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MN: I wanted to ask a little bit about your childhood growing up in this area. On your free time, what did you do? What sort of games did you play?

CO: Well, you know, it was pretty standard stuff, playing... well, I don't think it was baseball. We did a lot of those things like jacks and tops and jump rope, hide-and-go-seek, just a lot of stuff. Because it was a farm, we could do things that I think maybe city kids couldn't do, like dig real big holes and cover them over and pretend that they were houses and go down inside, into the hole, and set it up like a house. I remember that, 'cause the boys helped us dig, which was nice, so we had a big space. Anyway, also going fishing in a nearby creek, and that, I remember shooting down little birds with BB guns. They all learned to drive early out on the farm, the boys, so just rambling around in pickup trucks and doing that kind of thing. Yeah, we had a lot to do as little kids. Although they were things that we chose on our own to do, pretty unsupervised activity.

MN: And you mentioned going fishing to the creek. Were you close to the ocean also?

CO: We were close to the ocean, and sometimes family, my father liked to go fishing. So he would go surf fishing or sometimes pier fishing and that kind of thing. But another thing we used to do is go to rocky areas to gather octopus. That I remember. There was a way of, at low tide, luring out octopus, small octopus, from under the rocks, bringing those home, and we would gather snails and little abalone and sometimes seaweed. I don't know, just scavenge around the rocks. And I do remember mushroom hunting as a kid. My dad liked to do that, so after the rains he would go out looking for mushrooms. And my father hunted also. He shot pheasant and what else? That I remember. But once he did go duck hunting. So anyway, these were kind of rural things that we did.

MN: Really living off the land.

CO: To some extent, yeah. We had chickens, I mean, they grew little gardens with vegetables. And there was a lot of barter and that kind of thing going on. These were Depression days, but I don't remember ever feeling like we had to go hungry, or that we felt really poor or really resentful of other people. I think everybody was in the same boat. And like we had clothes and shoes and stuff but a lot of the kids that came to the school came barefoot in those days. So under the circumstances, we didn't feel like we were undergoing tremendous deprivations or anything.

MN: Now, you've been friends with the writer Hisaye Yamamoto from before the war. Is it at this Oceanside community that your family got to know each other?

CO: Right.

MN: Now, Hisaye is nine years older than you, but did you have a lot of contact with her?

CO: Well, she lived close by, for one thing. And I used to play with her younger brothers. And Hisaye liked to tell the story of how she used to be babysitter to my sister Emiko, so there was that much contact together. Of course, I was like eight or nine years old, and anyway, just happened to be proximity that she lived very close.

MN: Now, you're a writer also. Did Hisaye have any influence on you being a writer?

CO: I would say that she was the most influential person in my life in those terms, yeah. And she was an intellectual, although as a kid, I didn't realize that, or I didn't understand the breadth of her interests. Like she learned French and all that kind of thing, but I didn't know that. And during camp, we also were neighbors. So all of us having nothing to do, we were all just sort of hanging out wherever we could. So I maintained a good relationship with her at the time, but she always encouraged my writing. I was not particularly interested, but already she had been writing all along, all that time, publishing in the L.A. papers and such. So certainly when I started going to UCLA I was there in the L.A. area, so I used to go see her. And she all along sort of encouraged me in my academic career and in writing.

<End Segment 3> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.