<Begin Segment 8>

EO: Well, when you had to leave, now, to go to the camps, how did you get rid of your things? And did you have to sell -- did you bury anything?

HU: Well, I called the neighbor and said, "You want to buy anything, what I have? I haven't got too much but few furniture." He said, "I'll give you two dollars for a couch." "All right. Take it." "I give you one dollar for the carpet." "Go ahead, take it." Whatever they offered, that's all. Yeah.

EO: So you didn't lose any photographs or...

HU: Well, I had some dolls for my children, you know, the boys' dolls there. I had about half a dozen so I put in right on top of the garage, but that's gone, of course. And a lot of my furniture, my landlady kind enough to let me keep in the garage, so I didn't lose too much on my sewing machine, and my kitchen utensils, dish and everything.

EO: The government claims that they had some way for you to store things. Did that -- were you told that you could, that you could store things with the government?

HU: No, no, they didn't tell me that, though. So I asked the landlady, "Could you keep a few things for me?" Then they were kind enough. Because they were, I think the husband was French and the wife was Australian or something. And I'd been there for eleven years, you know. Before I rent that place, I look all over. You know, those days, in the '30s, a lot of houses were not fancy like today. They were all cheap wooden houses, lot of rental house there. And I went over to see the signs several place, they won't rent to the Japanese, you know. They'd always have an excuse, "We have somebody coming this afternoon to take a look." Or either, "We had somebody already promised." You know, all kinds of excuse. I know what they're feeling. So this place I rent, they had German people in, neighbors. They had a rental house, everyone had some. But they had an agreement they're not going to rent to the Orientals. But this Frenchman, he went to the court, because I was a citizen, so he won eventually. You know, that agreement is just a verbal agreement so he break that. That's what he told me just night before we evacuated. He didn't tell me that, you know. "I had to go to court three times," he said, "and I won." So I communicated with them after the war. They had two sons, two of them passed away. They were high school kids while we were there. They're all gone. 'Til then we communicated with each other. All the way through. [Laughs]

[Interruption]

EO: So you could only pack what you could carry.

HU: Yeah, that's right.

EO: What did you take?

HU: I took the three suitcase, that's all. That's all, just clothing, you know. That's all; nothing else. Because you can't take anymore than that. At first, they had the notice on all the telephone poles, this district going to the Santa Anita... so they had them marked what you can take, what you can't. You know, for instance, like a little electric stove, small burner, you can't take that, you can't use that. And anything bigger than you can carry, you can't take that. So whatever the instruction, we had to prepare for that, you know. Only suitcase allowed, one for the one person.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.