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BN: Okay. So we are continuing with our interview with Amy Uyematsu. We're again doing it remotely, and it's December the 8th, 2022. I am Brian Niiya, and I'm joined by my co-interviewer, Valerie Matsumoto. And Dana Hoshide with Densho is behind the scenes running the software behind the interview. So thank you again, Amy, so much for coming back. I think we're going to focus mostly on your poetry, but we have some other things we want to kind of pick up from last week. And I thought I'd start with kind of the question or the story that you had referred, because we had talked about to what degree your family talked about camp, and you mentioned something about your grandparents and your son. But anyway, maybe wanted to start with that.

AU: Okay. I'm trying to remember if I already told you. I had started doing a tape biography with my father, so some of the information I got about the Uyematsu experience in camp was on those taped interviews. And actually, some of those stories ended up in poems. But I also remembered that my mother, besides talking about how fun it was to be a teenager in camp, and then she had told me about how humiliating it was, hurtful it was to leave on the train, in more recent years, in her seventies and eighties, she would talk about being given just the twenty-five dollars and a train ticket, which was interesting to see what she was emphasizing at that time. And in her later years, she also did tell me about Grandpa Morita and some of his activities at Gila. So that resulted in a poem also, based on what Mom told me. I wanted to bring in my grandkids because there's a huge contrast between my experience in my high school civics class. No mention of the camps in the books, and my classmates wouldn't believe me. And then go down to my grandson's experience, recent, they both attended Clarendon elementary school in San Francisco Public Unified. And they both were lucky enough to get a Ms. Tanaka for fourth grade, and Ms. Tanaka has written a play about Fred Korematsu. So part of the fourth grade activities is for the kids, the little fourth graders to try out for their parts and then do this play. And both Tyler, my older grandson, and then three years later, Mason, they both played the part of Sansei lawyer Dale Minami, which is kind of cool. And then they actually got to meet him in person because -- it's one of those small world things -- Dale Minami's daughters are a little younger than my grandsons, and they were coming up right there through the same Clarendon elementary school. So I thought that was kind of, very interesting to see the contrast.

[Interruption]

BN: Thanks, that was a great story. The interviews with your, was it both grandfathers? About when were they?

AU: No, I had an interview with my father.

BN: Oh, I'm sorry, your father.

AU: My grandfathers had already passed.

BN: Right, right, okay. But about when was that?

AU: With my dad, I'm guessing maybe in the '80s, the '80s, '90s, and that I never finished.

BN: Okay.

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