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KL: So there's a question in this booklet that, the oral history booklet, that says, "What was your life after camp?" And you said, "This is a long story, ask me about it." What else did you want to record about your...

MM: It is so long, really. First of all, we had the three children in Ogden, while we served an Ogden church. And Charise was born, Michal was born, and Alisa, she suffered from seizure when she was six months old. The doctor said she was a normal delivery, although she was a breach baby, but now as I think back on it, the air must've been cut off and that affected her, and her brain, we discovered, wasn't developing like a normal child. And when they told me that she was going to be mentally handicapped I went into depression, because there were other women in the church having babies and their babies were okay, but mine wasn't. And to see the normal ones growing up, walking and talking, and mine not doing that, it just tore me apart. And I, for one year I just cried and cried. I just couldn't get over it, couldn't get past it. And then one Sunday in church, I was singing in the choir then, and we sang this offering hymn, "We give thee but thine own, whate'er the gift may be. All that we have is thine alone, a trust, O Lord, from thee." Boom, it hit me. Alisa was a trust from the Lord to me. And I just burst down and cried because the Lord trusted me with this baby, and here I was crying and being depressed and upset and all that. I said, well... and then the doctors told us to throw the baby away, by putting her into the state hospital and forgetting about her. And I said, "We can't do that, throw the baby away like that." I said, "That's, that's not right." So then that made me angry enough to say, okay, now what's the next thing that I've got to do? I've got to go learn how to teach this child.

So I went back to college and I took courses on how to help a handicapped child, and when I learned that I came home and I did it. And I taught her how to read, we taught her manners, that we have to have nice manners, we have to be clean and be clean, not messy or dirty. So she's very fussy that way today. [Laughs] She doesn't like to be dirty. She'll come home and she says, "I got to take a bath, or take a shower," 'cause she doesn't like to be dirty. Then after that, when I'm trying to teach her something and I get frustrated, I would spank her, but two pairs of eyes were watching, and I didn't know that. And the two pairs of eyes, when they were playing with their little sister, they got frustrated too, and they'd start hitting her, and I saw that, God made me see that. So I went over there and I said to the girls, I said, " Alisa is a precious baby and we have to have more patience with her, girls." And so they never did it after that. So God taught me all kinds of things along the way, how to, and to be concerned about her future. Start planning now, train her now, to leave the home at a certain age. Michal about it in the home, so at suppertime we're all talking about it. " Charise is gonna go to college, Michal is gonna go to college, and Alisa, you're gonna leave, too." Okay, so she accepted it, and when the time came at nineteen, she just went. She didn't fuss, she didn't cry. First day of school, at three years old, a training school opened up, she didn't, she just went in and she didn't even cry or anything, whereas the other two, they cried their head off if I left 'em at school. Alisa was just different. So just different things like that, I was trained, I really was trained. And in my training, I applied it to starting a camp for special, mentally handicapped Asian children, because when we checked around we found out that families kept 'em at home because they couldn't trust other people to take care of their kids for one week away from home. They were afraid they were going to be mistreated. But after they found out about our camp, they start letting their kids come. They were from Buddhist homes, mostly Buddhist homes, but because the kids had such a wonderful time and they'd come home and tell their parents, full of joy, well, that's really something.

KL: What's the camp's name?

MM: Special Camp, with the Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society. It's called JEMS, J-E-M-S, Japanese Evangelical Missionary Society. And this camp that we started forty years ago is still going on with different leaders. And Alisa went the first thirty years, and I, by now she has a job in Southern Cal, she's happy where she is, so she doesn't have to go to camp anymore. She needs to let somebody else come. So that's what's happened. So that, and then Charise became mentally ill at the age of fifteen, and it was the most devastating, frustrating experience of our life, because she would be, she would be up and down in spirit, down the next. If she was up, we were, I was up; if she was down, I was down. I mean, I couldn't take this. So we went to doctors, counseling, we tried all kinds of therapy for her. Nothing helped, until the parents organized -- because they had children like Charise, and they organized and called it National Alliance for the Mentally Ill, and that became a powerful group. They raised money and, for research, and the money for research helped our kids to, for new medication so it will control some of their, the things that they were experiencing. Like Charise was experiencing loud voices in her head shouting very mean things, "You're no good, you're an 'it.' Why don't you die?" I mean things like that. She would tell me, "Mom, can't you hear the voices?" And I'm sitting right next to her and I said, "I'm sorry, I can't hear it." She says, "They're screaming at me. I got to --" and then she's screaming back. She says, "Stop it," she's yelling. It was scary, because the neighbors, I mean, she's yelling, the neighbors are thinking that I'm beating her. I said, "You got to keep it down." So it was an awful time, so my, his sister said, "Well, you've tried everything. Why don't you try faith healing? There's a bible school in Tennessee, Cleveland, Tennessee. Go there and see what they teach about faith healing." Well, I didn't know Sab didn't believe in that. But he allowed me to go, and so I had, I said, "I'm not going unless some people are praying for us, definitely committed to pray for us," because it's scary dealing with Charise. I don't know what she's gonna do on the bus, and we're gonna go by Greyhound bus, three days and the fourth day reach there. And things did happen on the trip, but nobody paid any attention to her, so we made it. And when I got there, the faith healing teacher met me, and when he met me he left the school. I don't know if I scared him or what.

KL: Yeah, I hadn't thought about that before.

MM: Yeah, it must've scared him, because I said, "I have a daughter that's very ill and needs help." And he left. He was to be the faith healing teacher and he left, and I felt so abandoned. And I phoned Sab, and I said, "Well, I made it up to here. I might as well stay and go to the Bible School and see what they teach." And it was a charismatic Bible School, very, very small-minded in some ways, where they felt the devil was in Charise. I didn't know that. They thought it was the devil in people who are mentally ill, because they act so weird, and the devil needs to be exorcised out or whatever. They used to have healing sessions where you go up and they put your hand, they put their hand on you and pray, and some people just fall down. I don't know if they do that automatically or what, but anyway, things like that happened at the Bible School. And they sang in tongues. Are you familiar with that?

KL: A little bit. I've seen it.

MM: That is beautiful, singing in tongues is a very beautiful harmony. It's beautiful. But anyway, so when Charise, when I was at my wit's end and I told, I told God one night, I said, "I am so tired and I am at the end of my rope. I just can't do this anymore." I said, "I want you to zap me dead right now. And I'm waiting." [Laughs] And my two girls are sleeping on the bed, I'm on the floor, and I said, "I'm waiting, God. You do it. I'm telling you to do it." I'm telling God what to do. God doesn't do what you tell him to do. You don't order God around. Anyway, I ended up falling asleep, and the next morning at seven o'clock, two students from the bible school came and they said, "Marion, it's us. We came to help you." Two angels from the school came to help me, and they were my help, really wonderful. One was a black lady and one was a white girl Charise's age, and so we became three and now I had help to ease my burden while there. And I think it was about maybe halfway through the Bible School year, and so I said, "Why don't we all three live together? And we'll save expenses that way." So we shared expenses and we just got along swell. Then one day two students from the bible school came and said, "We want to pray over Charise." "Pray over Charise?" I said okay, so they took her and they beat her up, beating the devil out of her and locking her in a closet. And Charise did not tell me this when they brought her back. She was just kind of out of it. When you see her face there, she didn't look like that. She just looked like, she just looked like somebody else, not herself. But she told me what happened years later, and I felt so bad. This was years later she told me, and I said, "Why didn't you tell me?" Well, she was out of it, but she said, "They beat me and they locked me in a closet, and I was so frightened." But I guess in a way that... well, it affected her life. It did. So that's another experience.

<End Segment 26> - Copyright © 2014 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.