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BN: So I wanted to go back, kind of a little bit of a tangent --

AN: Sorry for distracting here.

BN: No, no, this is great, we were going to get there. But just to go back to the '70s and you have a young family you started in Long Beach, when did you move to Gardena?

AN: In 1985.

BN: Oh, later, okay.

AN: Yeah, 'cause we were living in Chinatown and Yvonne was teaching and working in Evans Adult School which is in Chinatown, or right at the edge of Chinatown. And we were involved in the LA stuff. So my goal all along was to probably transfer to work in Cal State LA. So with Bob Suzuki, when Bob was the Vice President for Academic Affairs, we arranged, because Bob knew my interest, and so he arranged a meeting with the president, we had dinner, and so he says, "Oh, yeah, we'd love to have you." So he kind of created a position, and it was a strange thing. So then I was interviewed by phone by this Vice President for Administration, and then I was offered a job. And it was the strangest thing because there was never a committee. So I looked into things and I found that the administration was this dysfunctional administration, that the president was not well-liked by students or anyone, and that I would be brought in as, quote, "one of the president's team" to carry out his things. So I said, "I don't need this." So I told Bob, I said, "Bob, I'd love to work at Cal State LA because as a campus, that's the community that I want to serve. But Long Beach, I've got the support and the administration and other things that I could actually get the job done," and I didn't feel at LA that that would be the opportunity to be able to do that. So I turned down the job at Cal State LA, then I decided that I'm going to stay at Long Beach, so then it was too much of a commute, so then we came to Gardena. So this is after living in Chinatown for twelve years.

BN: And I was going to ask you, because, of course, Gardena kind of became one of the suburban Japanese American communities.

AN: Not when we moved here. No, it was, and it was a kind of halfway commute because Yvonne continued to work in Chinatown and she continued her involvement in Chinatown in L.A.

BN: It's almost right in the middle.

AN: Yeah, it was kind of in the middle. We were not able to really connect that much to the city of Gardena, but we enjoyed the community. But most of our stuff is in L.A.-based kinds of things, and Yvonne was, and remains, active in a lot of other nonprofit stuff. When we think about the '70s when we had two kids, and Yvonne was chair of this Chinatown Service Center and then the Foundation for Early Childhood Development, and was active with the Teacher's Union. I was doing redevelopment stuff. It was a crazy time. We started a childcare center there, so it was all kind of a crazy time. We don't know how we did all that. It was part of a collective effort, so it was all doing everything together. But yeah, it was a crazy time.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2018 Densho. All Rights Reserved.