Densho Digital Archive - Helen Mori Interview (denshovh-mhelen

<Begin Segment 5>

RP: So where, so you grew up in Gardena then.

HM: Uh-huh. Moneta. In those days the homes weren't all solid. So I used to cut through the lots to get to grammar school. And it's, funny thing was one of the friends in our club here, I heard he went to Denker Avenue, which is a grammar school I went to, up to second grade. And he, I said, "I went to Denker Avenue too." He was so surprised. I said, "Well of course that was a long time ago." You know, it wasn't city streets. I just went through the lots and got to the school. But, it's still there.

RP: So what do you remember looking, thinking back to Gardena when you were growing up?

HM: What do I remember?

RP: Like, what kind of community was it? Was it predominately farming? Or...

HM: No, no. It wasn't near farm, farmers were further out. It was like any other community I would say, mixture, Asians, white people, uh, ordinary. It was a small little area. Moneta especially was a small little area. They had lumberyards and that kind of thing still right in that, right there. That lumberyard's long gone, but, that used to be there. Train used to go by, the tracks, train tracks. Other than that, nothing stuck in my mind really.

RP: And, your, did you have siblings? You had a brother?

HM: Well, they got married in camp. My mother in Manzanar, my mother married my stepfather in Manzanar. And so my brother was born a year after that. He was born in Manzanar, 1944.

RP: That's it.

HM: Huh?

RP: Just your brother?

HM: Yes. I says, "How come you didn't have more kids?" And she said, "We didn't know what the situation was going to be like when they let us out of this camp." And so they stopped right there. And they never had any after either because after the war was a struggle. We had to start all over. It was a real struggle.

RP: So, your dad passed away when you were very young?

HM: My natural father, yeah.

RP: And so your mom raised you.

HM: She raised me, uh-huh. And, and she taught Japanese school, which probably didn't pay much. And she would tell me that one family just came with two celery, one on each arm. That was... they couldn't pay the gessha, which is the fee, monthly fee that they pay the Japanese school. Yeah. And what she did was she went, she tutored the farmer kids at night. I never saw my mother. Yeah, there was a Caucasian lady that babysat me. And I would eat there and everything. And then my mother would come late at night and pick me up. But the farmers would pick her up, take them to their house. She'd tutor the kids and then they'd drive her back to Gardena to the house and then she'd come and get me. So to supplement the income I guess. She probably had a hard time.

RP: Did you, did you take the language classes with her?

HM: No. Oh, I think I had her one time. I think it was at the one, the last one we had, second grade. I didn't like that. I never studied at home though with her. I just went to Japanese school.