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BN: Okay. Now, I'm going to continue on this in a bit. I want to back up a little bit just to, kind of, finish off the camp stuff because I know you don't have firsthand memories of this. And you said they didn't talk about it. But did you ever learn later more about what they did at Amache, or if they worked?

SH: No, you know, I never learned very much at all. But here's where I wanted to interpolate my story about my English. I assumed that when my parents went to Amache that they were very marginalized . . . [Interruption] And I remember this very kind woman named Mrs. Nabeshima who befriended my mom. She was from Japan and she spoke Japanese. And years later, (when I'm) on my first trip to Japan, I met her in Kamakura. And then she came back to this country because it didn't work out there. But I must have grown up among Japanese kibei who didn't speak English very well, so that I didn't speak English at all. And in my first year of school in Long Beach, the school administrators wanted me to repeat first grade because I wasn't conversant. At that point in the Coachella Valley -- what I remember in second grade in Coachella Valley is -- I distinctly remember learning how to read and write. I have pictures of my teachers from back then. And suddenly, you know, I just acquired English and I went through the second and third grade readers and I skipped a grade so that I went from second to fourth grade. And it's interesting to me that, to this day, I'm not very fluent in Japanese and that's the only language that I knew as a child. And so, you know, it's a heritage that I've lost.

BN: I've heard from many Sansei even and Nisei who have that same story. My wife was like that. Japanese was her first language. She was raised by her grandmother, and then it's gone at a certain point. Yeah. The other thing I wanted to ask you was -- I know in camp you had -- your younger siblings, I believe, were born.

SH: Yes. In fact, my parents said they couldn't leave the camp because my brother was born in July 1945. So my mother had to -- had to have a child before she could leave camp. But I don't recall very much. You know, I do have this theory though, and I'm jumping ahead. But, you know, there is this field called epigenetics now, in which it's argued that adults who experience extreme trauma have DNA changes that they then pass on to their children. And I've always wondered if I'm somewhat different from my two siblings because I was not conceived or born in the camp, although I spent my childhood there.

BN: Yeah. No, that's interesting.

SH: You know -- because of the three of us -- it was years because I went further than they did and finished my doctorate-- it was years before I understood that really they were brighter than I was. I don't know numbers at all. My brother was a grad assistant in stat in college, and my sister graduated Phi Beta Kappa and turned down a fellowship to Berkeley. And I often wondered, you know, why did I go further in postgraduate work? And I'm wondering if that wasn't, you know, if they have a different set of genes on account of having been conceived and born in the camps.

BN: Under such stressful circumstances.

SH: Exactly. I mean, I don't understand if you didn't have mass psychosis, I don't know what you had. I mean all that stress must have generated a lot of mental distress. There are all those stories about how fathers who spent time in the camps died in their sixties and so on and so forth. So there had to be extreme mental breakdowns, whether people talked about them or not, or experienced them or not, or, you know, were articulate about them or not. I think that that happened, and I think that kept the Japanese American generations from really fulfilling their potential.

BN: And then I also wanted to ask you about Lomita, the trailer park, because I know you had a photograph of the family there.

SH: Oh, yes. This is a photograph in which you can see the trailer and the car. And my sister and I -- well, there's my father, with my brother, and here's what I've always been amazed by. My sister and I are wearing gingham dresses with white collars, and we have two dolls with gingham dresses; they all match. And I'm wondering, where did my mother get the fabric? I mean, you know, she had a certain sense of what was correct, I think. I think she had been brought up like that. But I can't help but thinking that this is like pounding a square peg into a round hole; it just doesn't fit anymore--not folks who are American, not being Japanese American.

<End Segment 4> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.