<Begin Segment 25>

KL: You guys have done a lot together. I'd value hearing more about, about your life together and about your partnership and what's been important to you guys.

MM: Well, we've had lots of struggles, lots of struggles. I was not born into a Christian home, per se, but... and then to marry a minister just like that, and I was just a young Christian, I can't tell you how hard that was. That's just like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. You don't know what to expect. There's a lot of expectations, and I know I didn't meet all those expectations. And I suffered for about eight years because of these expectations. When the girls gave me showers, they gave me the pastor's wife book. I got seven of those.

KL: What's the pastor's wife book?

MM: Tells you the wife does this and the wife does that, and well, I said I don't do not one of those things. It made me feel so inadequate, really. And he said, and so Sab said to me, "I didn't marry you to do all those things." He said, "I needed you to be by my side, that's all." I said, "I could do the work if you're with me," and so I said, well... but deep down inside I still felt so inadequate. Eight years I suffered. I counted those eight years. And then I, it dawned on me, you know, I have to do what I can do. I can't do what somebody else can do, because I don't have it. So I said, well, what do I do best? And well, I cook meals the best, so I said, I started inviting students, students who would come to the church on Sundays and needed a place to just hang out and talk, so I would invite students or visiting people, visiting the church. So I did that, and it was, it turned out to be pretty nice that I could do that and help people. When they come over, they talk about their life and they talk about their struggles, and I got to learn about people. And I says, you know what, when you feed people the tongue gets loose and they start talking. But if it's just refreshments or something, it's just being polite and nice and then they leave, but when you sit down to a meal together it's a little bit different. I noticed that. I'm very observant that way. And so people started to tell about their life. We had job corps students come to our church in Ogden, and these are children from the backwoods of Kentucky and all the states that were distressed, and they would send these kids to these job corps places where they had job corps training to do some kind of job. And so I learned that these kids were eating squirrels and these animals that they'd catch and things like that. I said, "Oh, really?" And how they lived in the backwoods, and that was so interesting to me. I found that I liked hearing these stories. I just love hearing how other people live or how they do things differently, so it, that kind of became my sort of joy.

KL: You mentioned that you were a young Christian at the time when you and Saburo got together. What caused you to embrace Christianity?

MM: Well, I was almost in an auto accident, and I said, "Oh my gosh," and so I said, "Well, I better go to church and be right with God." And in the meantime, all these friends that I had at the church, that I made friends with, they said, "Marion, we were praying for you." [Laughs] So I had a, I had a group of friends who were praying for me to become a Christian. I said, wow, they were thinking about me that much that they were praying for me, and so I said wow.

<End Segment 25> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.