<Begin Segment 22>

MN: Now I know you were a schoolgirl for this university professor and a single woman, but did you hear other schoolgirls working in other families who got harassed?

KI: No. Well, the girlfriend that I told you that was out here first and met me she was doing schoolgirl and she didn't get harassed in that sense of being Japanese or anything, but her employer was... I don't know if I... was one of these that really was very demanding and so she left and she went back to San Francisco and lived at her home... by then her family had a home. But because Miss Decker was so undemanding of me, when I heard my girlfriend's story I could see why she didn't want to stay.

MN: Now you went to Berkeley High School. Were you able to keep up with the students there?

KI: Oh, yes, surprisingly I didn't have any trouble. I made good grades. I mean, I wasn't a straight A student or anything like that but I made good grades.

MN: What was the ethnic makeup of Berkeley High?

KI: At that time still mostly Caucasian. There were lot of Asians. There were some blacks. I think minorities were still minorities at that time.

MN: Now you eventually became a registered nurse. What influenced you to become a nurse?

KI: Oh, it was Miss Decker, yeah, Miss Decker, she said... and just like most... a lot of us when we came out of camp, everybody was becoming a secretary or working in an office so I gravitated toward that when I registered, signed up at Berkeley High School for taking secretarial courses. And then one day out of the blue she says to me what I really wanted to do and I says I don't know, I guess be a secretary or something. She says, "Well, why don't you try nursing? You'll probably make a good nurse." So then I switched to a... what do they call it? A pre-college, I don't know, they had a special term for going to that kind of school. So that's when I decided. I didn't know too much about it I was never a nurse's aide or I never was in a hospital or anything like that and I didn't know anybody who was a nurse, I thought, well, okay if she thinks so. Again it was something that I just hooked onto something that somebody said to do. I didn't regret it of course.

<End Segment 22> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.