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TI: And so can you talk about the children? This would include your father, but uncles and aunts that you had. I mean, as much as you can remember, kind of the birth order of the children?

LI: Yeah, my dad's oldest brother was Sheane, and he was born on the piece of ground that my grandfather broke out of sagebrush. But shortly after that, they had to start moving. And so my dad was born on the first piece of ground that they farmed when they had to become sharecroppers. And at that time, fertilizers weren't invented. We didn't have mega dairies. And so the nutrition on the farm had to come through soil building. And so the leases said at any one time, a certain portion of that ground that you leased had to be planted to alfalfa hay. And so those crops that my grandfather initially started with, hay, wheat and potatoes, hay and wheat were the soil building kind of crops. They would deep root it, they would mine and bring nutrients up, and the potatoes were the money crop. And so because they didn't farm large acres, they couldn't do the alfalfa hay to build soil, and so they couldn't rotate those crops. And so because of that, they just rotated among these miscellaneous chop suey vegetables, the mizumono crops, and soon the soils were depleted and production was significantly lower. And so what they would have to do is they would have to move. So every four or five years, they would have to pack up and move and start over again. And so it was really difficult for those pioneers, and it was really a definite change in the way of life that my grandmother had expected to come to.

TI: That's what, yeah, I was curious. Did you hear stories? I mean, how did she handle the shift? Because it sounded like she came with certain expectations. And actually we're talking about the children, but let's keep going, because she had a lot of children.

LI: Yeah. Yeah, my dad was second, and his name was Ken. And after my dad was, his brother was Kay. After Kay...

TI: Probably Tamaki?

LI: Yeah, I believe Tamaki. And after Tamaki was Gilbert, and then after Gilbert was Reiko, and after Reiko was George.

TI: So two, four, six, seven kids?

LI: Yeah, sounds like it. And somewhere in the middle there, there was a Sanaye. And Sanaye I believe did not survive more than a year.

TI: Childhood. Okay. So going back to your grandmother, so she went from only agreeing to come to the United States because she could study music and voice and be with this affluent farmer, and now she had seven kids, and the farming business is a lot harder. So let's talk about that, what you know about that life.

LI: Well, the one thing she didn't lose was the piano. So all three of those years somehow they managed to hang on to the piano. And so she got to play the piano, but nothing was easy. Nothing was easy, and my uncle Sheane, he built -- I guess he was one of the guys, he helped to build these, like a bunkhouse that they lived in, and they put it on wheels. And so I don't know how late it was, but because they had to move so often, that was probably one of the first moves or... it's a house on wheels.

TI: Because every, as you're saying, after four or five years, they moved because the land kind of gave out, and they had to...

LI: Yeah, and the nutrition was depleted for those crops, and that's what we do, we have to rotate crops on our current farming operation, because if you don't, you have disease pressures or nutrient problems and things like that. So your productivity is greatly diminished.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.