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TI: Now, in those early days, I mean, how would you describe your feeling when you were around other Asian Americans versus your white friends? Was there a difference in how you felt?

PJH: Yes. I think there was a mild transformation and then a very cathartic transformation, because I knew when I was little that I did not want to marry a Japanese guy. And that's what I believed in, but when I started to march with all these other Asians, I'm going, hmm, Asian guy, they're not bad. They're not bad. [Laughs] So I think sexuality for men and women, looking at myself and also being interested in Asian men was kind of in the same time as getting involved with Asian American Studies.

TI: And how about you in terms of your personality? Were there any changes during this time?

PJH: Oh, very much so. Because one of the classes that I had taken that was offered through the center was Japanese American experience and of course the internment experience, these were all new to me, but it, or it became, it kind of fell into place, like now I understood what "camp" meant, as opposed to my parents' reference to camp very subtly as we were growing up. I would remember hearing my father talk about cooking lots of food and I would go, "How come, Dad, you don't cook for, for the house, for the family?" He goes, "I know only how to make a lot of food for a lot of people." [Laughs] But I could never understand why, but he always would reference that to camp. Of course, in my mind I'd think maybe it's summer camp. And other parts of camp, like my mother said, "That's where I lost a lot of weight. It was so hot and dusty and this," but they never talked anything specific. So not, for the first time hearing about the camp as a freshman in college, nineteen years old, it was like, wow, how is that I never heard about this tragic incident? It's not written in the book. We never heard about it as I was growing up. That's, I became incensed, all of a sudden it was more like American government, government and looking at it in terms of the "establishment" and being denied of our rights. So that was kind of like the coming of age of my politics.

TI: Well, and it was also during the Vietnam War, kind of protests, the Civil Rights Movement, a lot of things were happening right, right at that time.

Tom Izu: I wanted to ask what, did you talk to your parents much during this, all these changes going on, and what kind of relationship did you have with them?

PJH: Actually, they moved away. That's the other traumatic experience. My, my father got a job from the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory and he left in 1972 and my mother and he moved to Saipan. He got a job as a kind of mechanical engineer out there. It was a civil service job. But when they moved there they sold their house in Fremont and once they left it was like, where's home? So there was a sense of angst there, too. There was no real physical home. I always related home to being something geographic and now that my parents were in this foreign place, I never went to Saipan, never related to it, so there was that happening, too. So yeah, they weren't there from about, I'm sorry, about 1971, '71, '72.

Tom Izu: Did they have expectations of you when you were going to college and what to major in and all that?

PJH: Hmm. [Laughs] First year in college, I wanted to be a computer analyst, but we're talking about punch cards and my programs would never come out. Error, error, error. I knew that I wasn't really in the right field. So I remember the first, after knowing that math was not gonna be my major, I would just take a catalog and go... Journalism. Oh cool, journalism. And it was in journalism class that I was able to write about the camp experience. And I remember my teacher going, "Dark moment in history. This is a fine paper. You did a really great job," because I also, for the first time, wrote, asked my mother, "What was that like?" That got into the paper. So yeah, it was the first time for me to uncover a lot of my cultural past and, and there was anger, but also the critical mass of students also coming to terms with the same things that I was. I, going to rallies, going to community events, okay, this is the turn around. Protesting for the war, there was a platform within the Asian American community that, you know, all fine and dandy, but it's got to stop. We have to realize that the war is happening here on our own turf, here in our own communities. Our seniors are not being serviced, da da da. And I was involved in Asian American, well, the center, and then I transferred to Berkeley, UC Berkeley after my second year and I got involved with Asian American Studies there, took classes with Harry Edwards, and again, a lot more to be learned about third world people.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.