Densho Digital Archive - Celeste Teodor Interview (denshovh-tceleste-01-0018)

<Begin Segment 18>

RP: Why is the, the story of the Children's Village important to you personally and why should it be important to anybody else?

CT: Because in those days the Children's Village, in the minds of the other people, was nonexistence and we were always unimportant to other people. I felt that growing up. We were, I'm talking about adults. I'm not talking about my peers. But it just seemed like in those days there might have been a stigma of being an orphan or a homeless child with the Isseis and there might have been discrimination, I don't know, with the older children. "No, you can't play with them because they're an orphan," you know? And they would just say things like that, I heard. And, and then there was a, it was more of a stigma after you got out if you were an orphan or a welfare child, to me, because now I'm growing older and I see what the older people went through, older orphans went through, and the discrimination of... and then I saw the, as a teenager I had a boyfriend. He said he was my boyfriend, and everybody liked him because Bill was a terrific diver. He dove for the Olympic team and all this and that, but I thought that he was trying to take advantage of me because I was an orphan. He was trying to make out and things like that and I knew this, so I just told him, I says... oh, he says, "Celeste, will you marry me?" Here I'm thirteen and he is maybe in his twenties and he said, "Will you marry me and we'll have twelve children?" I said, "Goodbye, Bill." I says, "No way. I don't want nothing with you," 'cause I could just see myself barefoot and pregnant and not accomplishing anything in my life. But I thought sometimes these, the Japanese and Chinese men that had, or boys that had parents and they would kind of think that just because I was an orphan I would be an easy come on, which I wasn't because of Ruth. Ruth says that you just don't sleep with boys if, if you're not married and it was as simple as that, 'cause this is wrong.

RP: She instilled that sort of value system early on. You took it in.

CT: I did, in my teenage years, yeah. You'll read in my husband's obituary column that --

RP: And because, because you've gone through that experience as an orphan you just naturally have a great sensitivity to other orphans and other stories, and this person came along during the pilgrimage and her name was Cathy Drake.

CT: Yes. Cathy Drake.

RP: And tell, share with me a little bit about Cathy Drake.

CT: Cathy Drake, I met her at the last pilgrimage and she was so interested in the orphans and she was very nice, and she told me, she says, "You know, I've been drawn to the Manzanar orphans because I was an orphan myself," but this was in Japan and she was a hapa, half Caucasian, half Japanese. So this military couple, they adopted her and Cathy told me that she's been fighting emotional turmoil because she was forced as a little kid to lose her identity of being Japanese, half Japanese, and she says, "You know, Celeste," it wasn't 'til her parents died that she finally felt free to get to know what her identity was. And I said, "Oh my, Cathy." I said, "That is horrible, to have to lose your identity, half of your identity because of that." She says, well, they forced her. "Don't you admit that you're Japanese." This was a Caucasian family that adopted her, military couple. And I says, "Oh my," I says, "It's better to be in an orphanage than to have to go through that." I felt great empathy for her, but, but I think she's doing okay and everything, but she, I think this really has bothered her emotionally, 'cause I'm a psychiatric nurse and I see these sensitivities in people that has affected them, what their childhood has affected them to great lengths sometimes.