<Begin Segment 13>

AI: Well, and high school is, for so many people, it's a time of wanting to fit in, wanting to be accepted among one's peers. And sometimes, of course, something like an ethnic or racial difference can really affect that fitting in, but it sounds like for you that really wasn't the case.

CN: No, it wasn't. This is why I say it was the best thing that really happened to me because I thoroughly enjoyed myself and got lots of recognition and that kind of thing.

AI: Do you have any memory of what you felt inside yourself as far as your Americaness or your Japaneseness at that age in high school?

CN: To be very honest with you, I felt very comfortable with it because my classmates seemed to be comfortable with it. If they weren't, I know I would have had lots of difficulty.

AI: But at the time there really wasn't a conflict for you.

CN: There was not and they accepted me like anyone else. And though I... and my mother became interested in the PTA, though I'd come home and tell her that -- so you see, I had, some of me had this discomfort being different -- that I would tell her that the PTA wasn't meeting this month and that she didn't have to go, and, because her English was not very good. And she didn't think anything about serving dried cherries and tea to people who came. It was all right to serve those things to the Japanese guests, but not, not to the hakujins.

AI: It would have been possibly embarrassing for you?

CN: Yeah, it was embarrassing for me. And I almost died when I found out that one of my teachers had visited my parents to let them know how well I was doing in school. And in, in those years, if you made honor roll or got a special recognition that they, instead of writing a letter, they would visit the home to bring the good news. Well, I just about died, I mean, of mortification when I found out that this one teacher...

AI: Visualizing what that interaction might have been like?

CN: Yes. I said, "What did, you didn't feed her anything," oh yes, she did. She served sembei and these dried cherries and, oh my God -- and tea, not coffee.

AI: So a part of you was very conscious of the differences.

CN: Yeah. I was very conscious of the differences. But...

AI: But on a day-to-day level...

CN: It was, that didn't come up except when my father and my mother would appear at the school, and then it would be very uncomfortable.

AI: Well, now then --

CN: I'm not proud of this, mind you.

AI: No, but it seems like a very typical thing that many, many Nisei felt in that situation.

CN: Yeah, because you were very conscious of the fact that you were different, and you behaved differently with your parents, and at home things were very different.

AI: But on the whole, positive, until we come up to the time of Pearl Harbor.

CN: Yeah, uh-huh.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.