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JF: And I think a big part of that wound up with us moving to Hawaii where both Jeri, Michael and I felt... well, maybe not Michael, because he was only seven, but where we felt as though it's easier to be Japanese American here than it was where we were. [Noise in background] That's my dog. Where the culture is, it's part of the greater culture, your own, what you grew up with, everybody is familiar with here. It's not something odd, like we would... I still remember saying, "Oh, boy, we're going to have fried rice tonight, Mom's going to make fried rice." And it was a big deal because she rarely did that for us. Whereas here, we can just go to Zippy's or go down the street or make it ourselves with leftovers and stuff, it's like no big deal. And then everyone wears slippahs here, or zoris, we used to call them when we were little kids in L.A. But yeah, it's so easy here. So I think that's why we have two boys, Michael, who's seven, and then Daniel, who was born here during the beginning of our second year here. And they've grown up here, and I think they are turning into folks that are people that they may or not be necessarily this way, but I feel like they're better people having grown up in a culture where they're accepted, where they don't always have to be on the defensive the way I always felt like. I think Karen Ishizuka's book mentions me once about how I was always very reactive about being called any kind of racial epithet.

The one that comes to mind is when I was, we lived in Sunland, of all places. Our first townhouse, which we bought, when I was a teacher, was in Sunland. It was kind of like the armpit of the San Fernando Valley. So you have all these retired policemen buying their small horse ranches out there and stuff, the Aryan Brotherhood, the Ku Klux Klan, and some other racist group wanted to have a combined cross burning celebration during the Fourth of July parade that they were leading down the street. And so it was that kind of a community, which we had no idea at the time that we purchased the place. So Jeri is at the supermarket out there, and then these two haole biker types come sidling up on either side of her, and they're talking over her head at each other saying things like, "I feel like having Oriental food tonight. How about you?" and she just rolled her eyes and left, that kind of racist bullshit going on out there. But you know, this car drives by and I'm walking my dog, and there was this carload of high school kids, and they're throwing oranges. I couldn't believe it. Navel oranges, perfectly good, by the way, navel oranges. But they go whizzing past my head and so they're yelling something at me, and of course that just triggers my reaction, because it's just like in that movie with Steve Martin, Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid, when he hears "cleaning woman," it just triggers this reaction where he goes into an uncontrollable rage, and that's me whenever anybody yells anything my way about, "You fucking chink," "fucking gook," "zipperhead," all these other things that they yell. And then I just flew into a rage and I'm yelling my head off at nobody, because they drove past and it's just me and my dog, that happened. But yeah. So over here, nothing. It's like, okay, this is something I could get used to. I think it added years to my life, because man, the way I was going, I was going to be nuts. I mean, flying off the handle at any time, it's not a healthy way to live. So, yeah, it was a good decision on our part.

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