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TI: As you were going through Bailey Gatzert, were there any things that made you think that you were different than the other students?

HM: For one thing, they had a policy where if you were underweight, so called underweight, that they would feed you milk. Some of us were lactose intolerant. [Laughs] The nurse at that school -- we had a full time nurse at Bailey Gatzert -- she thought there was nothing like lactose intolerance function. So she insisted that we drink the milk. In my case when I drank the milk... they said I was underweight but I didn't feel that way. But nonetheless they forced me to drink the milk. As a consequence of that, I used to get diarrhea. It completely upset my digestive system. I got to a point where I was losing so much of my ability to use my nutritional capabilities because of the milk problem that I started losing more weight. And so because I was losing more weight, they insisted that I drink more milk and that compounded the problem.

It got to a point where my mother got worried about it and our family doctor says, "No, this can't continue." So I said, I told him that they're making me drink the milk. So he wrote a letter saying that he wants me to stop drinking the milk and that kind of resolved the problem. But that nurse thought that she knew all about medicine and she practiced this milk habit on a bunch of us and we're going through the same process. There were a couple of Chinese kids in there, I remember, that had the same problem. After I got off it, they said, "How come you don't come and drink milk with us anymore?" So I said, "I'm not going to do it anymore. [Laughs] My doctor says it's not the right thing to do." So they got their doctors to send in letters. It kind of changed the whole balance of the system. And I think that helped kind of convince some of the teachers that maybe some of these Asian kids are little bit different.

In terms of what the school thought of us, I had some very good teachers at Bailey Gatzert. They were very honorably intended. They had all the right things to try to get us to do. We were very well disciplined as a result of that and also because of our family upbringing. The teachers were very respectful of what lay in front of us in terms of the future potential. They realized that some of the honor students that they had in previous years going through high school and through university functions, were not given the potential but they thought that eventually this type of treatment would change. And that was the principal, Ada J. Mahon's belief also. So consequently the school itself was driven to help us achieve some degree of excellence.

TI: How did you know, or find out that teachers were tracking Niseis as they went through college and weren't getting jobs? Did you ever have a conversation with them?

HM: Because they would come back to the school and talk about what had happened. When they go to high school, for instance, they would come back to the grade school and they talk about what they've been doing, what their future looks like and all this kind of stuff. And then they would read in the newspapers about what had happened to some of these graduates. They had some community newspapers that would be given to these teachers and they were aware of what was within the prospects of jobs for these individuals. And scholastically they would have the name appear in the Seattle Times as honor students and so forth. Unfortunately, during that time period, we just were not given the opportunity.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.