and Hope moved out to, I think, Westchester or somewhere and then another lady took over the hotel. And then there was this girl my age and one night we went out and kinda walked around the town and then her mother didn't like it at all. She went to my mother and says she didn't want me to be hanging around with her daughter and then next thing we knew she says, "Could you move out?" So we got sorta evicted. And I had a friend, Leland, and his mother and father, was Nisei from Hawaii and they were dentists and they were living in this hotel, or apartment near Washington and Main Street. It's, it's removed from the skid row and they had a vacancy, so we moved in there.

TI: Okay, and during this time what was your mother doing?

HU: Nothing. She never worked. She wanted to work, but I said, "Well, you better not."

TI: So how did the two of you support yourselves?

HU: We sold the house. I mean, not the house, we sold the farm, but it didn't bring in much and what we actually, we divided, but... divide the proceeds among the siblings, so there wasn't much. But there was enough to tide us over for, until I started working.

TI: So let's talk about, so the farm was sold. So this was forty acres, the house, your brother had all these dreams of building something big. What happened? Why, why was the farm sold and what happened to your brother?

HU: My brother, he answered "no-no" on the "loyalty questions," so he went to Tule Lake and he was one of the "Wassho wassho" boys with hachimaki and things, so he got sent to, later sent to Fort Lincoln, Bismarck, and then, then after that he was sent to Japan. (...) When he left for Tule Lake I guess he had no intention of going back to farming, so he says he doesn't want the farm. (...) I was only about sixteen or fifteen or something like that and I had no intention or no capability of running the farm, so we just asked the shipping company to just sell it, sell it for us.

TI: Did you ever talk to your brother about his decision to go "no-no," to renounce his citizenship and then go to Japan? Did you ever talk to him about that?

HU: No, I never did. After he left Manzanar I didn't see him until I was in the army and I visited him. I spent maybe a couple of days with him and that's about all, so I haven't... and at that time I never talked about why or anything.

TI: Well, when you visit him when you were in the service, did he talk about his decision at all then?

HU: No, no, he didn't. He was sort of happy with what he did. When he was in Bismarck he took a correspondence course in refrigeration, so when, and he was sort of a smooth talker, anyway, so when he went to Japan he was able to talk himself into a job with the occupation force. So later he got his own business; he never came back to this country.

TI: Did he ever come back to visit the United States?

HU: [Laughs] He never did.

TI: He never came back. Was he bitter about, about what happened to him?

HU: No.

TI: So you never talked about that.

<End Segment 27> - Copyright © 2010 Densho. All Rights Reserved.