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BN: How did being a teacher, did it influence your role as a parent or how you parented?

AU: I have to think about that. [Laughs] Hmm. I should ask my son that question. One thing I've noticed... it's funny, my best friend's also a teacher, and both of us have spouses that say that we can be kind of... oh, they don't use the term bossy, but they mean bossy in terms of we're used to running a classroom. So in that sense, maybe I had a little bit of that carry over toward when I raised my son. That's why I said I'm going to have to ask him.

BN: Ask him, yeah.

AU: I probably won't like what he says.

BN: You mentioned that you enjoyed being able to teach creative writing for a couple of years. Did you ever have any opportunity to teach anything about the Japanese American incarceration subject area? And if not, was that ever taught that you know of in your schools?

AU: I was aware that something was being taught, because kids would carry books like Farewell to Manzanar --

BN: Right, right.

AU: -- with them, so I knew that they were being covered either in English or in their history classes. So that was a good thing. But for me, no, I didn't really have the opportunity to teach them. I'm trying to remember if even just sort of, on days when I might just be talking with the kids if I ever mentioned something, but I don't recall whether I did or not.

BN: Valerie, do you have anything you'd like to follow up on?

VM: I do. This talk about being a parent made me think about this. I was just wondering, since you talked about how you grew up, and how there was very little Japanese American culture in your lives. That you and Mary were not sent to Japanese school, and that you felt kind of really isolated from Japanese American culture. I'm just wondering, what did you introduce your son to? Did you try to encourage him to learn about certain aspects? What things did you teach your son as a parent? Did you teach him things that you didn't have, or did not have and made it difficult?

AU: Well, he knew what my views were, for sure. He knew I'm coming from this movement background, so he was very aware of that and my feelings about racism. I remember when he was little, he himself had not experienced that much racism. And so sometimes we would get into disagreements or arguments about something that had occurred, and I would say that was racism, and he didn't want to see it as that. But over the years I think that changed as he got older and he had more experiences. What else did you ask, Valerie?

VM: I asked if there were... thank you, that was really interesting. Were there any aspects of Japanese American culture that you tried to expose him to? Like food or values or New Year's practices.

AU: You know, our family never really did New Year's like a lot of JA families. I mean, that's how Americanized... the grandparents did New Year's, but my mom never really carried on that tradition for New Year's. But my ex-husband, his family was way more Japanese American in a lot ways. And so Chris got a lot of exposure through his father's family that way. And then also I tried to do things like getting into the Japanese, they had the baseball leagues, used to have baseball, and tried to get him involved in that. Different things like that, so he'd be around other kids. But that didn't pan out. And then he ended up going to a high school where it was predominately white, but it was on a scholarship. He attended Harvard-Westlake, which is a very good school to attend. But interestingly, when he was at Brown, his first year at Brown, he joined the Asian Club there. And then he got the Asian Club, my book had just come out, and he got the Asian Club to invite me to come out and speak. So I mean, okay, so something got in there. And the other thing, too, of course, he's used to having rice every night. I mean, that's something that I grew up with, and Chris was used to having rice every night. [Laughs]

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2022 Densho. All Rights Reserved.