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BN: So just to kind of close this chapter, you mentioned your grandfather dies in this accident, then soon after comes the war, so what happens to all his business ventures at that point?

LH: That is a very sad story, like many of those stories. So there was a woman that the family apparently trusted, they entrusted her all of the funds and all of the titles and deeds and whatever and she ran off with everything.

BN: This is someone not Japanese American?

LH: I never got the whole story. This was kind of what I got, and then, of course, it was such an emotional subject. I really didn't get much. And it might be, some of that might be in my interview with my eldest aunt, Katsuko, and I have it digitized, I've digitized all these tapes, interviews. Yeah, so when they came back, they had no documentation. And then for some reason, they still had the house, which was a really nice house near Yesler Way in Seattle. They tried to buy into a nicer area and, of course, they couldn't because of racial covenants. So they ended up in this pretty nice house near Yesler Way. My mother said she used to just walk down Yesler Way into Japantown. They were able to stay there for a while, and for some reason, Tachan, Tatsuo, who was the eldest son, who of course had control of everything as the eldest son, he was in charge. And I guess he worked with Uncle Mike, too, on deciding what to do. They sold the house, which was really hard on my grandmother, she was really sad about that, I know. They sold the house, and then they lost the property in Oregon because they couldn't pay the taxes. And that was a bone of contention in the family for a very long time, because it was the male family members that had complete control over what was going on.

BN: Right.

LH: And the sisters were pretty fierce.

BN: Yeah, I was going to ask you about that, I mean, your mother just, looking at her bare biography, just comes off as a very formidable, highly educated person. Was that, were all the sisters sort of like that in terms of education? Many Issei families, they chose not to send the girls to college, right?

LH: Oh, yeah, no, that was one of my grandfather's desires, that all of his children be educated. So he sent his girl children, his girls, they all went to the University of Washington. And my mother was, clearly she was quite intelligent, she managed to do very well. She was like, "You did what?" "I wanted to have a career in the State Department and World War II came along." "Why did you do that, prewar?" [Laughs] She wanted to work in the State Department. That would be something that would not be the best projected career, right? But she wanted to do that. And this trip was something that sort of bolstered all of that, but she apparently, she won an honorary prize from this very vaunted group of Seattle women that I came across, it's in part of that PDF. I just came across that and I was like, oh my god. This was when she was twenty-one, she was a very...

BN: She had this ambition that was, the sense that, I think so many women of that time, Nisei women, there was a constraint on what you could do, those expectations, a certain point you get in your career and so forth, and you don't necessarily see that in her.

LH: You're right. So maybe my grandfather's recognition, and his trust, actually, in Katsuko to run the company, because he trusted Katsuko more than Tachan to run the company. Maybe that really made a difference in her life, I don't know. But if you look at the Fuyokai women, they were all very strong and they became professionals and experts in their fields. And my auntie Teru was part of that, yeah. I'm spacing a little bit, but she also had, of that group, Tomoko, the poet, the novelist, anyway, she was always in touch with that group for many, many years. And they were really, they figured how to strategize, negotiate, and they would do this by sort of, they exchanged between each other, like, "Oh, how did you do that?" I would hear that, yeah. So she, I think she learned things from the Japanese American community about how to navigate the dominant culture, but she also knew, she had these capabilities of making those connections, like, early on. But she, so when she went to Denver, she ended up in Denver, Boulder and then Denver, it's like Puyallup, Minidoka, Boulder, Colorado, and then Denver, Colorado. She wanted to stay in Denver. I think she always wanted -- I hate to say this -- but my mother always wanted to be a white person. She wanted to be accepted into white society, that was one of her big goals, I think, really. She wanted to prove that she was as good as they were, that was one of her goals, I think.

BN: So do you think staying in Denver was, in some ways, not wanting to not to be part of the big Japanese communities?

LH: I think she didn't... I'm not really sure. Because she was so tightly knit into that group and I used to think it was, that she didn't like that clubbiness. Because even in Denver, she wasn't connected to the Simpson Methodist group or the Buddhist groups at all, and they were very active early on even. Because there was a large Japanese American community postwar, and it was like ten thousand and then it dwindled down. But even during that period, she didn't want to go there. That's why we didn't go to take Japanese lessons when we were, like, five or six. And she sent us off when we were eleven or twelve and my brother and I were both like, no way we're sitting with those kindergarteners to learn Japanese. Unfortunately, my stubbornness got a hold of me, and I didn't learn Japanese.

BN: Me too, unfortunately.

LH: So she wanted to be... well, here's the story I'm telling now. Because I just sort of had to, like, really deal with all the legacy of that, and she had these... I remember when I was little, we used to spend this huge amount of time in this designer furniture store. It had the most up-to-date, most modernist furniture you could possibly, and everything, beautiful things that you could possibly imagine. And she bought this bedroom set for her bedroom. She really, like women at the time, they really styled their houses, it was very important, you know, that your bedroom looked like a certain type of bedroom, and dining room looked like a certain... hers was all modernist, but of this really good quality modernist furniture. So the chests that I just sold, or that I gave away, actually gave them away, they were worth six thousand dollars. They were midcentury modernist masterpieces that she bought. They were like... oh, what was it like? Winchester Planning Group, and it was a James McCooper, but they were designer quality. So that's what she was buying in the 1950s. And actually Gail Dubrow, you know Gail, who's a (well-known) architectural historian, and Greig Crysler), who's also a (well-known) professor at Berkeley, they have that set. Greig has the smaller one and Gail had a two-drawer set. And I tell them they can both look at them and think of my mother declaring herself as the modern woman of Denver. And that's what she aspired to, I think, for a very long time, and she loved it. She liked Denver, she liked that freedom, I think, and that independence, which you can't always have in the Japanese American community if you're born in that community and you grew up there and everybody knows you and they know exactly what you're doing. If you do anything, they'll know, right? So I think she liked that freedom of being in Colorado and being separate from that community but still connected.

BN: Okay.

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