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TI: Tell me about your grandmother. What was she like? What kind of person was she? It is interesting because you're right, this is the first time I've heard of someone bringing wallpaper, so I'm just curious about her.

HL: My mother?

TI: Yeah, your mother.

HL: She was a very interesting person. She, I think, in her lifetime went to every different kinds of, different denomination churches, and she said it doesn't matter which church you go to or what religion you believe in. They're all telling you to live better with your fellow beings. And then my dad, he said, "Well, I was born a Buddhist. I'm gonna die a Buddhist." And so my mother says, "Well, I guess I better join the Buddhist church then." [Laughs] But she was, I mean, she went to the Christian Science church, she went to the Buddhist church, she went to the Methodist church. I think she even went to the Catholic church, just to see what they were teaching. She was a very open-minded person.

TI: That is unusual. I've never heard of an Issei woman doing that.

HL: Yeah, she just, she said it doesn't matter. She says it's all getting down to you live better with other people. She was a wonderful person.

TI: How about childrearing? Was there anything she did in terms of childrearing that may have been different than other families?

HL: Well I'll tell you, in our family nobody was ever spanked or anything like that. And it was more "this is our expectation if you," and just like they never put pressure on you to get A's, but they said, "We expect the best from you, and if that's the best you can do, so be it." But so it was more "we expect you to be this way" or "we expect you to be that way."

TI: Tell me about your father. What was he like?

HL: [Laughs] He was, let's see, he didn't say much. He just kind of... he was a very nice person, but then he wasn't, I don't think he was as interesting person as my mother was. To me my mother was a very interesting person and quite different from a lot of the Issei women, or any woman at that, during that time period. But my dad pretty much...

TI: Now, did your mother have very much education in Japan?

HL: Yeah, she graduated from high school, so for her age and for her era that was, she was well, and she had trained to be a nurse.

TI: Okay. Yeah, I'm always curious about, about my grandparents, essentially, and what they were like. 'Cause I, because of the language I didn't really ever get a chance to know them, and you would just get a sense of them but not really know them, so I'm always curious.

HL: Yeah, it's too bad, 'cause you would've loved my mother. My mother was really quite a person. She was an interesting person. And then as far as, like cooking, she'll say if you use the best ingredients you'll always turn out well. She says if you don't use the good ingredients, she says, "I don't care what you do, it's not gonna turn out very good." She says life's like that: you put in the best and you'll get out the best.

TI: And she'd use a cooking metaphor for --

HL: Yeah.

TI: Interesting.

HL: And she was a good cook, too.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.