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PW: So let's go back to your mom, we're in prewar Boyle Heights. So Executive 9066 was issued, her dad is picked up right away.

PY: Correct.

PW: Did the mother, did her mother have to take care of the kids and get them into camp?

PY: Yeah. So she had to do all that on her own, close down the house, whatever... I assume she had to do the business stuff, too, because there was, you know, he's gone just like that. So they had a big business, and how that was closed down, I actually don't know the specifics for that.

PW: And did you say that they went to Manzanar, your mother's side?

PY: Yes.

PW: Did she ever tell you any stories about that period, that experience?

PY: Not specifically of the camp. The war was pretty traumatic for her. So just in '44, she leaves her mother and her family behind, goes to New York, and fortunately Teri was there. Even by contemporary standards, how she married my dad was pretty remarkable, kind of like a weekend romance just before he ships out. They spent a few months together, she gets pregnant, she had German measles, my older brother was born with a congenital heart, so he's dead within months. And at the same time, my dad's missing his POW, he was captured at the Battle of the Bulge.

PW: Let's back up again quickly about your mother. So when she went into camp, she was already in college?

PY: She was a senior at UCLA, and so she would have graduated that spring. And so she was one of those Japanese Americans who didn't receive their diplomas until fifty years later.

PW: And you said that her family was at Manzanar for about two years, so '42 to '44?

PY: Yeah, they were in there for the duration. Her father rejoins the... and I don't know if he had rejoined by the time, while she was still there, or whether he would join the family after she had left. Because I think she was in Manzanar for about maybe ten months.

PW: And then again, to clarify, she got out and went directly to New York and joined her sister Teri.

PY: Yes. And so like so many of that generation of Niseis, like the Quakers were really immensely influential in helping them get out. Like my Aunt Louise went to Carleton.

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