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TI: Yeah, so actually, I wanted to, that was the next topic. So now you're just, all this is happening, and you're probably now learning how much trauma your parents went through, how difficult it was. And you were this tot, this child.

SI: Right. And my father said, he used to tease me a lot and say, "You were such a crybaby, you cried all the time." And my mother said it's because he was a stranger to me. We'd been separated since from when I was not quite one, and then reunited after I was two and a half. So suddenly he's back and we reunite at Crystal City. And by that time I had really changed, and I had no idea who he was, and every time he'd approach me, I would start crying. And so my first actual recollection is being on a train, and I'm pretty sure it's a train ride out of Crystal City heading to Cincinnati, Ohio. And I remember being big enough that I could reach on the arm rails of those aisles and kind of swing my feet as the train was going. And I wrote about this memory, and I remember my brother sleeping on my mother's lap, with his head on her lap, and my father is reaching for me, and I start crying again, it's like he's a stranger. He says to me in Japanese, he says, "Nakanaide, shikkari shinasai. Don't cry, be strong." And that was the phrase he would say to us as children growing up. And it could be the title of the book that I'm working on now, "Be strong, don't cry." But that, I think, was a powerful message about how to move forward in my life. Doesn't mean I don't cry, because I cry a lot. But the idea of how to be strong, how to endure, how to... it's a very Nisei message, transmitted from the pioneer Isseis, that being tough and taking it and enduring it. And he never said, "And fight back." [Laughs] So I think that has been the next part of my own growth, was to learn to fight back. That I could take it, I could take it, but what they felt powerless to do was to fight back, and that was what I could carry forward, was to take it, learn it, study it, understand it, really feel in control of it, and then speak out.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2019 Densho. All Rights Reserved.