<Begin Segment 13>
MN: So then you go to San Dimas, and what was, you went to school in San Dimas for a while. Do you remember the name of the school?
Mo N: It was in the town of San Dimas, that's all I remember. And mostly Mexican or Chicano and white, and a few of us Japanese.
MN: How did the other non-Japanese American kids treat you?
Mo N: The white kids, we used to have to fight all the time. Chicano kids were... well, I made my first friends there with the Chicano kids there. So for a while it was pretty tough with the white kids. Then after I hooked up with the Chicano kids, then we started to get back at those suckers. Yeah, it was not fun. I remember running home a couple miles, couldn't catch the bus. [Laughs] Yeah, it was right after the war, so there was a whole lot of animosity toward Japanese people. As to the whole society, when we come back from San Dimas and we moved into this Holiness hostel, and that was right across from Thirty-sixth Street School. I can remember coming home from school and going to my grandpa's shop, having the old black winos throw wine bottles and shit like that at me. It wasn't just white people; turned the whole society against Japanese people. And a lot of 'em resented our coming back.
MN: And then you said from the Holiness Church hostel you moved to the Arlington Heights area?
Mo N: Yeah.
MN: Which school did you attend there?
Mo N: Arlington Heights grammar school.
MN: What was the ethnic makeup of this school?
Mo N: Ninety-nine point nine percent white. That was still during segregation. Kids of color were instructed to go to... I forgot the name of that school, but there's a grammar school right above Adams on Western, right in that Dempsey Square area. And that's where the kids of color were told to go, "separate but equal" kind of bullshit practiced here in the city. But my mom, that was too far, all the way down to Adams from Pico up there, so she just said, "I want him to go to the nearest school." So I went, but I was the only one. Me and then a little bit later a Korean came. He was the son of a doctor or something. But we were the only two non-white kids in the school. Same thing, having to fight until you got some friends. So that's why for a long time I had this notion that I wasn't gonna have children, 'cause I didn't think this country deserved to have my kids. I don't want no kid to have to go through crap like that.
<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2011 Densho. All Rights Reserved.