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BN: What part of... I don't know Denver much at all, but looking at their trajectory, they moved a couple of times. I got the sense that there was this trajectory going on, kind of moving up. But where, can you tell us about the areas that you grew up in in Denver?

LH: Yeah, actually. So I grew up on Pearl Street first. I was trying to remember the address. But anyway, it was near Washington Park, and I think part of what my mother, anyway, liked about Denver is there weren't that many Japanese Americans, right? So people didn't really know how to relate to her and so she was fairly free to move about. I remember she got me into a preschool thing. My brother was in a preschool thing for sure, and then I would tag along, she would take me with her, and I would play in the sandbox, it was an elementary school nearby. And then we lived next door to Charlie who used to take care of us, too, (a) classic old prairie dog, he was like this really rough and tumble guy. And my mother used to have him babysit us at times. [Laughs] And I remember, like, the house, I always remember the house as a big house and then I went back to look at it and it's this little tiny house, right? But when you're a kid you always think it's huge, right? But so there were very classic 1910 bungalows, 1915 bungalows, very small, actually, with backyards that faced each other and an alley. So as kids, we had, that was our playground in the back. And I remember us digging mud holes and traipsing all around. Marilyn Bowles was one of my friends, and I was always one of the youngest for some reason, so I was two or three, tagging along with all of these kids. And I remember all the different houses and going... I remember this one woman, I can't remember her name, but anyway, she had three kids. She had this bedroom that had a completely, like a fur white floor. It was completely white, a complete white bedroom with this sort of over the top 1940s (...) bedroom. And I remember that white fur floor and walking over it. And I remember actually, even as a tiny kid, sitting in the backyard just looking at everything. And my brother apparently was very rambunctious. My grandmother came to stay with us, Han Nakata. And he always had that reputation, so he apparently he threw the refrigerator door keys down the register, the air register, and he actually pooped in it once, I think. And my auntie, who was sort of like, had observed my mother's parenting for many years, once told me, "You know, once I went and visited with you in Pearl Street, and your brother was out the window. And I called your mother and I said, 'You know that Makoto's out the window here? I'm going to go get him.'" And my mother said, "What? Again?" [Laughs]

LH: So my grandmother lasted a year and left.

BN: Now, was your mother, was she working outside the house at this point, even with two little kids?

LH: No, I don't know what she was doing. But my family is like, it's a very unique family. And I don't know, I always think about my parents, I always thought that maybe they made a mistake marrying before they went, because it was like they never seemed to quite fit in some ways. Although I read these letters, and they were just like, it's amazing, it was really great to find those letters and find out how attached they were to each other. Because they fought for their whole lives, practically. [Laughs] I don't know, they were not very good parents in the sense that they just didn't really pay attention to us. That was all the aunties' observations, like, "Poor Lynne and Bruce, they never learned anything from their parents, they're completely undisciplined." Which is probably true, and probably why my life is so non-normative, I don't know. Well, that and the combination of Denver. I was thinking about that since you started asking me about my early childhood in Denver and growing up in Denver.

BN: And at a certain point from Pearl Street, you moved to...

LH: I'm sorry, yeah. Then we moved to Race Street. 2586 Race Street. So that was interesting because I have to thank my parents, because they would always look at school districts in order to decide where to buy a house. So we were on the outer edge of the school district, right? So it was a mile and a half to University Park elementary school, but one of the best elementary schools in the city. So I got the best public school education this way. That one is like, University Park elementary school, I was put in one of the first AP classes in the country in fourth grade. And from then on, I was with this sort of elite group of kids. We didn't, of course, understand what was going on. We sort of did, we sort of thought we were better than the rest of them. But we didn't really know what was going on, we were just moving through these classes.

BN: But your parents were very conscious of moving to places just to have this?

LH: Yeah. So then from there, so that was part of my childhood, these walks back and forth to school, they were very long walks. Or even... and that was just sort of my parents, they were very hands-off parents. Like I remember snow five feet up, and I remember looking up at these snow drifts and my mother's going, "You're going to school today." I'm like, "No, there's snow outside." And she sent me, and I remember getting all the way to the school, and there were two kids there. There was me and what was her name, Marilyn, who lived across the alley from the school, and those were the only two people at the school, right? And then I had to walk back. [Laughs] So I don't know what my parents were doing, but I was kind of on my own as a kid, too. There was, I'm just looking back on it now, I'm figuring out there was a lot of sibling (rivalry), well, my brother would really exclude me from a lot of things and didn't want to have anything to do with his little sister kind of thing. So I ended up just playing by myself for a lot of time, I guess until I went to school. And then, of course, I made friends at school, it was a little bit different.

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