<Begin Segment 6>

RP: What did your father do in Menlo Park, Kinge?

KO: He wound up, originally, did a little bit of a, you might say, farm type work. There was a Chinese family over toward Atherton that had a, I think, flower farm, flower growers, anyway. And, in fact, chrysanthemum growing, had a fair, couple acres, I guess, of chrysanthemum farm. And he had, for about six months or a year, my father and mother did the work at the chrysanthemum place. And the reason I remember that is that I got to work in the chrysanthemums. In order to keep me occupied, we had no babysitter, they taught me how to pick the excess buds and stuff off the chrysanthemum. So I did my little share, for what little worth it was. It kept me busy. And we had, essentially, we ate with a Chinese family, and I got to learn to like Chinese food. [Laughs]

RP: Uh-huh. Did you pick up any of the language, too?

KO: No, almost no language. I think the communication was more or less in English. The common language, broken English on both parts.

RP: So you had contact with Chinese, did you have contact with other ethnic groups as well while you were growing up?

KO: Yeah, yeah. The, in Menlo Park, we lived on Mill Street, right parallel to the railroad, one block off the railroad. And we had an Irish family next door, and down the block was an Italian family. And so we mutually got into trouble playing with each other. And we all essentially were in school at almost the same grade, so I think one of the kids, yeah, one of the kids of the Italian family was the same grade I was, and he had an elder brother. Typical Italian family, he had several brothers, obviously. And the Irish family was the same way. One kid was younger, one kid was my age, one kid was older. And interesting enough, the older brother had a shoe repair business in Menlo Park after the war. So I met him a few times, and when I came back from the camp at that time. And we traded greetings and stuff. It was sort of interesting, the few people we left, that we knew from before the war were still around. I think only about one or two others from my grade school period was still around at that time. They had all either gone somewhere else, or... same thing as that, like this guy was a shoe store, shoe repair place, since we were next door neighbors for quite a while, we recognized each other and chatted for a while. Unfortunately, I guess, he's no longer there anymore. The shoe store, obviously, isn't there.

I met one of the other girls that was in my elementary school class. She was taking, let's see, she was taking teacher's course, school course in San Jose State after the war. (We met) after the war, chatted, and we went to, I guess the time I went to school for a couple years at San Jose State, we would run into each other every now and then. But she was in a different part of the school so it wasn't too common. We had a couple of common courses, I think, art history and stuff like that. That was about it.

<End Segment 6> - Copyright © 2008 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.