<Begin Segment 11>

JA: How was your mother coping with this whole experience of Manzanar?

SE: Well, she seemed to be healthy, but after we got, out I noticed she had arthritis and her left arm was kind of useless and when, while we were at Manzanar, we bought her clothes, dresses that button down the front so she could get into them, you know, without raising her arm. About 1940 -- I came back from Madison, Wisconsin, in 1948, her arm was okay, but she had bad teeth and we had to have all her teeth fixed. During the camp, she seemed to be pretty independent and doing a lot of things she wanted to do, but never said anything about how hard it was for her to have lost the store and to have to start over again. And since most all of us in the family had -- were grown up and working, we tried to get her not to work, but she wanted to keep busy so she would go out and do work like sorting walnuts in a small business, or I think freezing was coming in so she would go to a place where they were freezing shrimp into cartons. And she would sort out the shrimp, and we tried to get her to stop that work because her hands were always in water and it was cold water. Eventually she did stop working and she went to work for the Buddhist Temple, which she was a member, and she was a very devout Buddhist, and she went every day to cook for that priest there. I think she enjoyed that a lot. But she never talked about what happened, until many years later when we were talking and she said, "You know, the first couple of weeks we were in Manzanar, I used to walk all the way up to the orchard and I used to sit there and cry, but after a couple of weeks I decided that was not very productive and stopped doing that," and then she started to go to work and doing different things, taking care of my nephew. Even at the time when people were campaigning for redress in the early '80s and we talked about it, she said, "Oh yes, all those people who lost so much money and property, they really should be compensated." Never thought of herself, because she lost the grocery store and a future where she could have been a little bit more...

JA: Tell me again about where your mother went to be alone and why.

SE: She went up --

JA: Instead of saying "she," because my question won't be heard, speak "my mother."

SE: My mother was... I guess -- we were living in Block 20, which is sort of in the middle of the camp. The orchards were up I would say about half a mile toward the mountains, and my mother told me years later that she used to walk up there after we had all left, after breakfast, and go up to the orchard and sit there and cry, and she said she did that every day for a couple of weeks and none of us knew that. And then, then she decided that that was kind of a useless thing to do, so she stopped doing that and she looked around for things she could do in the camp.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2002 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.