<Begin Segment 5>

CO: So, you began your participation in this study in Tule Lake.

FM: Yes, and again, I could go into many stories about, in this connection. For one thing, we had to be moved from Puyallup to Tule Lake and in making that move, it was necessary for the government to assign a police officer to my wife and myself since we were simply a single pair being moved totally out of the context of the general mass migration that was being carried out. We were placed in a regular Pullman, a regular railroad car, along with other passengers, but the police officer, who was as uncomfortable as we were, would, was sitting opposite us through this one-night stint in which we had to ride down to Klamath Falls in southern Oregon, from which we were to go to Tule Lake in California.

There were funny incidents occur, which occur on this trip that I might tell you about. We asked the police officer if we could go to the dining room to have dinner, and he initially wanted us to have a box lunch at the seat we were in, but we were riding a coach and he thought we should stay there. But we preferred the dining hall -- dining car, if we could, and he relented. So we went and were seated and presently the dining car people assigned two other white people opposite us. They struck me as being what I call Southern colonel and his wife. They were from Kentucky, I think. And we got into a pleasant enough conversation but the awkwardness was in trying to hide from the fact that there was a, this evacuation story in our background, which we didn't want to get into, and they were questioning us about one thing or another, in the way that polite strangers will. And my decision was that the way in which I would deal with the situation, to take on the role of my Chinese friend, who, in sociology, C.K. Chang, who was from China and who had a very lively personality about him... and I put, took myself, put myself in the role of C.K. Chang and how he might respond to these questions which this couple was addressing to us. My wife, then catching, having caught on to what I was doing, had to listen as she could through the rattle of the cars and so on, to what I was saying and she played along with this role. We thought it was kind of funny that we would have to do this sort of thing, but it was less complicated and --

[Interruption]

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.