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AI: So that was really the daily communication between you and your parents, was in Japanese?

CN: Uh-huh. And my mother -- I don't remember this -- but my mother used to enjoy telling other people that I would come home from school, and I would say, "Now I'm going to teach you," and have her sit down and I'll be the teacher. And so I would come home and teach her new words as well as songs. I remember the songs especially and she went along with it.

AI: So in some ways, you were becoming a teacher for her regarding English and a little bit about American education and it sounds like she enjoyed that.

CN: Well, I think she did, and she said she did. I do remember her asking a neighbor Nisei girl who was in high school -- she's no longer living now, but asking -- and she was taking Home Ec. and foods, and she would ask her to come and teach her how to bake, make pies. I remember the pies especially. And also, and this when I was in junior high or was it high school? Do you remember -- maybe you didn't, you're so much younger than me -- do you remember a dish called "eggs ala goldenrod"? That you, this is for breakfast now. You toast a white, piece of white bread. I guess it must have been Wonder Bread and then have white sauce. And then you run the yolk, hard-boiled egg yolk, through a sieve and so there would be, in the middle of this white, there would be this yellow yolk that was put through a sieve so it would look like a flower.

AI: So it sounds like your mother was interested and curious about American ways and American ways of life.

CN: Well, she was, she was an interesting person. I grew up eating not just Japanese food, but other food as well. Like she would ask, she asked Margaret Nomura if she would teach her how to bake pies and cakes. I asked, my sister and I asked her how that happened, that we were, we used to have, I remember distinctly, the... oh, you know that Irish dish that they have during Saint Patrick's Day.

AI: Mulligatawny?

CN: No. Not Mulligatawny. It's a hunk of corned beef and cabbage, and stew and stuff like that. And, so she said that when she came, she was just eighteen, and didn't even know how to cook, didn't even know how to cook rice. And what she would do, since she lived in Seattle in that Yesler area, that she would go to the neighbors and watched the lady of the house cooking dinner, and then she would go and purchase these items and then go home and try it. And whether they were Jewish people or Russian or Japanese, it didn't matter. And she said, "None of us spoke English anyway." [Laughs]

AI: How interesting.

CN: And so we would say, "Oh, Mama you were so smart," and she said, "Not smart. I didn't even know how to cook rice." [Laughs] And so that was interesting. And I, since I spent a lot of my, the major part of my growing up experience as an only child -- since my sister was going to school in Japan and living with our maternal grandparents' family -- we did a lot of, a lot of talking, my parents and I. So my experience growing up with parents is quite different from some of my friends who lived in a larger family. And so they had each other to communicate with, and, therefore, not as much with their parents.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.