<Begin Segment 25>

BN: And then I wanted to ask you about redress. What did you think when you first heard about these efforts to try to get redress?

HK: Oh, okay. Well, at that time, I still didn't know hardly anything about redress or what all these people were doing, or who was doing all this work since the 1970s, took almost twenty years for all of this to come by. And so this is great for them to see if they could see if they could get the government to actually apologize, plus the money. So no, I just had to say, "Well, I'm part of the crowd and glad to go along with it." And sad to hear that you had to be alive, because my father died in '85, so he's the one that deserved the money more than anybody else, but he didn't know anything about it, but that was all part of the process.

BN: But your mother was able to get...

HK: Yes, she was still around.

BN: What happened to your parents? Because we kind of left them having gotten this new business in (the Virgil area). What happened with them subsequently?

HK: Well, they just continued. One kind of unusual part was that when my dad came back to join the business, actually, he went to, I guess, an employment place and signed up for what kind of job? He wanted to be, he put down presser, that's steam pressing pants and so on. So he got a job as a presser making records. So he used the pressing machine to make vinyl records, recordings, at Columbia Records. So that was kind of funny or unusual, I don't know.

BN: Kind of the same thing, I don't know.

HK: So he ended up, he worked at Columbia Records for a few years while my mom did all the work there at this El Patio Cleaners. But he eventually came back and joined. Then they did that business until finally they decided to give it up, and my dad got ill, he got cancer somewhere in his bladder or whatever and (she) took care of him.

BN: Yeah, he would have passed just a few years before the redress bill, because that was '88.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.