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But once I moved, we moved to Rainier Valley, and I was in a mostly white neighborhood at the time, now it's mostly mixed, brown, white, Black, whatever. But in those days it was mainly white. Although where we were, it was more mixed, but the school I went to was mostly white. But I still noticed, I mean, I didn't know about prejudice so much then, because the first school I went to, Bailey Gatzert, we were all Japanese and Blacks. My first friends were all Japanese and all Blacks. There were some Native Americans, and my mom told me this one story where she just was amazed that, because I didn't know that much English right when I started school, that I brought home this Indian, Native American friend, and told her to "wait here" in Japanese, "Matte kudasai." And she said it seemed like she understood. I mean, she did just exactly that. And so she was amazed that little kids could just sort of understand each other even without the same language. So that was interesting for me to transition into learning English, because there was a lot of... what do you call it when there's, in the home, they tried to speak mostly English, but then there would be some Japanese put in there once in a while. And so I remember being really embarrassed at lunch one time, I had some grapes, and I didn't know the English word for grapes was grapes, I called it by the Japanese name, budo. "Would anybody like to share my budo with me?" And they said, "What's that?" So it was a little interesting trying to get back into learning English.

But one of my favorite things when I moved, when we got out of camp was having a book. I had my first book, and it was in tatters. We don't have it because I'm sure it was this thick. It was a book of Mother Goose rhymes and those kinds of things. And at the very end of it was the story about Heidi, it was my favorite story for the longest time. I read that over and over, that story. And I guess because I liked it, I really got to learning to like reading. And one of my favorite books where I really realized I really liked to read was Strawberry Girl by Lois Lenski, when I was in fourth or fifth grade or something... no, I must have been in fourth grade. Yeah, because the person that showed me this book, I was still at Bailey Gatzert. Okay, so anyway, so I learned fairly quickly English, because I was in a high reading class by the time I was in third grade, that it was interesting that I didn't really know any white people except for one girl. And this is going to sound really terrible, like a racist comment, but I didn't know anybody that was white except for this one girl who was, who came to school in rags and had always a runny nose. And I was really surprised when she was in my high reading group because I associated that with being stupid. And one of the worst things you could call another person when you're a kid in Japanese is to call him stupid, "bakatare," baka. And that was the worst thing you could call somebody. So I realize now that, of course, that's a really dumb thing to do, I mean, to associate color with being stupid. I never thought any Blacks or Japanese, I had one Chinese student, none of them were stupid, just this one girl because she was the only white person I knew until I moved to Rainer Valley. And there were all these white people. I mean, oh my gosh, it was really an eye-opener. And my mom, before we moved, she said, "Just be sure you just smile all the time at everybody." So I was well-liked at the new school, but it was an eye-opener for me. But there was some racism, not from the kids, they didn't know they were being racist. But I remember some of my good friends calling me "Jap," and, I mean, they didn't know. I'm sure they heard it from their parents that were... because this one friend I had who called me that, you know, she had really nice parents and they invited me to different things.

VY: I'm sorry, was this at Bailey Gatzert or was this when you moved to Rainier Valley?

MM: This is at Rainier Valley when I met my white friends. I mean, I didn't have any white friends when I was at Bailey Gatzert. And one of things that I would like people to know, educators, I don't know. It's just really weird that when I was at Bailey Gatzert, I got the best education. We were all Japanese, different browns, blacks, and we had, I think what they called the platoon system of teaching. So you were in, what do you call it, in the classroom, in first, second, third grade, you usually stayed in one classroom. But I think it was in the third grade, actually, we started going from classroom to classroom. So we had special teachers, one for music, which was really great, I learned all kinds of songs. And one for math and social studies or something like that, I don't remember how it was divided. And we had our own, we had a special room for art, and a lab that was shared with science. And I had the best education there because we had teachers there who could really apparently do good teaching. I mean, they were really able to prepare their lessons and everything. I don't know how it happened, but I do know that when I went to Hawthorne and you were in the one classroom kind of situation, they thought I was really smart. Well, I wasn't really smart, it was just I had a really good education. And I realized that that's what it was, that it was the education system as it was, which was weird because you think of the outlying areas as having better education.

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