<Begin Segment 19>

BN: So you came back and then you went right back to...

KN: Okay. So I came back, and another trauma, because I wasn't really ready to come back, but I came back. But I came back with, again, no answers to the question of "where do I belong?" And I know I didn't belong in Japan, because I tried every way to be Japanese, except for speaking. I acted, tried to act Japanese, I was bringing home things. You try to do the Japanese thing, I lost like fifteen pounds, had ulcers when I got back, because I had been trying so hard, it was like a lot of stress. And when I got back, I went back to the doctors, I think, and I asked, I think they had to prescribe sedatives. So I think I took it for a bit, and it wasn't good, and then when I came back, and I would look at American people or white folks, basically, they looked really grotesque, literally, really, features were grotesque. It was like, "Oh, my god, they're so alien, like alien creatures." And I said to myself, then I said, "Why aren't people walking more?" My parents had bought a house while I was gone because they had to leave. They were evicted from their home because the convalescent home bought the house, so they had a very short time to buy a house, and my sister helped them buy it because she was a social worker, so she had the down payment, and her boss, my mother's boss. So they bought a home not too far away in Silver Lake on Benton Way. So I came back to a different home, and I said, "I'm going to walk to downtown, I'm going to go downtown." They said, "You're going to walk?" I said, "Yeah, I'm going to walk, we walk all the time." Forty-five minutes is nothing. So I'm walking downtown, I don't know where I was going, but everything was just very different. And I had a hard time shaking loose, or getting back into American culture, and I didn't feel like I again belonged, and I was not ready to go back to Berkeley and I thought, I was actually really, really depressed. And I think I said, "What is the point?" I don't belong here, I don't belong there, there's really nothing.

And I don't know what clicked, I don't know what changed, but at some point, I just said, "Okay, I'll go back to Berkeley," it was time to go back. So maybe I didn't have much time to think about it, because it was already August. So I did go back, and from pictures, I look pretty happy. My friends had a house, and this house, oddly enough, on Channing Way, became the first J-Sei place, so odd to me, across from the Buddhist Temple. But that was where my friends were living, and I lived there, and my roommates were, my good friend had gotten married, the political ones, but I saw them before they left. They had gotten married, and he was going to go to med school in New York. So they left, and my other friends came in and we had another roommate. But it was an African American friend, and so we were, it was great. It was a great year coming back, and I found Asian American Studies. And I want to say that I took the first Asian American Studies class, because I think '69 might have been the first class, but you'd know better than me. Because I don't know how I got there, somebody told me that there were these classes. Did I see a flier, or was it somebody telling me? Nobody went with me, but I went to... I recall, might have been the theater building. And people were gathered there, and they were talking about these classes, and all these different choices, and I just was like, okay, this is it. And I signed up for the first class and met all these people, all these Japanese Americans or maybe Asian Americans, that were totally not like the Japanese Americans that I had known before. And they were probably some of the same people, but they were not like the people I'd known before. It was like, "This is really it." So it was sort of like I found the answer.

<End Segment 19> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.