<Begin Segment 15>

KN: So how long did you folks live in Seabrook?

EK: I would say about two years, two and a half years, maybe. But, see, when my father realized that he could not save, and the children were growing, I was already, you know, at that growth stage where you really needed clothes, in one month you grow so many... so he said his friend, his bachelor friend, a Mr. Takeshita, had gone to Chicago. And he wrote to my father saying, "There's lots of job in Chicago. You can work two jobs, maybe even three. You stay at my place, when I work nights, you work day, and when you work, vice versa, so you always have a place free." And so that's what he did. But see, the "illegal entry" stamped also prevented him from just taking off. He had go to the immigration office every month to say, "We are here," and sign the paper. To go someplace further than, I don't know, an hour away, you had to go and ask permission to say, "I'm going to Chicago, and I won't be back for probably so many weeks or months," and all those kind of things. And it wasn't easy. No one had cars, you had to take the bus, which was expensive for us, had to go to, sometimes to Philadelphia to do this. And so it was a trying time for the adults. It was not easy for the children either, of those of us who had many in the family, 'cause I have friends who also were doing -- males, young classmates -- who had to do the dishes in the communal place, or help the parents with the children, those kind of situation.

KN: So there were a number of Japanese families who had experienced this same thing, they had moved with you.

EK: Uh-huh.

KN: So your father heard about jobs in Chicago, to somewhere that he's never been to.

EK: Never been there.

KN: And does he go first or does he bring everyone?

EK: Oh, no, no. We didn't have any money. So he saved enough to -- on the cheapest coach, the type that you just sit up, and I don't think they have those kind of trains anymore but in those days I think they did. And so he went to Chicago, worked several jobs and spent very little. And in the meantime, when he worked nights, he would look around the city to see if it was viable for him to bring his family. And then he realized, too, if he was going to do that, we children needed coats, 'cause Chicago is so much colder than southern Jersey. And so when he came back, he had a coat for my mother, a coat for me, a green coat, and my sister and my brother. And those that belonged to us from Peru went to the younger ones, we had grown so much. And so that's how we got to Chicago later. February of 1949.

KN: So it was still freezing cold.

EK: Well, yeah. He said, "It's very cold in Chicago." When we got there, it was like freezing cold, as you say, and it was a place in the ghetto where the music was blasting away day and night with, "Do the Hucklebug." [Laughs] You folks don't that. Do you know that? No? Well, it was very jazzy.

KN: So were you in an African American neighborhood?

EK: Yes. But it was a mixed neighborhood. Ours was just a short block that had everything in it. Italian American, Japanese American, Puerto Rican, Mexicans, blacks. That's about... Southerners from way south who were the scariest when the father got drunk. It was like that.

KN: So you were dropped into American culture and different ethnicities and picking up English and...

EK: And trying not to say the swear words which came, every other word were swear words, but we tried to close our ears. [Laughs] So to this day I cannot say it. Even I tried it with my adult children, I said, "I'm going to swear just to see how it feels like," and they all laughed at me. They said, "You don't sound like you're swearing," you know, 'cause you just train yourself not to say those words, 'cause you know they're bad. You don't know exactly what they mean at that time, but you know they're bad.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.