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TI: So I'm curious, when you're doing all these things, thinking about the tomato business, school choices, how much advice did you get from your parents?

YU: They thought it was a dumb... why don't I go to UCLA or... "You quit Fullerton Junior College and now you want to go to some school up north?" They thought I -- and said, "Besides," he said, "when you graduate you're gonna be selling vegetables in a fruit stand or something like that." I said, "No, I'm not gonna be doing that." So we went to San Jose State in 1940.

TI: But when your parents would say this, would they kind of... I guess, how persuasive were they? I mean, did they just kind of give you advice? Or did they say --

YU: They said, "We're not gonna send you any money."

TI: Okay, so they were actually, so you had to, you were pretty headstrong in terms of going your own way.

YU: Yeah, I said, okay, in that case I figure I can find a job and work. And looking around and talking with someone, they said, "Oh yeah, what do you do?" I said, "I'm a schoolboy and I, do they have a lot of jobs like that?" He says, "Oh yeah, you can find schoolboy jobs and work during the daytime," not daytime but in the morning, get things ready, and then in the evenings you get home earlier, and then on weekends you clean the house. So I said, "Okay, well, I think I can make it." So that's how we came up here."

TI: And going back to your parents, tell me a little bit about your, first your father. What kind of personality did your father have?

YU: Well, my dad didn't have too much education, and so one of the things that they, he says, well, we should go to, we should have education to get anything accomplished. And my mother was very strong about that. They would say, "Okay, look at us." He says, "We don't have an education and we don't, we can't do anything. So you must." All my, my brothers and sisters. "You must have an education to grow out of all of this misery, or you might say the kind of life that we are living. If you have education, you can get out of this."

TI: And when they said education, did that mean college education or high school?

YU: They meant school and then go to college. But they also said you have to really be serious about going, otherwise you're not gonna, you're not gonna get anyplace.

TI: Okay. So you decide to come to San Jose State College, so tell me what you found when you came to San Jose. What was it like?

YU: Well, I found the campus to be real small, and there's only about three thousand students, and it seemed to me that you get to know a lot of people and it was a friendly school, nothing serious. And we, for recreation, we didn't have too much money so we would go to football games on Friday nights and maybe a movie downtown on Saturday nights. And that was the extent of our recreation.

TI: And when you say "we," who were your friends?

YU: My roommate. His name was Tak Tashima.

TI: Good. And this is, what, about 1940?

YU: 1940, and then into 1941.

TI: Okay, any other activities that you did? So it was mostly school, then working?

YU: I did, I was on the wrestling team, just horsing around, nothing serious. But it turned out to be something that I'm glad I was in a the time, because I got to know a lot of people and made friends with important people.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.