<Begin Segment 24>

AI: Well, I'll want to come back to that, but before we go much further, I do want to finish up about the time at Tule Lake. And I was wondering, it sounds like personally such a difficult time for you with your mother's illness and passing, and at the time same time here you are, you're becoming an adult now. And your father's situation changed so drastically from being a prosperous business person to this enforced imprisonment. Did you have much discussion with your father or your mother while she was ill and your sister about any plans or thoughts for the future?

CN: Uh-huh, lots of it. I wanted to get out and my sister did, too, but my parents, of course, said no, that the family had to stay together. Especially since my mother was ill, and, well, terminally ill, that that was, they felt, out of the question to leave. And I was all for leaving anyway. And...

AI: What, I think around that time, perhaps in, what was it, late '42 and early '43? Wasn't that the time when a number of people were going out to college?

CN: Uh-huh.

AI: What were your thoughts about that?

CN: Well, I made plans to go, too, but...

AI: That's what you were hoping to do?

CN: That's what I was hoping to do and did make... well, I actually wrote in to the Student War Relocation, and, but that, nothing came of that, of course, because I was urged to stay on and certainly...

AI: By your parents?

CN: By my parents. And with my mother so ill, I was torn in two. I wanted to leave, yet I wanted to stay with her, too. Though, I will have to say that the desire to leave was a lot stronger for a time there until we found out that she would never be able to get well. It was terminal and so... then, of course, during this time -- you and I decided it was the spring of 1943, just a few months before she died, she died in June -- and we were given this loyalty oath to either sign or not sign, and my parents decided that they would not sign. And their decision was that, "You allow us to become U.S. citizens and then we will." But as my father said, he refused to become a person without a country, even if that other country did do this horrible war act on the United States. And I appreciate that now, but certainly at that time I was saying, "Well you got to sign, you got to sign it so that we can get out and maybe we can get Mom into a better place." And how are we going to pay for it, that didn't enter my mind, of course. But anyway, I have to say that I did say that I would... you know, my answer was "yes," but I wasn't able to say "yes-yes." And in the end, the family won out. And I really think that they would have won out anyway regardless.

AI: So in the end you ended up signing "no-no" on the questionnaire?

CN: No. I signed "yes-no." So... anyway, that's, that's what happened. And I stayed on. And it was, and I think it was okay. It was good that we really needed each other during that, during that time and we became really close. In fact, we used to laugh a great deal that all three of us grew up together. We all learned how to cook at the same time. And I know, and this is after we came back here and we lived at -- after leaving the hostel, one of the churches. I can't even remember which church it was. It was nice of them to put us up -- (then) we went to Renton Highlands and stayed there for several months. My father was there for about a year. I started school. No, wait a minute. I, my sister and I both went to work as domestics, and I lasted exactly four, four months, just enough to pay for tuition and get a couple of new things to wear.

AI: So during this whole period, your plan and your dream to go to college never died.

CN: No.

AI: But you had many things that you had to go through before you did that.

CN: And these people that I worked for were, they were okay. They were nice, but they didn't want to lose someone who was working out, and it wasn't because of me. They needed someone to take care of their child and also to clean their house and do some cooking even if I didn't know what I was doing. I will say that I read those cookbooks and studied them very well, and they wouldn't let me leave unless I found a replacement. So what I did was I talked my friend from Bellevue, a good friend, if she would replace me and she did. After a few months, she talked another one of our friends to replace her and this, the third person really worked out very well. She enjoyed that kind of work. I hated it. Learned a lot, but then I started at the U.

<End Segment 24> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.