<Begin Segment 29>

TI: So I'm, at this point, were you thinking at all about career, about college, things like that?

MY: Well, I think that goes a little ways back. I'm not trained to do anything, so the logical thing is education. In order to do education I really have to go to college. Where in college? Well, in order to do this, San Francisco, Bay Area was the logical place, but in the meantime, getting out of the camp was a circuitous way of seeing the country, and so here I was, March and then April, May, Fourth of July I was in New York, then couple of days in Washington, D.C., and then back to San Francisco to start the fall semester at City College of San Francisco. At City College I enrolled as a, presumably a high school graduate, and in the application, "Where'd you go?" "Lowell High School." "Oh." And that was the end of the application.

TI: So the question, I'm curious, so it's like five years of your life were just sort of wasted in some ways. I'm trying to get a sense of how you changed in terms of your aspirations. I mean, when you were seventeen, Lowell High School, one of the best high schools in the whole country, did what you want to do with your life, did those four or five years change you in terms of how you thought of who Morgan was before and after the war?

MY: No. Essentially, the idea was I needed a college education to do anything that I wanted to do. The question of what do I want to do was still kind of vague.

TI: So from a sociological standpoint, again, because of your background, I'm curious how you view this, a lot of people would say someone who's gone through such a difficult time, they're kind of, their life is going and then it's disrupted for four or five years, it'd be common for them to have a hard time getting back on track and doing something. It seemed like you had no problems, sort of like here you had this very difficult time, you were essentially in prison, and now you come out and you get back on the horse and figure, okay, I have to go back to college and you continue with your life. How is that possible?

MY: Possible because those four or five years, as you mentioned, was only one kind of a life of a prison. See, it wasn't going through different kinds of lifestyle, from this job to this job to this job, or one kind of social experience and another social experience here. It was only one kind of social experience. Even the social experience was limited to every three day cycle, so in a way the original thinking was not particularly disrupted, go to college, because this pattern was just a time away from normal life.

TI: So it wasn't, so it just, like that time was just on hold kind of? I mean, it was like you're, you're progressing, then these five years, and then just like...

MY: It was a time, lifetime being on hold, essentially nothing different from April 7, 1942 to March 13, 1946. I went into camp straight and then I picked up the pattern from here over here.

<End Segment 29> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.