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BK: How difficult was it, then, to return to the Seattle area upon your father's death, without having finished school, when you were having a, really, a fairly good time and all? How difficult was it to return here?

SU: It wasn't. I remember that particular summer, before I made up my mind to come home -- I couldn't come home at all in-between, except one time, because, well, I don't think we could afford it. I don't know why. But I had to work instead. And I worked going to summer camps all over Indiana and Wisconsin, as a girls' counselor with all these hakuijins. They're all young girls.

AI. Did they ask you -- did they ask you what you were? Did they --

SU: Never. Isn't that strange? No, they never asked -- or else, they were told ahead of time. And I remember staying with a medical doctor and his wife. His wife was a graduate of BMTS in Indiana. And I had just received this letter from my mother, which said that my father was in the hospital with cancer. So I was telling this lady about it. And she had a similar experience, where -- in her senior year, she said her father became very critically ill, so she went home to be with her father. And she's never regretted that she didn't graduate from school. Here she's a wife of a medical doctor. So, well, that helped make up my mind, and I went back to school. When school started, well I had started my fourth year, and I was still going to school, but around Thanksgiving, I told my mother, "I'm coming home." So, came home, and that's --

BK: And your father had passed away by that time, or --

SU: No. He wanted to die in Japan, where his brothers and sisters were. So he went on the boat, December, middle December. And by January, he died. He couldn't go to his home. He landed in the hospital right away, where my sister had already made arrangements for that. So his brothers and sisters were able to come into Tokyo to see him. So he died young, at only fifty-four years of age.

[Interruption]

BK: I was just thinking as you're, when you came back to Seattle from the, from school, was it difficult to leave what is almost an all-white world back into an Asian world?

SU: No. The transition, it's just natural for me to come back to that. And then trying to help my father and things like that.

BK: So you just jumped right back into like the dairy business?

SU: Into the church life.

BK: Into the church life. I see.

SU: My activities were mainly church, besides work. So that...

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 1998 Densho. All Rights Reserved.