<Begin Segment 9>

RM: Let's talk about how you met your wife.

JY: High school.

RM: Do you remember the first time meeting her?

JY: Oh, yeah, I had a class with her. In fact, there was an opening in another class, and I left. [Laughs] That's how we got attracted to each other. She asked me to a Sadie Hawkins dance, that's how it all started. I said, "Gee, I have to work." I parked cars in Chinatown, that's how we learned to drive back in the late '30s, '38, '39. So I made a date with her later, and she had to call me from the restaurant below the hotel, and that's how we got together. Got to like each other, started going around, started holding hands in the auditorium. [Laughs]

RM: Was it common for women --

JY: Japanese and Chinese?

RM: Well, that, too, yeah, was that common?

JY: No, it wasn't. In fact, this friend of mine, David, he's still alive, and he's about two years older than I am, they owned the General Lee restaurant up in Chinatown. Used to tell people, "Oh, yeah, Johnny goes around with a Japanese girl." And next thing I knew, he married a Japanese girl and he worked in a restaurant. So we still remain friends. But he was a brilliant student. I got mad at him for not going to college, because he would have made a great engineer, or even a doctor. He thought that restaurant was the greatest. In fact, when my wife died, my wife was very... well, she was a good person. She picked out her sister, his sister, as my next girlfriend, but we grew up together. We were playing around, and three o'clock, I had no feeling for her, just good friends. In fact, she's come over here for dinner after the husband died. That's about it.

RM: What about, was it common for women to ask out men?

JY: Sadie Hawkins day.

RM: It was a special event, then.

JY: Yeah, a special day. So that's when the girls have a chance to ask the boys, just to a dance, that's all.

RM: And she'd had her eye on you?

JY: Yeah, we both looked at each other and, I guess, liked what we saw. That's about it.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.