Densho Digital Archive - Nancy Iwami Interview (denshovh-inancy-01-0006)

<Begin Segment 6>

MA: What about Chinese? I heard there weren't as many Chinese farmers.

NI: No... no, I don't remember going to a country school where there were Chinese, uh-uh.

MA: So the Chinese mostly were in town in Watsonville?

NI: I guess they must have been. I was a country girl, so I didn't know too much about town. Because there wasn't any transportation into town, my dad was still riding a bicycle. Whenever we want transportation into town, they called, there were a couple of people that we used to, they called themselves, (...) stage conductors, they had a horse and buggy that could hold maybe about a dozen people, and you called, tell them to come and pick, pick us up.

MA: And that's how you would get into town?

NI: And get into town. And there were lots of boarding houses in town then because of this. People couldn't go back and forth in a day or two, so there were lots of boarding houses, Japanese boarding houses in town.

MA: Were they segregated? So did Japanese have to stay in their own boarding houses?

NI: It seemed that way then. We had what they call a Japanese town and a Chinatown, too, here. I don't remember the Chinatown too much, but my husband used to talk about it and how they used to celebrate New Year's and shoot firecrackers and so on.

MA: So the Chinatown and the Japantown were separate then?

NI: Kind of separate. I think Chinatown was more in Pajaro across the bridge. Then eventually it burned down, so they came into Watsonville.

MA: What happened there? Why did it burn down?

NI: Fire (...). My husband always used to talk about the big fires in Chinatown. Yeah, couple of big fires, he said.

MA: But it wasn't arson or anything like that, or just kind of an accident?

NI: It was an accident, I think. You know how the buildings were so rickety in those days.

MA: And so then do you know when that was? When the Chinese moved from Pajaro into Watsonville?

NI: Oh, it must have been before, gee, I think I was almost in high school, so it must have been late, in the '20s and '30s. They were merchants, you know, they had grocery stores, dry goods store, things like that.

MA: Did they do business a lot with the Japanese?

NI: Oh, yes. Got along pretty good, I think. Very good, in fact, I should say.