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BN: And then at this point, since you raised that about your mom. Can you tell me a little bit about just how and what your parents were in terms of their personalities and interests? Sounds like your mom was kind of creative and had the flower arrangement, did the flower arrangement and sewing and so forth. And your dad, I know, was -- had some martial arts training.

SH: So, well, my mother, I think, you know, to this day -- and I know this sounds prejudicial -- I think my mother was really an extraordinary person. I think the experience of being so deracinated, coming here, etc., being in the camps, you know, my mother hated being called a Jap. I think that, like a lot of women, she survived better than my father. I don't think he survived very well at all. She realized -- and this is where the sewing comes in handy -- I think she realized when my father started gardening in L.A. that they needed more income. And so she worked three jobs. She had three children; she made all my father's clothing, etc., our clothing. And, you know, being a Japanese housewife, not only did she make dinner, but she made breakfast and obento, and sent my father off to work. But then she went and started working in the fashion district, in garment factories. And she did that for years. And she got -- well, she was good at it anyway, but she got to the point where she just couldn't sew on the Singer anymore, so she bought, you know, an industrial-sized sewing machine for her own use. She was -- she had a wonderful eye. We loved to go shopping, and she had a great sense of aesthetics. And I'm very insecure about a lot of things in life, but I'm not insecure about my sense of aesthetics. I get that from my mother. And I remember taking her to the Norton Simon Museum garden. I was just astonished. She knew all those plants; she knew all the Latin names, and then she'd say, "Oh, I don't know this one." So she was an extremely -- I don't know -- accomplished person. She had a great sense of humor. I remember one year there was this film from Japan, Okoge, about Japanese homosexuals, and I took my mother to that movie. And I told my friends and they said, "You took your mother to see that film?" Well, it didn't faze her, you know. She had this great black sense of humor that you see in certain Japanese films, and I think that was her saving grace because she lived an extraordinarily hard life here. And her father, years later, met Moriso, the guy, the uncle who owned the grocery store and his wife when they visited him (in Hiroshima). And he wrote my mother this letter and said, "I'm sorry; you must have had a very hard life." Because he met that woman and he knew that my mother had to put up with, you know, an extraordinary . . . . Well, she looked after their four kids at that moment, and she'd been very exploited. And I think she had a lot of difficulty, but she never lost that crazy sense of humor of hers.

And my father is -- it's harder to recall him because I don't think I understood until my sister was diagnosed very late in life -- and I mean in her sixties -- that he really actually had bipolar disease. And my mother said that he wasn't like that but he became increasingly so, you know, after the war. He lost his brother in the atom bomb blast, and it was the brother he was closest to. That brother and his wife unfortunately went into Hiroshima the morning of the explosion, and they were horribly burned and disfigured. And her mother, well, her sister, Kikumi, ran across their bodies as they lay dying in a school. And so her mother brought them home -- to her home, and she said, "Oh, no!" She just used up her good ofutons and had to throw them out. But then they wanted to die in their own home, so she made sure they were transported back. But I think that experience really broke my father. That and, you know, it was an accumulation of events that he experienced, and I think at a certain point he just cracked up. And you know that Janice Tanaka film, Who's Going to Pay for These Donuts, Anyway? And the definition of, well, who decides who's mentally ill and who's not? I could so -- you know -- I knew when I saw that film -- I wrote a little bit about it. It really rang home.

BN: There's also the classic Hisaye Yamamoto story, "The Legend of Miss Sasagawara."

SH: Oh, I've read about that but I've never actually read that….

BN: You've also written that afterwards, I think your mom, right, was constantly sending material goods to relatives?

SH: Well, she couldn't go back to Hiroshima. You know years later I asked her, "Would your life have been better had you stayed there?" And she said, yes, she thought so. Well, I met her father and her mother. I met her whole family when I went to Japan the year before I went to graduate school, and then I've been back twice. I have to say, my mother and father's family are like oil and water. My mother's family is just, you know, very warm and welcoming, very generous, etc. My father's family is very repressed and you know. So anyway, I'm sorry, I'm rambling. What were you asking now about…?

BN: About your mom sending material goods back to Japan.

SH: Oh, yes! Yeah, my sister once commented about that. She said, you know, she stood in endless lines in Amache -- meals, etc. And then she came out . . . she stood in endless lines in the post office. Because she wrote home and everyone said, "Don't come back here, there's no food, there's nothing." So I remember for many years -- we would be -- and she would -- I would be packing all these boxes, you know, sugar, cans of Crisco, candy, yardage, etc., notions, etc. And she was . . . . And I would be writing on a card and what was the value, etc. And she would be sending these packages, and I went back to Japan and everybody said how much they relied on those packages. And she was mailing those packages home regularly.

BN: Did that -- I mean, did that create any sort of hardship for your family?

SH: You know, my mother never thought of hardship in those terms. I mean years later my cousin Yukio comes out here, and it's like she had another child all of a sudden. She had to take him shopping, buy him clothes. And he went off to graduate school; she was sending him money. And I'm thinking, "Well, wait a minute, hasn't she done enough? Why does she have to take care of him, too?" But she was always like that. I looked upon -- I wrote about that in that -- there's a book -- you have a couple of pieces in it, too -- about the Japanese American family. And I wrote about my own very ambivalent feelings about Japanese womanhood, especially in the films of Ozu.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.