<Begin Segment 14>

PW: So before we move out of Los Angeles and come to San Francisco, I'm kind of curious, did you feel any changes in Los Angeles around that time, just developing?

PY: Well, just adolescence. Well, the valley is filling in and getting busier and busier. I didn't know why I was discontent, or didn't like it there, but I knew that I wanted out. I didn't know what, out to, but the only horizon I had was kind of the music I was listening to, but that was the only thing that distinguished me from any other kind of suburban, middle class kid. Because I didn't really have a sense of myself as a Japanese American despite my family. I was unsuccessfully trying to fit in to this very, kind of, middle class, mostly white. Like there were no African Americans at this school of over four thousand, just a handful of Chicanos. For many years, I think I was the only Asian American there. And so it's not that I rejected that, I did want to become... but I was very unsuccessful. And so my social home was the Boy Scout troop. And it wasn't until I got up here that I discovered that there was this great diversity among the Japanese American community and a lot of interesting people. I was really fortunate coming up when I came up under the circumstances.

PW: So tell me about it. What year did you arrive?

PY: '67. So I'm just right there on the cusp of everything, having no idea of what any of that stuff meant. So I arrive in San Francisco late summer, early fall of 1967, when the national media had been blowing up about San Francisco and the Haight specifically. But I was really fortunate to go to San Francisco State because it was known as a commuter school, had a much greater diversity of, not just racially, but class-wise. I think one of the reasons why the San Francisco State strike was one of the longest strikes, student strikes in American history was because of that diversity of experience and backgrounds. We had African American leadership that had, some of them had gone through the military, some had gone through the military as well as organized in Alabama and Mississippi during Freedom Summer. There was a lot of community activism among the Chinese and Filipino communities that had been organizing and teaching in Chinatown. So it was a great hub of really conscious Third World activity. And I just stumbled into all that stuff, and it just kind of, with no conscious intention. So you come to San Francisco in 1967 and you just kind of, for me, learning what to live in a city is like.

Even growing up in the suburbs of Los Angeles is... because Los Angeles is so large and the suburban things, you kind of know what you know. You go from point A to point B. I was fortunate I knew a little bit more, because I used to make house calls with my dad. And because of where my parents grew up and where our various family friends were, you got to know a little bit more of Los Angeles, but it was still very limited. But you didn't have the urban experience of being able just to walk around and stumble into stuff the way you do in the city. And that's what happened to me. And just, I think, a key example of that, I'm walking around what eventually became Ghirardelli Square, but still, it was an abandoned chocolate factory at that point with a commercial strip beneath that. There was a little movie theater, there's aquatic park. But anyhow, slightly abandoned, slightly tourist, the cable car ends there. Somebody doesn't know the city, San Francisco specifically, and cities in general, I'm just wandering around there.

I get handed a leaflet by this young woman who I thought was very attractive, and it was a benefit for the Black Panther Party for a screening of the Battle of the Algiers at the Surf Theatre. I didn't know what the Black Panther Party was, I didn't know what the Battle of Algiers was. So I took the leaflet and went to that benefit on the hope of maybe seeing that young woman, which I didn't see, but David Hilliard was there, Bobby Seale was there, large presences of [inaudible], left at that point, was at this event. It must have been shortly after Huey and Bobby had gotten into their difficulties with the Oakland police. And so for a young person just to be able to dip their toes into this, that was an amazing first exposure.

And just to back up a little bit, I'm playing high school B football in high school, I was politically... I was much more politically conservative than my parents. My parents saw very clearly where Vietnam was going, and the American involvement in Vietnam was, they were highly opposed to that. And I was at one point considering enlisting, which obviously upset my parents a great deal. Eventually I didn't do that, but I had friends that I'd played football with who had enlisted. So I had, despite my family background, when I came up here, I had no real disposition about, I didn't think of myself as a liberal, despite all my exposure to all those various music at the Ash Grove, that hadn't changed me or moved my politics at any point. Just a couple people I was acquainted with in high school knew I was going over there, and so they invited me to the Pete Seeger concert, and I thought that kind of, "What the fuck is this shit?"

So it was an amazing, very rapid changing of political views, just the one... to this day, I really can't fully explain it, but I decided that I would not register for 2S (Student Defensemen), and that I would remain 1-A. There again, this is probably, even though I wasn't conscious of coming out of a family background of, particularly my parents, of fairness. I couldn't articulate it at the time, I can barely articulate it now, what seemed unfair just based on class circumstance that I'd be exempt from going to this war, and somebody who was in a different situation would have to go to this fucking war. So anyhow, my parents weren't happy about that either, because they rightly sensed that I didn't know what I was doing. But it was through this whole process that I began to understand, okay, I didn't know what I doing, but that's not actually a bad decision. And what I'm learning with the people that I became acquainted with, that I would, even if I did get drafted, I would be able to kind of resist fight, kind of work the system and not end up in Nam.

PW: When you came to San Francisco, were you already planning to enroll at State?

PY: Yeah, I came up specifically --

PW: Did you have a place to land, or did you just drive the Bel Air down the road?

PY: No, I'd come specifically to go to San Francisco State. Miraculously accepted there, because my SATs were terrible, my GPA from high school was not good. Coming from a middle class Japanese American family, it's like... this is about as big a screw-up as you could have. My plan particularly was so UCLA-centric, UC-centric, just like... they were kind of semi-happy that I was getting to, because I wasn't going to go to junior college, which would have been really, from my mother's point of view, a family disgrace. I was going to school in a city period, any of these, Santa Clara or anything like that. It was nothing against, or any of those schools, because I wanted to be in a city. I wanted to be out of, like, the suburbs. I had no idea what being in a city meant at that point, but it had to be different and better, which it turned out to be really...

PW: Right.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.