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EO: So you were in Japan with your dad here.

SS: My father was in this, remained in this country. He went back after he was, he had established himself economically here, he went back to Japan and married his... he did not intend really to stay in this country too long. He wanted to make enough money to go back. And that, that desire was common among all, practically all immigrants to this country, regardless of where they came from, they looked upon the United States as a place where they could make enough money to save it up and then return to their own homes eventually. Of course, most of them failed to realize on that dream. My father failed, too. He died quite unexpectedly when I was eleven and the, the death of my father put an end to my childhood right then and there. From the age of eleven I had to, I could never get, put out of my mind completely like a child normally would, any consideration of economic worry. That was, that was a part of my life from there on. My father at one time had a fair amount of money, but several years before we came, he had, some of his investments had unexpectedly turned sour and so at the time he left, or the time he died, he left us only with five or six thousand dollars. Not enough to go back to Japan to live on. And our relatives in Japan told us to come back, they'd take care of us. But my mother said, "Oh, no. We're not going back to be dependent on the charity of relatives." So despite the fact that my mother knew absolutely no English then and never did throughout her life, we stuck it out and fortunately things turned out so that things gradually got easier.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1992, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.