<Begin Segment 7>

EO: Okay, so now let's jump back to where you're about to have to leave for the assembly centers. So what, what happens?

AH: Yes, okay. I think you, we were talking about how we decided what kind of clothes to take. What did we do about our personal property? Since we were not told exactly where we would go, it was hard to decide, do we take summer clothes, winter clothes? Sneakers, boots, or what? So I found what few things I selected were totally inadequate for the kind of weather that we finally did encounter when we went into camp. At the time, I mentioned to you a little while ago, that I was engaged to a young Nisei who lived on the other side of town. We found out that the persons living in the area where he lived would be going to a particular assembly center, whereas my family would be going somewhere else. And so foolishly, and desperately in love, we eloped, so I could go with his family. That is what I did. So I ended up in a camp called Manzanar where my parents did not move for another month or month and a half, they did not go to the same camp. They went to another camp called Santa Anita. It was a horse racetrack, and it was a pretty miserable situation in which they found themselves. Not that Manzanar camp was much better, but it was at least not horse stables.

EO: How did your family take this?

AH: My family was distressed; I was such a spoiled brat and I just did whatever I wanted to. My father pretty much disowned me for a while. He wouldn't contact me. I only wrote a couple of letters and I'd say my life in camp was pretty miserable because I knew I did such a dishonorable thing and it haunted me all the time I lived in camp, that I had disgraced my family by my behavior. Then I was too busy in camp. Here I was seventeen years old and a year later I became a mother in camp. I had my first child in camp, so busy learning how to be a mother when I hadn't yet grown up myself, so... [laughs] And then thinking about my poor parents, oh, I did wrong, that the camp life all in all, with everything else so wrong, it was a miserable experience for me.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 1994, 2003 Densho and Emiko Omori. All Rights Reserved.