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BY: And so you had Day of Remembrance, you're working on redress, and what kinds of things were you doing at the time?

CH: Well, the first Day of Remembrance was, I want to say, 1979. The first Day of Remembrance in Portland, so it was the second day nationally.

BY: The first one had been in Seattle.

CH: The first one in Puyallup, "Camp Harmony." And it was quite a cathartic event, planning it, organizing it, getting people there, talking to people who hadn't talked about camp until that point. But we had two thousand people attend what was then the Expo Center, still is the Expo Center, but the former Portland Assembly Center, the actual location where about four thousand people from Portland went. We asked people to bring their art that they had from camp, it was a huge exhibit, and they were bringing it up until that day. [Laughs] I was running around doing all the, trying to put the tags on all the artwork. And the governor spoke, the 442 were represented. I remember that the women cooked for everybody, two thousand people, they cooked for everybody.

BY: Wow, at the Expo Center?

CH: Yeah, they served lunch for everybody, and so it was quite amazing, quite inspiring.

BY: It sounds like quite a logistical effort, too, to get all of that organized, and media coverage, I'm imagining?

CH: Yeah, I was always the media person, and I was always in charge of the PR, and that's, I guess maybe a carryover from my Asian American Cultural Center days. But yeah, I don't remember all the details anymore, but it was quite a beautiful thing.

BY: So you were now heavily involved with the Japanese American community around Day of Remembrance and redress. Were you still doing art stuff during that time?

CH: Oh, yeah.

BY: And so what were you doing at the same time?

CH: Well, I was always teaching.

BY: Teaching what?

CH: Dance.

BY: Dance, okay.

CH: When I first came to Portland, the school that my husband went to, I, let's see, came in November, in June, May or June. Well, May, my son was born, but in June I started working at the school that he had gone to, and I decided to teach a dance class after school. So that's when I started, that was the first time that we were in Portland, the first time, yeah, we were in Portland. So I always studied, still studied dance. But started my own dance class, which was, when I think back on it, it was like, wow, I made my own flyer, I went around school kind of promoting my class, and I even would go to pick kids up, take them home, whatever I had to do to make the class work. I had talked to my teacher back in Iowa, she was still alive, and she was very encouraging for me to teach classes and carry on.

BY: So you must have been extremely busy at this point in your life. You had kids, you were involved in Japanese community activities, you were teaching dance, what was life like then for you?

CH: I don't remember all the details, I think I blocked it out. [Laughs] I think I've just always been busy. I mean, I don't think of it as busy, I just think of it as living. But I took classes at the art museum school, I always loved sculpture. And so I studied that at the U of O too, in high school. So when I got to college, that was the one class. I think it's because dance and theater were so amorphous to me, like I just wanted that tangibility of having a soapstone sculpture, you know, or a piece of wood that I could... even if it wasn't something grand, I would just put it on the shelf and look at it from time to time.

BY: And you also are a poet. So when did you start writing poetry?

CH: I think I always have. And I don't know if it's... I like to put words together, I guess is how I think about it. And then it was probably when I came back to Portland. It was... so during redress, we didn't know that's what we were doing. Because there were just all these different efforts, it wasn't just, let's get this bill passed and let's move it through, it's like, well, maybe we should go this way and maybe we should, Bill Hohri's in Chicago and he's doing litigation. There's all these different efforts. And so it wasn't until really the leadership in Congress said maybe this is the way we should go.

BY: The commission?

CH: Yeah, and then the commission was established, and we were still doing a lot of education, still holding workshops and getting people to talk. But with the commission hearing in the '80s, I guess, when it started, those workshops and taking people's stories and listening, helping them talk, but then preparing for the actual hearing which was in Seattle. So we had a series of workshops leading up to that for people who were willing to testify, and there were twenty-six of us that took a bus up to Seattle for that hearing.

BY: So I was asking about your poetry.

CH: Oh, I'm sorry, I don't know how I got to there.

BY: That's okay, I just want to know what the connection is there. Did you start writing poetry about it?

CH: You know, I can't really remember the first time. I just always liked to put words together. I think it was the rhythm of the words that...

BY: Well, there's something dance-like or artistic.

CH: It is very movement-oriented. It's like trying to find the essence of the feeling in a few words, it's not a lot of words.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.