<Begin Segment 17>

MA: So how have, you've lived in Twin Cities now for fifty years, and how have you seen the city change over time?

IO: Oh, big change. It's grown to a big city where when I first came here, I looked around, (...) all you see is Caucasians, you don't see any black or you don't see any Asians, and now I see 'em all over. [Laughs] But when I first came -- but there was one area where there was, African Americans were congregated more or less, in that one area. But it never used to seem like, in the areas that I was living, even in the last, let's see, started probably in the last ten years or so, that you started to see African Americans in that area, and Asians. And I used to go downtown, I looked around, I'm the only Asian around, and no minority even. That was kind of like isolated or something, I felt like sometimes. But everyone was nice to me, at least my experience.

MA: And now it seems like there's a lot of Southeast Asians who've immigrated to Minnesota?

IO: Yes, lot of, awful lot of 'em. There's more of them than any other. In fact, the company I worked for has a lot of Southeast Asians working for them now, as well as people from India. Not many American Indians, but the Indians from, the Southeast Asian Indians.

MA: Yeah, so it seems like a lot of changes with people in Minnesota.

IO: Oh, yeah, really. In fact, you could even go out of town, a lot of these smaller towns now, you see Asians. Because a lot of 'em had adopted Korean babies, so you see these smaller towns, a lot of Korean adoptions. I was surprised that so many of these small towns that adopted Koreans.

<End Segment 17> - Copyright ©2009 Densho and the Twin Cities JACL. All Rights Reserved.