Densho Digital Archive - John Young Interview (denshovh-yjohn-01-0011)

<Begin Segment 11>

RM: Let's jump back to your wife. Can you just, for the record, tell us her name?

JY: Yeah, Kiyoko, Kay Ishihara, I should say.

RM: And what did you know about her parents?

JY: Well, she had good parents, she could speak fluent Chinese. In fact, she went in to a Chinese store after she was taking care of my mother for a couple of years, and they said, "Here comes that Japanese girl," and she would tell them in Chinese, "I can understand Chinese fluently." And they respected her after that.

RM: When did she learn Chinese?

JY: Well, she had to communicate with my mother, that's how she learned. And she would in turn tell me, she said, "You're sure dumb, you can't even speak Japanese." I said, "That's how your mother and I get along, we just nod at each other and smile." [Laughs] Which I never did learn.

RM: So tell me a little bit, you mentioned that earlier, before we started this interview, you mentioned that both of your parents, her parents and your parents, didn't necessarily -- how did they feel about the two of you dating each other?

JY: Well, they were, after we got married, they finally came over and met my parents. And what could they do? We were married and got along. In fact, when we moved down to, on Wall Street, 21st and Wall Street, I beat up the father because he was hurting the mother. I dragged him out in the hallway and hit him in the stomach and he just crumbled. And the older brother... the older brother, Roy, and my wife was from a different father, and the father died during the Sacramento Flu in 1928 or '29. And he was abusing her, and I dragged him out and hit him. So the older brother called the police and took him into jail, and somebody bailed him out.

RM: Where did her parents live?

JY: Well, they had that hotel on First Street. She was doing all the work and he was a gambler, so all he did was gamble. In fact, when we had our daughter, Beverly, she was going to go in and visit the mother and she was kind of afraid of the father. So the brother, who was a huge guy, the whole family was big for Japanese. In fact, one of the brothers was six-two and a half, and he went to Japan and went like this, all the relative was under his arm. Dinky, yeah, he was the second boy. And so the older brother said, "Come in, I'll protect you, don't worry." But then the father fell in love with my daughter and took her all over, show her off and all. He had to accept that we were married and all that, though. I'm sorry I never got back together with them, because he died in New Jersey. Because we could have become friends. So that's the only thing I was sorry about.

RM: Did your wife have siblings?

JY: Oh, yeah, he had, let's see, Roy, Dinky, Fumi just died last month, and Hideo. Hideo had heart problems, in fact, I'm still in contact with the sister-in-law Nancy. In fact, we knew four Nancy, and we called them "Big Nancy" and "Little Nancy, "Teeny-weeny Nancy," they were all Nancy.

RM: Did you tell your parents, or did Kay tell her parents that you two were dating?

JY: No, but I told them I was gonna marry a Japanese girl, and that's when I told you that I thought my father would raise hell, but he didn't. He said, "Just bring her around and let me look at her.

RM: What did her parents think of you?

JY: They didn't say much. After we were married, they came over and visited our parents and all that. They had to accept because we were married and living together, they couldn't do anything. We had a daughter.

RM: So you two met in high school, and then when did you graduate from high school?

JY: Summer of '41. She did the same time.