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BY: Okay. Did your parents ever talk to you about the incarceration?

CH: Not in the early years. It wasn't until I started talking, actually it was when I went to camp, like a Camp Fire girl camp, I think different people have had the same story. And they ask you, "How many of your mothers went to camp?" And I had heard the word camp, so I raised my hand, because I thought it was something that I should be proud about. And so I told my mom when I got home, "Oh, yes, they asked us if you were in camp," and I raised my hand, and that's when she said, "Oh, it wasn't the same kind of camp."

BY: So did she explain much about the camp to you, or not?

CH: Not a whole lot. Not a whole lot.

BY: Do you remember if she spoke about it in a positive or negative way?

CH: Definitely a negative, but more of an embarrassing way.

BY: How about your father? Did he ever talk about that?

CH: Oh, no. No, no, no. Never ever.

BY: Not at all, okay. So that's how you learned about it initially. How did you find out more about it? How and when did you find out about it?

CH: So the older I got, it was in college, actually, where I started studying more and took History of Japan and started asking my mother more questions. I was really searching for identity trying to figure out, "Who am I?" and that's when she really started talking a lot more about it. In fact, I think was about that time she started going to schools, too.

BY: Oh, really?

CH: Yeah. She started talking to schools about her experience, and then just kind opened up more and more.

BY: And this was in Des Moines, Iowa?

CH: Oh, yeah.

BY: So my guess is that nobody in Des Moines, Iowa, knew about the incarceration.

CH: Oh, no, no. East of the Mississippi, forget it. They didn't know.

BY: Yeah, interesting.

CH: Yeah, they didn't know. She was quite an educated person, though. When I was a senior in high school, she had an aneurism and I think she really maybe reevaluated her life, and that's when she started to get more and more involved. But up until then, she was an RN and then she taught [inaudible] school. But after her aneurysm she went back to college to get her master's in education. I think she wanted to convince herself that her mind was still okay after that. But then she got her master's in education and worked in a program called Home Start, so she'd go into people's homes and teach their kids about, teach the parents how to teach their kids, actually.

BY: So you've alluded a little bit to this, but did you ever feel like you were discriminated against or treated differently because of your ancestry, your ethnicity? And it could have been either in a positive or negative way, but the incident of your Bluebird leader, besides that, can you remember any other things that...

CH: There was a time when I went to L.A. and my auntie bought me a whole kimono, whole set of obis, everything. When I went back to Iowa, I think I might have been maybe about fifteen, there was a party at, I want to say it with the 4-H club, I might be wrong. And they had, like, all of us Japanese girls dressed in kimonos. I don't remember anything really negative about that, but it was kind of unusual that we all were able to dress in traditional Japanese attire. And then, so that was the one time that I wore a kimono. And then the greatest time in high school, when I was talking about being ostracized a bit, was because I dated an African American, but it was all in secret. Nobody interracially dated in public. Even the white girls, it was all secret. So then when people found out, I was treated differently, and that's when I really questioned, like what is going on? And that's when... it was actually my U.S. history teacher and my drama teacher and my boyfriend at the time who said, 'Well, there's this thing called racism that you should know about." But up until then, I had had some white friends, I had a couple really good Black friends in junior high, but never brought them home. I probably would have learned something else if I had brought them home, but at school.

BY: How did your parents feel about your relationship with...

CH: Oh, they did not know.

BY: They didn't know? So it was secret, okay.

CH: Totally secret. Totally secret from everybody. Yeah, it was during the late '60s, nobody in Des Moines, Iowa, really, they were dating interracially, but not publicly.

BY: Okay, interesting.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.