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BY: About, that you decided to take a break and how you came to that decision and what you did.

CH: So after all the years of redress, the passage of the, you know, going to the hearings, the presidential hearings, the passage of the bill. It was in '88, August of '88. My father died in October of '88. All that time I had been teaching dance, raising my children. And I thought, you know, I don't think a lot of the people here, even though I went on to become JACL president, they don't know this other whole part of my life. And I really thought, do I want to be in meetings all the time and talking? What do I really, what is really important? And so said, I'm going to have to just focus on what I want to do as an artist. And so I just kind of stopped being involved in a lot of community work in the Japanese community, but I still stayed somewhat involved. Probably the last, biggest thing was called Celebration, because we were trying to do this Asian American organizing. This was way before APANO or other organizations that were combined in Asian American groups. And I think it was about that time that I also got a divorce. And I was dancing a lot. I had to get a job. Then I got a job with the city, which was a really stupid job, but still, I managed to get... what was it, I was an executive assistant or something, and I'd never worked before. But all of my volunteer work, starting a school in Eugene, teaching all these classes, being active in the cultural center, I just put that all down and I got hired as Executive for Public Works for the city. And I'm like, this is so bizarre. [Laughs] I'd leave at lunchtime and go to the dance studio and take classes or teach. So I'd be running back and forth, and my kids were in school. But then I started my own dance school with another woman, partnership. And did that for quite a few years, and that was really my focus, teaching and creating.

BY: So then you had stopped being involved in the Japanese community activities at that point?

CH: Yeah, I wasn't so involved at that point.

BY: And what brought you back?

CH: Well, Peggy Nagae, who was my friend back then in the early days of organizing, and then I worked on Min's case, I was his PR person all through coram nobis, all through that. And we were, she was beginning to work with Holly on getting a presidential medal for...

BY: This is 2015 or so, right?

CH: Uh-huh, for Min. She said, "I want you to come to this meeting." And I had thought in my mind when I left, I will go back one day, but I will bring the art part. So when I came back, I said, "Okay, Peggy, but I'm going to do the art part." And I did, I designed a program to educate people about Min, I worked with Holly on her play. So we put together a half an hour, forty-minute little presentation that then organized communities around listening to Min Yasui's words. "Do you know who he is? Do you know what he did? You should know about his work and how does his work then compare to what you're doing today? How is he inspiring your work if you didn't know about him?" And a lot of people hadn't heard about him.

BY: And who were you making these presentations to?

CH: So we took it to Ontario, Eastern Oregon, and performed it at the Four Rivers Cultural Center, Holly came out and joined me there, that rich history.

BY: Ontario.

CH: Eastern Oregon.

BY: Right.

CH: And then in Hood River at the Columbia Art Center. So all of the people in those areas helped me organize the communities in those areas, Latinx, whoever it was, predominate native communities of those areas, and then in Portland. So we did three of those performances and round table discussions about "Who Is Minoru Yasui?"

BY: So by "performance," was it spoken word, dance, or what was it?

CH: So we took a section of her play.

BY: Holly's play.

CH: Holly's play, we edited it together and got it down to what we thought would be the essence of some things that Min was saying. It was a reading, so I had six or seven actors so that you didn't have to memorize the lines, that they had that in front of them. I actually had the same cast of Portland pretty much in Hood River, but a totally different cast when we went to Ontario. So I auditioned, I auditioned people, and they came from Boise. But it was a totally unique cast to Ontario.

BY: And didn't you do it in Seattle as well? I feel like there was some kind of a...

CH: Well, we did, that was a different project. That was my friend who actually is more of a mentor, Nicki Nojima Lewis, she perfected the art of reader's theater. And so we did "Breaking the Silence," that was her play that she first wrote for Gordon Hirabayashi's coram nobis case when it first was introduced.

<End Segment 14> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.