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TI: And you mentioned earlier that up to this point, you mentioned yourself as sort of this happy-go-lucky guy, joking, lots of joking. So it sounds like who you now were was very different?

RK: Oh, yeah, I was different. I can remember it was my birthday, I forget which one it was, but we went to a movie with a group of friends, and after the movie, we came back to the hotel and had lunch and cake and all this, and I was joking around and laughing and everything else, everybody was laughing and having a good time, and my dad opens up the door and he just says, "Stop being stupid." I mean, it wasn't very quiet, "Stop being stupid," he was yelling. So after that, it was like, okay, so I shut up. And I stayed that way for a long time. So even that stress just made my sickness worse. They found out that I had the ulcer and I was in the hospital for about two and a half, almost a month, because they had to go through all these tasks, x-rays and all that stuff, I couldn't eat anything.

TI: And during that month, again, none of the medical people just asked, talked with you...

RK: Well, they may have talked to my mom, but nobody asked me.

TI: Did your mom, do you think your mom shared with the medical staff, maybe, some of the causes of the ulcers? Like, "Ron just found out he was adopted"?

RK: Yeah, I'm quite sure she was.

TI: So she might have shared that with them?

RK: So she may have talked to my dad. But I don't know, for six months or so, I couldn't eat anything except Jell-o.

TI: When you talked about when you found out you were adopted, the sense was that no one wanted you. Your birth parents gave you away, and yet your parents, your mom and dad, took you in. So wasn't there a sense that they wanted you, especially for your mother?

RK: Well, I wasn't sure if they really wanted to be part of this family or not. That's why after I graduated high school, I decided to go into the service just to get away for a while, and I just couldn't live in that environment anymore.

TI: Before we go there, I just wanted to finish up a few things. So you talked about your father treating you differently than your younger brother, Richard. What would be some examples of things that he had you do that Richard didn't have to do?

RK: Well, when I was... I think I was in the fourth grade, something like that. My dad had to have, he had a cyst on his neck, he had to have surgery. So I had to do some of his stuff like emptying the garbage cans. Every day I had to take empty garbage cans, help take the full ones downstairs. I mean, that plus doing my homework, and then I asked my brother to help. He had this way of kind of smiling, and, "Hmm, nah." So I just kept doing it every day, every day. The other thing was I ended up painting. I had three rooms, and this is when they had, it was lead-based paint. So you were up in a hotel room painting, lead-based paint, you have to wear a mask, because it was pretty bad. So I did that, I did maybe two rooms. This is a summer-type job. It was things like, got to paint, and then I didn't feel like going down to have lunch, but I would go downstairs and have lunch. I wouldn't eat anything, I didn't eat a lot. And my brother was, I don't know what he was doing. So our relationship, my brother and I, had kind of changed after all this started going on.

TI: It sounds like the whole... what's the right way... feelings or the tenor of the family shifted after you found out that you were adopted, people started treating you differently. It sounds like you also saw people differently also with that information?

RK: All that kind of built up, and it didn't help my ulcers any.

TI: How did, when you eventually went back to school, how did it affect things like your schoolwork or just being with friends? Did things change after the adoption, finding out about the adoption?

RK: Well, I was out of school for like three months, so I had to repeat fifth grade. And after I found out I was adopted, I could see my grades were going down, because all this was affecting me. I was making pretty good grades. I wasn't all As, but As, Bs, Cs. And all that started to change. It became a lot of Cs and Ds, but all that went through junior high school and high school.

TI: With your grades going down, did it affect other things? Did people see you more difficult in terms of maybe disruptive or anything, or did you become more quiet, or did your mood change or personality change?

RK: Yeah, it did. It was almost like I stayed within myself. Even though I had friends at school, I wasn't really having a lot of fun, not like I used to have.

TI: So did any of your friends or maybe a teacher just maybe notice some of the differences and say, "Ron, is everything okay?" or, "What happened?" Did you ever have any conversations like that?

RK: Well, they may have talked to my parents, but my parents, they never came up and said, "We had a talk with your teacher, your grades seem to be slipping," none of that happened. I knew my grades were slipping, I mean, I could tell. I had to take my report card home and had them sign it.

TI: And also it was probably difficult having to repeat a grade, too, right? You had three months, so because of that, you had to repeat, so you lost some of your friends, and your friends sort of went on, so that must have been difficult, also.

RK: I kept a lot inside of me, which doesn't help when you have an ulcer.

TI: Well, that, I think, is what causes the ulcer, right?

RK: Yeah.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2024 Densho. All Rights Reserved.