<Begin Segment 15>

KL: I know some of your siblings left before you did. Would you just walk me through your family's departure from Tule Lake, what you remember of it or what you've learned since?

SK: Well, my sister went to Beverly Hills and worked for a doctor's family. I'm trying to remember how long she was gone.

KL: The roster's hard to read. It looks kind of like she left... oh, I didn't write it down. It looks like she left in 1945, maybe kind of late in the year, middle of the year. But she went to work for a doctor's family?

SK: Uh-huh. Oh, no, I think she stayed with a friend for a while until she found a...

KL: Why did she choose Los Angeles?

SK: A friend. A friend recommended Los Angeles, that's how she worked. And Nobu came to San Francisco, and he was enrolled in City College San Francisco. But he was called home to help with the... we were moving to a ranch or something, and he was needed at home, so that was the end of his career as a student, he never finished. So my two older sibs never made it to college because they were called on to help the family finances. After the... are we ready to move on now?

KL: Yeah, yeah, I am if you are.

SK: Yeah, well, after we left camp, we had no place to go, so we went to Penryn, and we lived in, the Gotos had a hostel and we stayed there for a while. And then we stayed at the church social hall for a while until my father was released. And then things were really tough, and so we used to get the Nichi Bei Times, and there was an ad in the Nichi Bei Times for what they used to call schoolgirl, domestic, in San Mateo. And I was only fourteen at the time, so I came to San Mateo, I was kept in... and I worked in San Mateo for two years as a schoolgirl. And then...

KL: What was that like, to leave your family and go work and live in someone else's home?

SK: You just knew. Again, it's something that you help your family out, and that was one less person to feed, one less person to clothe, that kind of thing. And so then I went to the San Mateo High School and graduated from San Mateo High School.

KL: Who was the family that you worked for?

SK: Coppage, C-O-P-P-A-G-E.

KL: And what kind of work did you do?

SK: Well, a housemaid, you know, cooked or helped with the cooking, did the laundry, cleaned the house, and I had to do it every day, that kind of stuff, and got room and board and fifty dollars a month, and that was a lot of money in those days. And then I took a bus to school, then I went to the San Mateo Buddhist church.

KL: Yeah, I'll have to think of you when I'm there.

SK: Pardon me?

KL: I'll have to think of you, I'll think of you when I'm there.

SK: Then I started in junior college. Meanwhile, my original family moved to Palo Alto, so I had to find a new family. And I went to one family and it didn't work out, so I went to a third family. My father heard what was going on, and he says, "Come home." So I went home, and so I went to junior college from home, but there again, I worked for... I guess she was the vice principal of the junior college, I worked and cleaned her... see, we went by bus, and we couldn't just come home once classes were over. So until the buses left, I used to clean her apartment. And that's how I worked my way through college, and after that, I worked at Sacramento State College, I mean, went to Sacramento State College, again, worked in a private home near the campus and worked to the campus that way. Then I got tired of that and borrowed money and moved in with a bunch of, near campus, and this boarding house, or rooming house, because we couldn't do our own cooking and everything. So I did that for a year, and graduated from college, I was the first to graduate from college in the family. So that pretty much sums things up. And then I went from there to, see, I was a... went from there to Berkeley, and got a job in a continuation high school and taught for three years, got my tenure, and then got married. I guess I got pregnant, so anyway, when it was time to go back, I said, "No, I'm going to stay home and take of you." And I did that for, stay home for, until our youngest was in kindergarten.

KL: Okay.

<End Segment 15> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.