<Begin Segment 11>

MN: Now going back to Long Beach, now this is right before you're going into Santa Anita, do you remember what day you left to go to Santa Anita?

YH: We left on Easter Sunday morning.

MN: Did any of your friends, school friends, come to see you off?

YH: No, it was, my, I think my grandmother and my mother's friends took us in their car to the railroad station.

MN: And when you got to the railroad station, what is your memory of getting there and the soldiers being there? What are your memories of that?

YH: Well, I just remember getting on the train. I didn't see any soldiers. And then we were in Santa Anita.

MN: Was this your first time on a train?

YH: Yes.

MN: So for yourself, you're young, was it pretty adventurous?

YH: Yeah, it was.

MN: When you got to Santa Anita, what was your first impression?

YH: Let's see, well, there's a whole lot of horse stalls, and that's all I remember, all those horse stalls.

MN: Now your family, did you live in the horse stalls or in the parking lot?

YH: In the horse stall.

MN: What was that like, adjusting to living in a horse stall?

YH: Well, I didn't like it because there were all these stinky bugs, these great big black stinky bugs. They would come crawling out of the asphalt someplace and on the sides of the wall. And we'd just step on them and, because their exoskeleton was very hard. And I don't know why we called them stinky bugs, but that's what we called them.

MN: Did they smell when you killed it?

YH: No, I don't think so. I don't remember. We just called them stinky bugs. [Laughs]

MN: So what was the food situation like at Santa Anita?

YH: I do remember that a lot of times we'd have to get up in the middle of the night because it would be, we'd have the cramps, so we'd have to go to the bathroom. We weren't the only ones. The bathroom was filled with people who had the cramps.

MN: So you're eating a lot of tainted food, it sounds like.

YH: Yeah. Yeah, a lot of people were eating tainted food.

MN: So even in the middle of the night, was there a line to go to the latrine?

YH: Sometimes we'd have to sit down and wait.

MN: How about the mess hall, what was it like? Did you have to stand in long lines to get in?

YH: Yeah. Yeah.

MN: You were talking about how you made butter at Santa Anita?

YH: Yeah. We would take a bottle of milk and then we let it, let the cream come up to the top and throw the rest of the milk out and then shake it. And then by shaking it you could make butter, so we would put the bread on the, on the heater, the stove and then put the butter on the bread, 'cause we never got butter at the mess hall.

MN: People were very innovative, it sounds like.

YH: Yeah, I don't know who else did that, but that's what we did.

MN: Tell me what you folks did with these wheat squares you got.

YH: Oh yeah, those wheat squares, we used to, 'cause you had to really put a lot of sugar on the wheat squares in order to make them edible. We never ate those before in our lives, so we just saved all of them and then put them into one place, and everyone else did the same thing, so there was a mountain of wheat squares out there and they set them all on fire.

MN: And then earlier you were sharing with us about school at Santa Anita, how it was at the grandstand. How would you compare the schooling you got in Santa Anita to the one you were getting in Long Beach?

YH: 'Course, the one in Long Beach was much better, but the one in Santa Anita wasn't too bad because most of the teachers were university graduates or university students at that time, so they were very good teachers. They knew, they knew the subject.

MN: And these are the Nisei university...

YH: Right.

MN: And was it, am I correct in saying this was all voluntary to go to school?

YH: Yes. Yes.

MN: Do you remember what your mother was doing in Santa Anita?

YH: I think, I don't think she did anything.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.