<Begin Segment 5>

KL: I have one more question about San Francisco actually before we move on to the kids. I wondered if you have a sense of how racially or culturally integrated your parents' lives were, if they, you know, you had that chicken story of being in a store that was run by someone who was not Japanese, and then it sounds like their customers, some were navy, some were wealthy people. Do you have a sense for if your parents moved pretty easily kind of between groups of people, or if they were mostly around Japanese Americans and Japanese immigrants?

MS: I would imagine mostly with the Japanese immigrants. Because of the clientele he had, they had to, they felt it was better to move the shop downtown. So I don't think they really had any problems.

ST: Never spoke of any.

MS: But do you know Dad's ear problem, that was early on.

ST: That was when they went to the market.

MS: Somebody threw an apple at him and broke his eardrum. So he always had ear problems. To the very end he had that ear problem, because he never had it fixed.

KL: Did he say why they threw the apple at him?

MS: No. I thought Mom said that at that time there were some gangs running around.

ST: Yeah, they had some kind of a strike at that time.

KL: Did you have anything else?

LP: I used to work at Angel Island State Park for about four years, and I was curious, since you mentioned your mom's connection to Angel Island, have you been back there just to visit or to see sort of what the immigration facility looked like or anything?

MS: I've been there.

ST: Yeah.

MS: You know, with Jeanie's parents, because they came to there also. But we didn't go in the building or anything. It's open now, right, that you can actually go into the buildings. But when we went, we weren't allowed to go into any of the buildings.

LP: Did you visit that site knowing at the time that your mother had been held there?

MS: Yeah, I knew. But I went with our daughter-in-law's parents, and they're Chinese. And he was, it was very nostalgic for him because he actually stayed in some of those buildings and everything, and he showed us where he stayed and they played baseball here and there and stuff like that. So it was more his story that we got, because I had no information about what my mother did there.

LP: Did your father ever talk about his first impressions of your mother? It sounded like earlier you talked more about your mother's...

MS: Not really.

ST: Never talked hardly ever to my father.

MS: And yet, you know, he did care about us, and we knew, but it was kind of funny because I know when we were little, we knew that we were getting too rambunctious and he was getting annoyed because he would go... [clears throat], and that meant we better shut up. [Laughs] Right? Mom was always the buffer. It was just like when Ack broke his leg, remember? I guess they were playing basketball, he was sitting up on the stand there, and he jumped down and he ended up breaking his leg. And I guess they were supposed to be home helping with the farm, so Mom didn't tell him that the kids were out having fun. So here he comes home with his leg in a cast, and with crutches, she kind of had him hidden in the bedroom, but he finally had to come out at dinner time. But he didn't say anything, here he came out with crutches and everything, and looked at him, but he never said anything. He probably said something to Mom later, "What happened to him?" [Laughs]

KL: Farm accident.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2015 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.