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BN: So how does he end up in Chicago?

KM: Well, my father was very social. So for one that was being raised as a somewhat, I envisioned is a lonely childhood, and not real happy, he was actually a pretty upbeat kind of guy, so he really liked to have fun. So he would go to Chicago for the dances, and I think he was introduced to my mother by her circle of friends. So they met... they met, and I think they were engaged, like, after three months. So it was a very quick, my mother would always say that they were engaged, and they had a wedding date set, and she said, "I cancelled it three times." She made it sound like she didn't want to marry him. So she'd always tell him, "Hmm," that's why we didn't believe a lot of her stories. And so then I was actually very relieved or whatever when I found their wedding album, and there was a card that expressed something different, like a card between them, from her to him, was like their first Thanksgiving, their first Easter, but it was like seeing something very endearing. I thought, okay, it's not true. She made it sound like she was forced to marry him or something.

BN: They could both be true, I mean, who knows?

KM: Well, she did feel a little pressure because her younger sister wanted to get married, and she was the oldest, right? But her younger sister got married before she did. I mean, she was supposed to have been married before.

BN: Yeah, I mean, from what you've written and how you describe them, they seem like a little bit of an odd couple.

KM: Yeah. And in my experience growing up, my sister and I always, that was actually the dominant theme, was that clash between my mother and my father. It was very confusing because she would always be correcting him, his manners, and reprimanding him for not saying the right thing. And he was, indeed, always like, never take it. So my sister and I, because we always felt bad for him, so we would end up later on defending him, sticking up for him, because she was always correcting him. But that's also not just a Nisei-Kibei thing, but my mother's family is very, very strict, very stoic, very tough. They were tough on their kids, like us. I think if I told you some of the punishments my mother inflicted upon us, people would be shocked. She did things like threatening to send us to the orphanage. And literally, I was put on the porch, and she said, "I'm calling the orphanage now." And my sister would be inside the door saying, "She's not really calling." But I thought she was. And then I'd have to wait 'til my father came home from his produce job, and he'd come in and she says, "Well, it's either her or me." It's like, what did I do that was so horrible? I think I broke something. I was really clumsy, so I'd always break things. And I think because of the economics, and her punishments were like, I don't know if you know what these things are, shoe trees, I mean, no, shoe horns. But there's a wooden end and I a wire thing that's really, we'd get ten of those, minimum ten. And then we started to cry, which we usually did before she even started, because we knew how painful it was. She said, "I'll give you something to cry about." And so I asked my cousin, said, "We all heard that. Every single one of her siblings were like that." So that's how we were raised. So my mother was strict with us, and she was hard on my dad. And so this whole Nisei-Kibei thing was really confusing for us.

And even though we looked up to my father, he never punished, never laid a finger on us, almost never raised his voice except one time when we were running around crazy. But he took us to the beach, he's the one that played games with us at night, card games, all kinds of stuff like that. My mother baked with us, we did those things, but she was cleaning and checking out... so she was the disciplinarian. So we looked at my father like, well, he was a fun person, he didn't punish us, but he wasn't really that American, his English wasn't very good. He sang shigin, we didn't like it, and he had this odd religion that he would pour tea over these sticks, I think it was gedatsu or something, and he would chant. And we were just like, that's very odd. My sister even told him, "Dad, can you sing outside? You sound like a dying cow," or something. So we were really horrible. So we were not very kind to my father, we felt bad for him. So a lot of our cues we took from my mother in terms of how to act, aspirations, she wanted us to be totally American, and of course, her aspirations of going to New York and fashion and that whole living, appearance. So we'd go shopping, she would make clothes for us that we would see at the stores, because things like that. And she really wanted us to be, to succeed. So their whole life was about us, education, they never bought a home, they rented, everything went into it.

BN: Did you have a sense, talking about your mom, the sense of, I don't know if frustration is the right word, but regret that she wasn't able to pursue this kind of life that she had envisioned apparently when she was younger before the war?

KM: You know, we must have, because I think we might have heard that. Like, "I didn't want to marry your father." "I love Chicago," "I was gonna be, I was engaged before," all these regrets. "I was going to go to New York." She had apparently thirty pairs of matching shoes and purses. She was totally fashioned like that. And then to come and live in Boyle Heights, didn't really have many new clothes, it must have been really hard. So I think she was frustrated, and he wasn't quite, perhaps, he was not a... he wasn't like her brothers. Her brothers could do anything. They would put on a roof. I said, "Who taught you how to do that?" "Nobody taught us, we just did it." And I thought, "Wow." My father couldn't paint anything, couldn't fix anything, and she would be very frustrated by that. So I think a lot of things frustrated her. She was always quite angry about things. And so she would, you sensed that. So it was sort of like, in our family, my mother's emotions were always dominant. It was like you'd always feel whatever she was feeling. My sister, fortunately, had a very strong personality. So it at least balanced the family in that way, because I was less that way, I was more like my father.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.