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BN: So going back to your parents, how did they feel about your path in life, become more of an activist and getting involved in all these political things? And you said they were largely apolitical.

MM: Well, you know, my parents, I think, again, not unlike many immigrant parents, their children were their life, or lives. And I think... you know, in retrospect, I'm sure it's been very difficult. Because while on the one hand, I mean, I recognize things like the fact that they worked their asses off. They worked so hard to do better for themselves and their kids. But also I didn't think enough about maybe the insecurities they had about me learning things that they had no idea about, they didn't understand. It's not like arithmetic in elementary school, they can help me with that. But beyond that, I'm learning things. Not even before I got political, just things in society. How to navigate various systems of government or transportation, all these kind of things, how to make a reservation at a restaurant, a lot of mundane things. I think about maybe they had to second guess themselves a lot to keep up with me. I think they were proud of me for doing well academically, and I think they expected me to have sort of the traditional path of whatever I ended up being, like a doctor, lawyer, engineer. I was an engineering major when I first got to UCLA, like many other Sansei guys were. But anyway, interesting, though, as I became more political, and I was very open about what I thought was going on and other things. They were very, I would say, I don't know if they were open but they were not resistant, they tried to support me. In fact, in that Asian Americans for Peace rally that we did, that I spoke of earlier, I wanted to get some signs and some buttons made, and I wanted them to be in kanji, in the Chinese characters. So I had my father do the brush calligraphy of peace, heiwa, and love, ai, and I made buttons out of them. And they would support me because I wanted them to do that for me in that way. And I think, like I remember even like when I worked on Gidra, like day and night, sometimes they would bring me lunch or dinner to the office. And people, other people would say, "Hey, what's this? Your parents sure are nice," that kind of thing. So I feel very blessed to have had that kind of relationship with them. And I think over time, as my profile, and I guess I settled down a little bit, and I did accomplish certain things that I wanted to do, so I think they were proud of that.

And I would say for... my dad passed away earlier, but my mom in later stages, she followed the news, she would discuss it with me, she would discuss it with me, she would have points of view sometimes I'd disagree with. But a lot of times she had embraced what I had been saying for years. And, for example, this is a small example, but when my parents first registered to vote in the '50s, they said they signed up as Republicans because FDR is the one that signed Executive Order 9066 and he's a Democrat, so the Republicans must be better. But over time, like we talked about that, and years later, it became Nixon and Reagan. So they reregistered, both of them became Democrats. And I was way beyond being a Democrat by that time, but I was happy that they were trying to be, I was kind of framing their perspectives around what I thought to solve. And then towards the end, like my mom passed away four years ago, and so she was very aware of Trump by then, and she hated Trump, you know, like that kind of thing. So I don't know what the experience of many other immigrant parents are. I think some of them were more hard-nosed and insistent on a path that they had determined for their kids.

BN: You read a lot about those stories, yeah.

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