<Begin Segment 10>

SY: When you first came out of camp, I was curious if you remember experiencing a lot of racism.

GN: I did. Especially in Norwalk. People would use the word "Jap," and I used to get into a lot of fights.

SY: So tell about some of those fights.

GN: I would say mostly those, I guess, when the family where the parents that had the prejudice and it kind of rubs off on the kids. Because, on the other hand, there were those who were really good to me and really go out of their way to help me on a number of things.

SY: You mean like other Caucasian families?

GN: Right.

SY: So do you remember, give us an example of that.

GN: Well, they're, the one that I remember that was really good to us was this old pioneer family that had come to California in a wagon train, and when they came here I don't know, but the father had a gun shop and the parking lot to the gun shop was adorned with the wagon wheels that was used as part of the wagon train. But they were pretty well off. They owned a large parcel of land that they were leasing to a farmer, and he had a private plane that he bought. They had a station wagon and a trailer. They would go camping a lot. But the oldest son was my age, and he joined the Boy Scouts so he invited me to join the Boy Scouts, and I think his mother was kind of responsible for part of that, having, invite me to join with him. And so I remember the experience I had in Boy Scouts in Norwalk with him.

SY: So that was a mixed ethnic troop when you first joined?

GN: No, it was strictly white.

SY: Strictly white, so you were the only --

GN: Even the school that I attended, what I remember most is the intermediate school. It was called Centennial Intermediate School, had about five hundred students, maybe about four or five Asians. I think there was one Chinese and the rest were Japanese, and the other Japanese were farmers from the Whittier area that was within the Norwalk school boundary. But, and then that family, one day when the father was gonna go fly up in the private plane they invited me to fly. I got sick. [Laughs]

SY: Sick in the plane?

GN: In the plane, yes. And then they, let's see, some of the thing that I remember, they had a burro and so I would ride on their burro every once in a while on the farm, and those are the kind of things that I remember.

SY: Yeah, so they were very open.

GN: And I remember going to Boy Scout camp. They had a camp, they had a jamboree at Rio Hondo, I remember going to that. But I caught, I got yellow jaundice at that camp. Yeah, in fact... they had type A, type B and type C, what is it called?

SY: I don't... it's a jaundice type?

GN: No, no. Yeah, it's a particular disease.

SY: Malaria? No.

GN: No. I thought it started with an H. You know, where your skin gets yellow and brownish. It's your liver.

SY: Oh, I know what you're talking -- hepatitis.

GN: Hepatitis, yeah. And I think that's the sickest I had ever been, when I came back from that camp.

SY: Really.

GN: And I remember I went to Dr. Tashiro in L.A. My parents took me, and so anyway, he prescribed this yeast type drink that I'm supposed to have every day. And I was sick for about six weeks.

SY: Wow.

GN: And my skin turned brown and the sheets would turn yellow, but anyway, that was the bad part of the experience of going.

SY: And that's when you were living in Norwalk.

GN: Norwalk.

SY: And you, and there's no residual of hepatitis?

GN: Well then, years and years later -- no, nothing, I didn't get anything after that -- and I read in the paper that many Asians, especially those from Hong Kong, have hepatitis B, and one of the things they find about people with hepatitis B is that there's a high percentage of those who end up with liver cancer. And so that really worried me, and so I went to the doctor and mentioned about what I read, and he says, well, he says, "When was it that you had your, this yellow jaundice?" I said it was like 1947, thereabouts, or '48. And he says, "Well, in those days they didn't have, they didn't know that there was hepatitis A, B or C, but we could check that out by seeing what your antibody is like." And so they took my blood sample and when I went to see him again he said, "It was hepatitis A that you had."

SY: That's good.

GN: So I felt relieved. [Laughs]

SY: [Laughs] You're still here.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.