<Begin Segment 14>

AI: What about getting used to American culture and American living?

KM: Well she didn't, she said that she didn't go out too much when she first came. Dad did all the grocery shopping, so forth like that, because she said that she wanted to gradually get used to. But she was never a shop going. She always wanted to stay home. When I grew up too, you know, when I had a dressmaking shop, I would stop and get grocery on the way home. She never did. But the only way that she would shop was the -- we had lot of peddlers, fishermen and lot of Japanese cookies and stuff. They would come once a month and that's when she would store up on all the Japanese things or different fish things. That's, I guess that was her means of shopping. But never out with the car or, and she never did learn to drive a car either.

AI: And then what about, you had mentioned earlier that she hadn't learned much English when you were a child...

KM: Yeah.

AI: ...did she gradually learn more?

KM: No she didn't. She said that, their thought is that they're gonna only be here for temporary, and then that they didn't have to. And in the camp, when they're in the camp, that's when they had a great opportunity to learn, because so many Isseis learned and became citizens. But they didn't have a desire to learn.

AI: At that time, in the earlier...

KM: Yeah. I said, "You sure missed a good opportunity." Yeah. But, so she just relied on us to do all the interpreting. But my dad, he was something else. When we bought our first car, which was a Ford, you know. We were coming home, and we were singing away, three of us. All of a sudden there was a motorcycle policeman coming after. And I said, "Dad, there's a motorcycle coming after." He says, "Oh, never mind, it's not for me. I didn't do nothing wrong." And so he kept on going, and finally they did say, "Stop." And so we three just looked, "Now what's happened?" And so we were listening for my dad's English, seeing what he would say. And he said, "What's a matter?" [Laughs] I remember that. And then they got, and the policeman said, "You went so many miles over the speed limit." And Dad wanted, deny it. But then they said, "No, you did." And so he wrote a ticket and so forth. And then my dad says, "God damn." That the first word they learned, language they learned, and that got him another ticket. And so, to this day I remember that's the first bad language he's (learned), and he didn't use it in the right way at all, to a policeman. He came home and he says to my mother, "I got a ticket for saying... gee, in America you can't even use a word that you learned." He thought he learned something [Laughs] pretty good, 'cause I guess maybe he heard other people saying that. But he just didn't know when to use it. That's a recollection I have because I heard him and, oh, the policeman got so angry.

AI: Oh my.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 1999 Densho. All Rights Reserved.