Densho Digital Repository - Amy Uyematsu Interview I

Densho Digital Repository
Densho Visual History Collection
Title: Amy Uyematsu Interview I
Narrator: Amy Uyematsu
Interviewers: Brian Niiya (primary); Valerie Matsumoto (secondary)
Location: Culver City, California
Date: December 1, 2022
Densho ID: ddr-densho-1000-523

<Begin Segment 1>

BN: We are here on December 1, 2022, and we're very pleased to be interviewing Amy Uyematsu. We're doing this remotely, and the interviewers are Valerie Matsumoto and me, Brian Niiya. Dana Hoshide is in the background doing the technical support for this. And thank you so much, Amy, for joining us, and let's go ahead and get started. So the first set of questions that we wanted to ask you about were kind of the legacy of the wartime incarceration on your family, and kind of your family's... a little of maybe the prewar history and what happened to them during the wartime incarceration. For readers of your poetry, snippets of the family history turn up frequently, so I think it would be great to get some background. We did interview your mother, Elsie Uyematsu Osajima, which is in the Densho archive and UCLA collective memories. That was also a collaborative interview. So interested viewers or readers can refer to that for more detail on your other side. So I wondered if you could maybe start with your father's side, the Uyematsu side, to begin with.

AU: Okay. The Francis Uyematsus, there were two of them. My grandfather and my dad was also Francis Uyematsu. And Grandpa had a very successful nursery in Montebello. Really, really successful, to the point of my dad would say some of the other Nisei kids would beat him up because he was driven to school and had on fancy clothes. This was during the Depression. So Grandpa's nursery did quite well. When Executive Order 9066 occurred, like many Issei, what are you going to do with your house, with the property, with your businesses, that type of thing? And so in Grandpa's case, he had to -- well, he was able to sell three hundred thousand of his camellias to Manchester Boddy, who was the newspaper mogul and who owned Descanso Gardens. So I guess you could say that the impact of the camps really had a direct bearing right away in that those camellias ended up in Descanso Gardens with Boddy. And for many years, Descanso Gardens would say that Boddy paid a fair price for the camellias. And I know from my family, from my dad, I've never heard that. He'd always said that Boddy got the plants really cheap. And interestingly, research has been done more recently by Wendy Cheng, an Asian American scholar, and she's been able to document the fact that Boddy did get a really good deal on those camellias, and they form a substantial part of the present camellia forest at Descanso Gardens.

So anyway, the Uyematsus were supposed to go to Heart Mountain. I think a lot people in East L.A. and Montebello went to Heart Mountain. And again, this is where the nursery comes in. (...) Paul Bannai, who was quite active in the JA community, even as a young Nisei, he already had a job at Manzanar. And he and Dad were friends, so Dad and Paul came up with an agreement that in exchange for the Uyematsus, being sent to Manzanar instead of Heart Mountain, Grandpa would donate cherry trees and I think wisteria plants to Manzanar. So that's how the Uyematsus ended up at Manzanar. And, of course, Grandpa was much happier about that because he was that much closer to his nursery in Montebello. Manzanar would have been the closest camp to Montebello. Anyway, that's how we ended up at Manzanar.

<Begin Segment 2>

BN: Okay, so I wanted to also ask about, a little bit about what happens after the war and kind of how your parents and the families left camp, the respective camps they were in.

AU: Okay. Before the war was over, many Nisei were able to get permits to leave their camps to attend college, I think often with the help of organizations like the Quakers or different Christian groups. So that was also the case for both my parents. Mom's brothers, Dick and Bill, ended up at University of Nebraska in Lincoln, and eventually they brought over Mom. Mom went to Doane college and Grandma and Grandpa ended up also at Lincoln and the youngest in the family, Helen, they were all there. Dad was there and met Mom's brothers, and through them, he met Mom. And he immediately fell for my mother, who, as you know, is a very beautiful woman, and they ended up getting married. And I believe they were the first Japanese American couple to get married in Pasadena. I think it was an article in the Star-News, something to that effect. Now once the war was over, Mom's father, Grandpa Morita, who had had really a pretty successful grocery store business, he used to drive a truck and bring groceries to Japanese American families in the San Gabriel Valley. He lost that, and like many Issei, he had to turn to gardening, and gardened for many years until he retired. In Dad's case, the nursery had been under supervision of a Caucasian man, I don't remember his name, but I do know my dad said they're pretty sure he mismanaged the nursery, may have stolen some things. And so once they were out of camp, Grandpa, I think, basically turned the nursery business over to my dad who was the oldest son, and that's a tradition in Japanese families. Unfortunately, Dad was not a good businessman, and Star Nurseries never did that well again, not like before the camp years. It did last maybe (thirty) years, but like I said, it was a struggle. One of the things that occurred in our family that we talk about a lot is the fact that Grandpa had acquired property, not just in Montebello, but in Sierra Madre and in Manhattan Beach. The Manhattan Beach property, they kept selling in groups of acreage to various people and also to the Manhattan Beach Unified Schools (through eminent domain). And supposedly, they had to use that money to pay off bills or debts for the nursery. But what Grandpa had built up as far as the nursery and having all this landholdings just kind of disappeared.

[Interruption]

BN: Okay. As a follow up question, I wanted to get a sense of how well, or how much interaction did you have with your grandparents as you were growing up after the war?

AU: We had more frequent contact with my mother's family even though both families were nearby. What really helped as far as, from my generation's standpoint, is that her father spoke fluent English. So out of our four grandparents, he was the only one that really could communicate easily with us. And my parents never tried to have my sister and me learn Japanese, so we really weren't able to talk too much to the other three grandparents. But the families would get together pretty regularly on my mother's side, the Morita side. Less with the Uyematsus, but we saw them, too.

BN: So you were among the lucky Sansei who didn't have to go to Japanese school, it sounds like?

AU: I always thought I was unlucky because my folks were, you know, there's a spectrum in the Nisei of those that are more Americanized and less Americanized. They were way on the end of more Americanized, so they didn't really pass much on as far as customs, any kind of customs to us, very few.

<Begin Segment 3>

BN: Did your parents or grandparents or other family members talk much about their World War II experience to your generation as you were growing up?

AU: My parents talked about it, I think maybe more than some of my Sansei friends' parents. Not a whole bunch, but enough for me to understand that for my mother, I remember she talked about how awful it was to have to get on the train in Pasadena and leave town in the train. I think they pulled the shades down and go to whatever assembly center she was sent to. So she talked about that, but she also talked about how much fun she had in camp. Because she was a high school junior or senior and was able to have a really active social life. So I would hear her talk about that quite a bit, the good times she had at camp. My dad... later on, I did try to interview my father maybe in the 1980s with a little tape recorder, that seems so old fashioned now. Unfortunately, I never was able to finish it, but I was able to hear more stories about the Uyematsu family and the camps from Dad, from doing that. And one of the things that he mentioned more than once was the sadness he had that his sister Alice, who maybe was a couple years younger than him, she got tuberculosis at Manzanar and she never survived. And so he would say how he always thought she never had a chance to experience being a young woman. My grandfather, it's funny, my Grandpa Morita, who spoke good English, very talkative, would have a lot of conversations, but I don't recall him ever talking about camp with me.

Oh, you know, I just thought of this, too. I know my parents must have talked some about camp because when I was in Pasadena High School as a senior, I was in a civics class. And I brought up the topic of camps to my teacher and classmates, and I was just really, really hurt because many of the kids in the class would not believe me that that the camps had ever occurred. Because in those days, this is, what, 1965 it would have been, we weren't in the textbook. And so they just thought, well, Amy's just saying this, where's the proof? So we've come a long way from that.

BN: Yeah, that's something. But do you know about how old you were when you first heard about this or when your parents first talked about it? I guess your mom, mostly?

AU: I don't know. I'm thinking maybe more in my teens, but I'm not really sure. I've got a pretty bad memory. In fact, one reason I write poetry is because my memory is so bad. I write poetry and I keep journals, because I know I have a bad memory.

BN: Just to follow up on that, how does that work? How do you feel that the poetry addresses that you feel like you don't have a good memory?

AU: Sometimes I can get things I've experienced written down through a poem. Like in 30 Miles From J-Town, I was able to talk about some of my experiences growing up. And if I hadn't written those poems, I'm curious whether I'd remember some of the details that ended up in those poems. I'm not sure.

BN: So you feel like the act of writing kind of brought these memories forward, sort of?

AU: Maybe, yeah, I'm not sure. "Before I forget this, I want to get this down."

BN: Looking back now, how do you feel like your family's incarceration experience affected the family dynamics, the family history? Aside from the obvious things, that your parents likely may not have even met, but how do you think it affected even the way that you and your sister were raised, for instance?

AU: Well, I kind of group our experience as being really assimilationist, really assimilating. And so I think the impact the camps had on my parents at least was that we really need to be assimilated into American society, and we were raised in a predominately white neighborhood. And I was always envious of Sansei that I met later, as I got older, that grew up in neighborhoods where there were concentrations of Japanese Americans. So it seemed like my family was one of those that assimilated.

BN: And you think that might have had something to do with that World War II experience?

AU: I think so. You know, also they're not having us go to Japanese school, speak good English, right? I think it did have an effect.

BN: Did your parents speak Japanese themselves?

AU: Yeah, a little bit. I don't think my mother's Japanese was as good as my dad's, because his was pretty good. In fact, I think his was good enough that when he got drafted in the army, they wanted him to join the units of Nisei they used as translators, and he didn't want to be sent to the Pacific, because there was a high casualty rate of Nisei being sent to the Pacific. So I don't know how he did it, but he was a talker. [Laughs] And maybe he talked his way into this, I don't know. But he became a cook, and he was a cook at whatever army base he was at. And he was able to do that rather than serve as a translator.

BN: Definitely better for your chances of survival, unless you're a really bad cook, I suppose.

AU: But you know, too, what's interesting is that, in some ways, because we were raised in a white environment, it kind of pushed me more toward wanting to know more about my heritage. And, of course, because I was experiencing so much racism, that also played a big part. I've sometimes wondered if the Sansei I know that grew up in the neighborhoods like Crenshaw and Gardena, whether they had the same kind of anger as I had growing up kind of isolated in Sierra Madre and Pasadena.

<Begin Segment 4>

BN: How do you feel your views of the World War II, the incarceration history, both your families kind of in general, how have they evolved over time?

AU: Well, I've learned... besides getting a little more detail from talking to my dad and my mom, bits and pieces here and there. The larger thing is I have such pride in being Japanese American and knowing the kind of courage and the dignity that the Issei and Nisei and a few Sansei who were babies. But what they showed when they were in camp, and the communities they were able to build despite everything being taken away from them. So I'm just really very proud of being Japanese American. I think I come from a strong, strong heritage. And also, over the years, I've learned more about some of the acts of resistance which I find really inspiring, too. Like the "no-no boys," or even hearing about the Manzanar fishing club, how people at Manzanar would escape camp, they'd get past the guards and they'd go sneak out and go fishing and then come back. To me, that was even a form of resistance.

The other thing I feel really strongly about, because the conditions in this country and the racial environment just don't seem to get better -- maybe some would say they're even worse -- is the importance of bringing up the camp experience in our history and letting people know about it. We have to keep doing it, we just have to. So I think that's a part of what I've learned, too, from the camps.

BN: Do you or your family go to, like, pilgrimages and days of remembrance, that kind of thing?

AU: Not regularly, but we've been to some days of remembrances. I finally went to Manzanar maybe around 2018, '19 for the first time, and I really enjoyed that pilgrimage. I had hoped to go with my uncle Sam who was just a little boy in camp. And we had talked about driving up to Manzanar together, but unfortunately he passed before we had a chance to do that.

BN: Okay. And I think we'll revisit some of these themes when we talk about some of your poetry because there's so much of it, so many poems are sort of inspired, seemingly, by some of these events.

<Begin Segment 5>

VM: Thank you very much. I think the segue here will be that you're talking about how you were very much impacted by growing up in a racist environment and that is reminding me of how the Japanese American youth, the Nisei before the war were very much impacted. And so one of the things they did was to form their own clubs and sports groups, and to have their own activities, because they were so often excluded, particularly in places like Pasadena, right? And, of course, this exclusion didn't automatically end, and some of the hostilities certainly continued after the war, as we know. I'm very interested in asking about your experiences with the Theta Kappa Phi sorority, which was the second Asian American sorority founded at UCLA. I think it was founded in 1959, and I understand that you joined after you entered UCLA in 1965. And the very first was the Chi Alpha Delta, which I think was founded in 1929. So I was wondering how you decided to join the Thetas as opposed to, perhaps, the Chi Alpha Deltas?

AU: Well, first, let me back up a little bit. Because how I ended up at UCLA even had to do with my reaction to racism. I applied to three UCs, I think, Berkeley, Santa Barbara and UCLA, and also to SC. I was accepted at all the colleges, but the reason I chose UCLA was because I figured I'd have more of a social life because there was a sizeable number of Japanese Americans attending UCLA at that time. So Theta Kappa Phi was one way for me to try to have a social life. So in Pasadena there was no interracial dating. I'd had girlfriends tell me that, "Oh, so-and-so's interested in you but he won't ask you out because you're Japanese," things like that. I was kind of starved for social life and not a very intelligent reason for picking a university, but that was how I ended up at UCLA and joining Theta Kappa Phi. Now why pick Thetas over the Chis, I don't know. They had these rush activities and they tried to charm you, and so all I can think of is maybe there were a couple of women in Thetas that charmed me more than in Chis, I'm not sure. But I ended up in Thetas, as did Karen Ito, by the way. She and I were in the same pledge class.

VM: Is that where you became friends, then? Is that where your friendship developed?

AU: That's where I met Karen, yeah. And it's just so ironic, well, interesting that she ended up, she and May Chen were the first instructors of the Asian Women's class. I think maybe in '72, '73, the first class UCLA offered, that was Karen Ito. And then there was me, I mean, we both ended up being pretty political, even though Thetas was not a political group at that time. I don't know what's like now, but it was all social and I figured it was the easiest way for me to meet boys. [Laughs]

VM: So tell us more about that. What were the social activities like? You said that in your "Mountain Movers" essay, you said that you spent more time in sorority activities than your studies. So tell us about some of these social activities.

AU: The sorority had dances, and then I would also go to dances given by other groups, other sororities. So there were dances, the sorority had other internal activities. But it's interesting, I was only kind of into the sorority the first couple of years at UCLA. And then the antiwar movement was getting stronger and stronger on campus, and so that started pulling me away really from wanting to attend sorority things. And my junior year I kind of really pulled back quite a bit, and by the senior year, I don't think I was going to anything with Thetas.

VM: Were you still, were there other Thetas like Karen, though, who were also being pulled into these activities?

AU: You know, I think Karen might have been active the whole time, I'm not sure. I just know that I used to spend time at Powell Library, is where a lot of the Japanese American kids would hang out. And so I'd go there supposedly to study, but people are just kind of looking at each other and checking each other out. [Laughs] I didn't get much studying done.

VM: So did your sorority... so was the sorority mainly Japanese Americans when you were in it? Were there also other Asian Americans like Chinese Americans who were in the Thetas?

AU: We had a few non-Japanese Americans, because at that time, I think we were very reflective of the Asian American population at UCLA, which was mostly Japanese Americans at that time. This doesn't include foreign students, right? Now if you go to Theta events, I think Japanese Americans might be more of a minority and there would be many more Koreans and Chinese, Vietnamese women.

VM: There seems to be a continuing kind of friendly rivalry between the Chis and the Thetas even today, and I'm just wondering if that was the case when you joined. How did the Thetas sort of differ or perceive themselves as different from the Chi Alpha Deltas?

AU: I don't know. [Laughs] I'm sorry, I don't know. Have you heard anything? Because I know you've done some research on different groups.

VM: I will tell you after the interview. [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 6>

VM: So the most famous Theta is probably Janice Mirikitani. Did you know her? Did you meet her through being in the sorority?

AU: She had graduated before I came in, because she was in the initial group that started Thetas. So I found out about her when I began to be interested in poetry and the Asian American Movement. And so I found out about her as well as Lawson Inada, and so they were the two Japanese American poets I really, really admired.

VM: So you found out about her and Lawson outside of your sorority activities?

AU: Outside of it, definitely.

VM: So you didn't know that she was a sorority member?

AU: I found out, but I'm not sure... when I first started reading her poetry, I don't think I knew she was a Theta at that time. I'm not exactly sure when I found out she was in Thetas. But like I said, I've got a bad memory. [Laughs]

VM: Do you remember if, in the years that you were active and hanging out at Powell Library, did the Thetas hold joint events with, for example, the Asian American fraternities?

AU: I think those fraternities were just starting up. I don't remember any joint events, but like I said, I became less active, too, in my junior and senior year. Now I'm guessing they do have joint activities, but I haven't really kept up with Thetas as an organization, just with certain Theta alumni.

<Begin Segment 7>

VM: Well, let's actually talk more about Karen, because I'd really love to hear more about this first Asian American Women class that was taught and that you actually also co-taught with Karen. Could you tell us about that?

AU: Well, gee. Now I'm wondering if I'm getting my classes confused. I believe she taught a class with May Chen, that was the first class. The one I was involved in was the second class Karen co-taught. Karen and I submitted the proposal for it, but really, we were representing and entire collective of women that had been studying together. People like Vivian Matsushige, who was on staff at the Study Center. And so our whole little collective taught the class, tried to teach the class. So that was kind of interesting because, you know, you're dealing with not just one or two instructors but with this whole group of people that wants to have a say-so on what's going to happen in class.

VM: Can you remember some of the particular important issues that arose, or what it was like being an instructor at that time?

AU: I don't remember what it was like being an instructor, but the issues for us were always triple jeopardy. As Asian American women, we felt we needed to talk about racism, sexism and economic exploitation. And I'm trying to think. It might have been in the Women's Studies class, but I remember being in a class where we were really hard on some of the white male students in the class, there were a couple, and I think we came down really hard on them. [Laughs] In those days, right, we were so, "This is what we want to say."

VM: I'm sure it was an eye-opening experience.

AU: For them, yeah.

VM: So what did, how did you put together materials? I mean, being a teacher is so hard now, trying to figure out what materials would work, but I can't imagine back then when there were so few things. How did you come up with stuff to use in class?

AU: I think we did what a lot of those early classes were using. We used Gidra. Gidra was a huge source. The Berkeley women under Emma Gee had put out Asian Women, so we used that book, too. And then, of course, we used books like Sisterhood is Powerful, was out at that time. And then you just kind of scrounge around for anything you can find that might relate to your topic. It's so different now, huh?

VM: It must have been very energizing for the students. Do you remember how they responded?

AU: No, I don't remember.

VM: Was it a positive experience for you teaching this class?

AU: Yeah, it was positive. It was definitely positive. Though it was also complicated, because in those days, a lot of us were affected by Marxist-Leninist thinking. We were reading, also our study group was reading works by Lenin about women, and so I think we were pretty hard on ourselves. We would do self evaluation at the end of the course, and this was true in a lot of the organizations, too, you always do criticism/self-criticism. And I do kind of remember that, that we'd really, kind of like, okay, what did we do right, what did we do wrong? And I'm not sure if there's that kind of emphasis nowadays by instructors, I don't know. Is there? Do you do that kind of self-evaluation?

VM: Our students evaluate us. They let us know what they think at the end of every quarter. So you also mentioned these other classes or these other things that were going on simultaneously when you were involved with the Asian American Studies Center that was beginning. And you mentioned your involvement with the Asian American Student Alliance. Could you tell us about that?

AU: Yeah. We organized, I think as our own campus group fighting the war in Vietnam. And so we were called AASA. We put out a newsletter. I think we had some big event at the Sunset Center with, gee, I think we got someone pretty major, like maybe Chris and Joanne, or someone pretty big at that time. But it was mainly, AASA, mainly we did a lot of studying. We were studying capitalism, anti-imperialism kind of works, discussing them.

VM: And is this -- oh, go ahead.

AU: No, no. I was also thinking that some of us had connections, like I was working at the center, and some of our other members would hang around the center a lot. So there was a lot of crossover between what was going on at the study center and AASA.

VM: That's what I was going to ask, so thank you.

<Begin Segment 8>

VM: I was also going to ask you if you could say a little bit about Storefront because I've heard of it, but I don't really know what Storefront was doing, and I know that was also a very dynamic part of this time.

AU: Storefront, I'm trying to remember the years. '73, '74, '72, somewhere in there. Storefront was an organization, we had an actual store front in the Crenshaw neighborhood on Jefferson Boulevard near either Eighth or Ninth Street. And the goal of the group was to serve the local neighborhood and to try to encourage more unity between the Asians that lived there and the Blacks that lived there. We had different programs, youth program on Saturdays, Fridays sometimes we had films or educational entertainment, we put out a newspaper. I remember once we took the kids to a... what do you call it? What are the flowers that bloom in the spring? The poppies, we took them to see the poppies, and these were mainly African American kids that we took. I think our intentions were really good, but the organization itself was largely Asian American, mostly Japanese American, very few Blacks. And we just somehow, I don't think we were able to make the kind of bridges that we'd hoped we could make. And I don't know... well, some of it might have been due to the composition of our group being largely Asian, but also the fact that we were also pretty left-wing, very left-wing. And so I'm not really sure how the local residents responded to our message being that leftist.

VM: So was this... I mean, this sounds like a pretty big involvement for this organization, that's pretty impressive, with all the programming. Was this something that you were all doing when you were students at UCLA, or is this after?

AU: The other members, I think some were going to school, but some were out of school. I was going to grad school at the time. I was working for the study center part time and then going to grad school, and doing the Storefront and doing Asian American Student Alliance, so pretty busy. But that's before I had a kid.

VM: Wow, that's a lot. Perhaps we should move on. Brian, did you want to add anything in there, any other questions, follow up?

BN: Yeah, I have one question about the Asian American Women's class. I'm curious who the students were, I mean, demographically. Was it mostly Asian American students, was there a mixture, and how big?

AU: It was mostly Asian American students, but I don't remember how large the class was.

BN: It just struck me, you're talking about giving while male students a difficult time, if there were a lot of white male students in the class, what type of white male student would take that class? That just made me wonder.

AU: Yeah. I don't remember, I think there were maybe one or two. And I remember feeling kind of bad for them. [Laughs]

<Begin Segment 9>

VM: Maybe I'll just follow up on Brian's question but ask it more about the dynamics of, say, Gidra and the movement. My own students have been looking at Gidra for an assignment, and they were really noticing how heavily Japanese American it was, right? The editors and a lot of the writers. There a few people like Dinora Gie who were contributing, but it's very heavily Japanese American. And is this reflective of the demographics at the time of who was in college, or were there some other kinds of dynamics at play here? Why do you think the ratio was the way it was, the proportions?

AU: I think it represents the demographics of the time because back in the mid-'60s to late-'60s, weren't Japanese Americans the biggest Asian American group population-wise? Yeah, so I think it was more a reflection of that, and also the connection between UCLA and Gidra. Because a lot of the Gidra people were Sansei students attending UCLA. But you also see in those very early Asian American Movement years in L.A., there was also a lot of JAs. But again, I think it's demographics.

VM: Thank you. Brian, over to you.

BN: Just to follow up on that, were you involved at all with Gidra? I know they published some of your pieces.

AU: I wasn't involved with Gidra. I knew people like Mike Murase, but I wasn't involved.

BN: Okay.

AU: I kind of wanted to be, but I tend to be kind of shy socially. And I knew that they would hang out at night and have meetings and this that that. I was kind of shy.

VM: Well, you made a big splash right from the very beginning of Gidra with your "Yellow Power Manifesto" which my students still love.

AU: And that's all because of Mike Murase. Mike Murase was a TA for that first class that Yuji taught, so Mike printed it. But then Mike also printed the three poems that I included at the end of my "Yellow Power" essay. But something was driving me poetry-wise. And in those days, if you look at the Gidra, you can see all these people submitting poems. I mean, a lot of the movement people were writing poems. And I think I've asked this to some other people in other ethnic groups. I think this was happening not just in the Asian American community, but also in the Black and Brown and Native American movements. A lot of creativity going on.

VM: Was this when you started writing poems? Were those your first three published poems?

AU: It was the second time I got published. The first time I got published was my junior year at Pasadena High School. They put out a literary journal called ARTES, A-R-T-E-S, and looking back on it, I can see that maybe I've always been kind of a protester. Because that poem was my telling other teenagers not to be such conformists, because you know, teenagers conform. And so the whole poem was against teenage conformity and the title was "Simon Says." Anyway, that was the first official one, and then the second time I was published was the Gidra articles in '69.

<Begin Segment 10>

BN: So yeah, I guess we'll switch topics now and move forward a few years. I think in the prior interview, you covered a lot of the subsequent time period, your employment at the study center. And then we wanted to now kind of explore a little more your teaching career, your work with the schools. And one thing that I was kind of wondering about was, you had said in the prior interview, I think, that you had majored in math in part to please your father, which I hear all the time, actually, from Nisei and Sansei. That was true with me also. But you ended up teaching math for many years. Did you come to enjoy that, ultimately?

AU: Yeah, I did. I'll give you a little background. My dad had the foresight to see that computers were going to come in a big way. You figure I'm starting UCLA in '65. And I'd always done well on math aptitude tests, and so he was encouraging me toward math. And then like you said, I wanted to please him. And the thing is, I didn't really enjoy the math classes. I hated my classmates -- I didn't hate them, but I disliked them, I didn't feel comfortable. There were very few women and it was mostly white guys. And so here I am, I'm already kind of angry about the racism that I'd experienced and that I'm going into these environments like that, but there was a part of me that just stuck it out because I didn't want to drop it. It may be a pride thing, but I never did that great either in my math classes. I'm surprised I didn't flunk out, but I didn't flunk out. [Laughs] And when I graduated, I actually interviewed with IBM. (...) I made it past all the written tests, and at the oral interview, the guy interviewing me did what I think is not considered legal anymore. He kind of said something to the effect of, "Wouldn't you be happier being a housewife?" And then, of course, they never offered me the job. Anyway, I had my math degree, and it did come in handy because in 1974, I had... well, 1970, I got married, and in '74, we had a son, Chris. A few years down the line, we needed to have two incomes, and so the math really came in handy, my math background, because the public school system is always short of math teachers. Always, still even now. And so I had no problem getting a job as a math teacher. And I ended up teaching with the L.A. Unified Schools for thirty-two years. What else did you ask about?

BN: Did you just start teaching math, or did you have to get some credential, or how did that...

AU: Okay, I'll back up. Back when I was at grad school, I got a Master of Education and I got a teaching credential. Because at that time, gee, so many of the Sansei girls I knew were getting teaching credentials. I mean, that was what you did, you get a teaching credential, so I got one.

<Begin Segment 11>

BN: Where did you spend your teaching career? What schools?

AU: Okay. I started out at Virgil junior high, which is on Vermont near L.A. Community College. Very rowdy school, and I lasted there two and a half years. And I say two and a half because the third year, the first semester, a couple of things happened. I had a young eighth grade gang member, he was in 18th Street gang, come up and talk to me face to face saying, "I'm going to shoot you." Because I was trying to instill some discipline in the class. And then that same, we're pretty sure it was 18th Street gang, slashed a whole bunch of the teacher's tires in the parking lot. And so I decided, you know what? I think maybe I'd rather be in high school than in junior high. Junior high is just kind of crazy, right? So from there, I transferred mid-year to Grant High School in Van Nuys. And I was at Grant for almost twenty years. And then after Grant, I went to Granada Hills, and then I spent my last six years of teaching at Venice High School, which is close to where I live now in Culver City. But people always say, "Why were you commuting so far all those years?" Because I was always on West L.A. or on the west side, but I'd go over the hill to the valley to teach.

BN: What did you tell them when they asked you that?

AU: I didn't have a good reason. Other than, you know, you make friends. Like at Grant High School, I had good friends. Plus, the commute wasn't as bad in those days. Driving has gotten so much worse.

BN: Yes, definitely have noticed that. What did you particularly like or dislike about teaching?

AU: I liked the kids. I always enjoyed the kids, I liked the relationship with them. I enjoyed trying to take math concepts and trying to break it down so they could understand it. So that part of it was fine. The part I didn't like was the administration and the bureaucracy. We have these people that couldn't... the way we looked at it, they couldn't last, survive in the classroom, so a lot of them became math administrators. And then they're dictating to us what we should be teaching and how we should be teaching. And many of us teachers that were right there at the ground level were very resentful of these bureaucrats. Like they would change books on us every couple of years, they would change the direction. The kids didn't have any basic math kills and they'd say, "No, you have to be teaching them this level of math," and they weren't ready for it. So that's my big complaint.

BN: Were there any particularly memorable moments as a teacher, particular students, particular classes or anything over the course of your career that just immediately come to mind?

AU: Well, interestingly, one of my best memories from teaching wasn't a math class. Grant High School let me teach two years of creative writing. And in that class, we put out a school literary magazine two years in a row. So that was really, really enjoyable. Now as far as my regular classes, they were good kids. I got the whole spectrum of kids. I got the kids who couldn't pass the state basic tests, all the way to the kids that are going to be taking calculus as twelfth graders, the advanced kids. So I enjoyed having that diversity among kids. And I would occasionally then incorporate poetry in some of my assignments. Like with Algebra II and Geometry and Trig, I might give them, tell them to write a math poem. Write a math poem that uses some of the terminology of the class. And you'd be surprised at what kids come up with, very creative.

BN: What kind of teacher were you in terms of, on kind of the scale of disciplinarian, strict versus more lenient, easygoing?

AU: I was strict. [Laughs] And I think, in a way, I had to be, because you figure, I'm a small woman, and we would get classes of forty kids in the class. And the discipline problems are just, the potential is huge. So I found that, for me to survive, I had to be strict. I hope they didn't think I was mean, but I was strict. And I know through the grapevine, I heard over the years the kids would say, "She's strict but she's fair, and she knows how to explain things." So I was okay with that reputation. [Laughs]

BN: Are there students that you've kept up with?

AU: Not too many. It's interesting, the one that I've kept up with the most was from the creative writing class, so I guess that kind of makes sense. She was the editor of the literary magazine for two years.

<Begin Segment 12>

BN: Did your prior experience in activism, Asian American Studies and so forth affect your teaching in any way, do you think?

AU: I think it did. I mean, for one thing, I was sensitive to issues of racism when I knew our kids were experiencing that, too. The students were often Latino and Black. Well, the whole mixture, I had a lot of Anglo students, too. I think that the activism did help me have a more open mind to all the kids, whatever their needs were. And I have to say, I have to admit this, though, the kids that I was the least crazy about were the really affluent, spoiled Anglo kids I had at Granada Hills High School. And I tried to do a good job with them, too, but I have to say that among the students, I found that the most obnoxious. I got along well with the gang kids, I did. Even the kid that threatened me, his gang, I remember there was a kid Michael Mares from the same gang, he and I, we got pretty close. It's just interesting, there was something about gang kids that I... I think one reason I was more open to them was I saw the reaction of a lot of the teachers toward them, and a lot of the teachers didn't want to have anything to do with them.

BN: Were most of your colleagues white? Or were there other...

AU: Primarily at that time, yeah. I remember at Grant High School, I'm thinking, I might have been the only nonwhite there for several years. And I was open to teaching the, quote/unquote, the "low kids." And our math chair was white, so he started trying to give me all low classes my entire program. Whereas department chairs are supposed to give you a balanced program, like high, medium and low classes. So I had to speak up for myself and complain because he was pigeonholing me, "Okay, Amy will teach them, so I'll give her all of them."

BN: Were you involved at all in any of the teacher organizing, teacher organizations or unions, politics, as a teacher?

AU: No. I was a UTLA member the whole time. And I participated in the strikes but not active.

BN: I mean, having taught for such a long time, what did you notice in terms of change at both the school level and among the students over time?

AU: Oh, my. Well, from an academic standpoint, the students' basic skills kept dropping and dropping. Not just in math, but their writing skills, their speaking, their English skills, it just kept dropping, which was very sad to see happening. The bureaucracy, as you know, LA Unified has a huge bureaucracy that kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. So a lot of us teachers were not real happy about that situation. Other kinds of things... another thing that I noticed as a trend is a lot of parents would, they would not respect the teachers' authority in the classroom. And if there had been a discipline problem, a lot of times they would say it was the teacher's fault, "not my child," even though the child might have done something very negative. I noticed kind of a shift -- not on all parents, but in some of the parents -- and that was kind of upsetting. Didn't happen to me personally, but I saw it with other people. They'd have meetings in the principal's office, and... well, this made it even worse. The principal would sometimes side with the parent, so everybody was against that poor teacher.

<Begin Segment 13>

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]