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RP: And you, in 1961, you moved down to Huntington Beach?

MK: Yeah, because, do you remember the Watts riots?

RP: Yes, oh very vividly.

MK: All right, at that time we were living outside of Gardena. It was an unincorporated area of L.A. Our children were going to school and it was getting kind of rough. Our oldest son was in junior high school. He would not even take lunch money with him. He said no, that he'll get stopped and most of the Japanese kids, they got stopped. Especially the boys. And they would take their lunch money. They would take their lunch. He, I said, "Well you have to pick up your gym clothes after school." And he said, "I'll come home once and I'll get the money and then I'll go back to school and get my gym clothes." His tennis shoes disappeared someplace. Things like that. And we were just lucky that he was a big enough kid that he didn't get picked on that much. A lot of the Japanese boys were on the smaller side and even if it wasn't school, I mean, I know one of his friends got stopped just walking to and from the library. And there went the money, the wristwatch, whatever. And I thought well, we needed a bigger house to begin with. And I spent one summer just driving all over. We drew a perimeter. I had to go out of the perimeter to find that house in Huntington Beach.

RP: You had some issues with your ethnicity too, in respect to finding a...

MK: Yeah, and it, the student body was quite a mixture. And because Huntington Beach was mostly agriculture in the early days. It was either that or oil, one or the other. And then, so there was, there was a lot of Asians moving into Orange County at that time. We were one of the first ones to move into Orange County. But there was this one Sakioka and he was a big farmer in Orange County. That's how come they got the land for the, that and this other family, Caucasian family, they raised lima beans and what have you. And they're lying, between those two families, that's how come Orange County has a concert hall, a playhouse and all this kind of stuff.

RP: Right. Art Sakioka.

MK: Yeah. And that big South Coast Mall, this Caucasian family started it. Then they built the Crystal Court across the street. It's really nice in that area. Plus you're only, we were only twenty minutes from Disneyland, two miles from the beach. I think my kids were fortunate growing up where they did.

RP: How were, how were you accepted initially in Huntington Beach?

MK: I beg your pardon?

RP: How were you accepted in Huntington Beach?

MK: We were the first Orientals to buy in our tract. And a lot of the families that were in that same area near Watts, first they said, "How come you're moving so far?" And all this kind of... one by one, the families were moving out to Orange County. A lot moved out to Long Beach, in that area, Cypress. But no, everything was all right. They accepted us. It was nice. Huntington Beach, at that time, was a small town. You could go and you write a check. You didn't have to show any I.D. or anything. And it changed the face of the, the Asian face changed when they accepted all the Vietnamese refugees. And then we all got lumped together. They couldn't, they couldn't tell the difference. People couldn't tell the difference. But if they had observed us, they would have seen that we were more like the Caucasians. When you went to a mall, a lot of the refugees would just walk through there like a house on fire. They didn't care who they bumped into or anything. Their manners were terrible. I was appalled. And then to get lumped in with them was even worse. 'Course, the ones that came with money, they were different and a lot of them came with money. 'Cause they moved to Irvine, places like that. The kids were, went to college. And they raised the standards at all the schools that they attended. And I could remember being in a department store and these two women had their little kids running around the china department. And it got on my nerves so badly. I couldn't just stand there and wait my turn. And I said, "I'm sorry, but your boys cannot run around this department like that." Because the salespeople aren't, weren't allowed to say anything to the customers. And after they left she goes, "Oh, thank heavens you were standing there." Well, she was getting nervous. I was getting nervous too that something was gonna wind up on the floor in a thousand pieces and all that kind of stuff. But I kind of resented the fact that I got lumped in with all those refugees and they weren't kind to us in the store. They would ignore us. I'd have to go look for somebody to wait on me. If you went into Nordstrom it was different because they didn't shop at Nordstrom.

RP: At any other store.

MK: But you know like, a lot of the other... May Company and places like that. I thought, I couldn't even get somebody to wait on me. And I, and I was dressed nicely. I dressed up when I went to the store. Then pretty soon I got sloppy about it because I thought well if they're gonna treat me like that I don't have to do that anymore. And our neighbors were just super. They said if we close our eyes you wouldn't know that we were Asian, Japanese. Because we did everything the same way everybody else did.

RP: ...else did, right.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright &copy; 2011 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.