<Begin Segment 20>

RP: So when, when in your time at Topaz did you begin to realize you were stagnating and needed a change? When did that...

TH: Well, people were leaving the camp. My friends, a lot of my young friends were leaving the camp because they had job offers in Cleveland or Chicago or you name it, someplace, they had legitimate job offer and they left. I didn't have a job offer. And I thought, "I'm really stagnating here. I've got to get out." And that's when the opportunity arose, and so my sister and I quickly left camp with my father and mother's blessings, of course.

RP: And you traveled to Ozone Park?

TH: Yes, Ozone Park is in Long Island.

RP: This was... was this the first time you'd ever been out on your own?

TH: Yes, yes. So it was an adventure, but I'm glad we did it and I'm glad we experienced what we experienced. Learned to love the theater, Broadway plays, Radio City Music Hall and things that we were never exposed to before.

RP: Tell us about the, your trip from Topaz to New York.

TH: The trip from Topaz to New York took a few days, more than a few days. We were stranded in Iowa because of a flood, this was in June. And so we had a twelve-hour delay and reached Chicago quite late. We were supposed to meet with friends there. We cut that short, then when we went to New York, we just told our friends, the Yamaguchis, that we would be arriving in New York at such and such a time. Well, I didn't know that New York had two railroad stations, Long Island, I mean, Grand Central Station and Penn Station. So they went to two stations to look for us. But we made it, but it was really nice to see people welcome us. And we were able to freely walk the streets. But I have to tell you one incident, this happened about a month after I had been in New York. I was waiting for the subway train, and a woman kept staring at me and staring at me, and she finally approached me and she said, "Who are you?" I was taken aback, so I couldn't answer. And she said, "Where did you come from?" I said, "California." She said, "But you speak English."

RP: And that was the end of the conversation?

TH: Well, I finally -- in fact, she says, when she asked, "What are you?" and I looked at her blankly, "What race are you?" That's when I said, "I'm Japanese American." "But you speak English."

RP: So you were sponsored by the Yamaguchis, and where did you find work in New York?

TH: Oh, so through the War Relocation office, I forgot what the name of, official name of that office was. We had to report there when we reached New York. They had an employment department, and through them I was able to get a job working for Le Atelier Chic, that is a shop that made very fancy French-style accessories like French-style, I mean, cute little cocktail aprons, cute little lace doily boxes and things that the average person wouldn't even look at. But this was a very small company run by a refugee couple, German refugee couple who came to the U.S. just two years prior to that, and they started this little business. And they were very, very sympathetic to me and my other Japanese friend who worked there. And besides the two of us, there was only one black girl and another Caucasian girl who worked in the place. And the interesting thing about this is this black girl was not able to ride that elevator to the fifth floor where the lofts shop was. She had to climb the stairs. Not because her bosses said so, but because the black elevator man said, "Fannie, you don't belong here. You walk up the stairs." We had a ride every day up and down, but she had to walk it.

RP: So you went from a sixteen dollar a month salary to twenty-five dollars a week.

TH: [Laughs] I got the big salary of twenty-five dollars a week. And I had to set aside five dollars for the rent, five dollars for the food we had in our community kitchen, and five dollars for my lunch money. And then I had some leftover, that's what we spent on the shows and things. And the kosher delis. I loved the, I loved the kosher delis. That was new to me.

RP: A country girl in Manhattan? A country girl in Manhattan?

TH: Oh, yeah. I mean, here I was, this country bumpkin, going to Manhattan. I learned to walk very fast in the city, and keep my elbows out, especially in the subways, so that I can just turn my body around and free myself of a lot of things.

RP: And your sister Mary, was she, she was with you, right?

TH: Yes. We went together. She worked in a couterier shop. But as soon as California opened up, we came home.

RP: March 1945?

TH: Yes. Oh, but I have to tell you, when we went to report at the relocation office in New York City, we were admonished not to congregate as Japanese people. "Don't get together in the street and make a group. Be very discreet." We were.

RP: Did you come across other Japanese Americans who had left camp in New York?

TH: Yes. New York wasn't that popular a destination for the people out of camp, because I said before, jobs were, there weren't any real job offers like there were in Cleveland and in Chicago and the Midwest had better job offers.

RP: So what happened to the rest of your family during this time? Did they all remain in Topaz?

TH: In 1944, my uncle (George) and his wife (Tamaye) and daughter (Carol) left to work in Nebraska in an ordinance depot. My father was in and out of camp as a seasonal worker. Jim was, of course, in school, (UConn), that left my mother, my grandmother, and my younger brother Kei in camp. And before we came back to California, my sister and I stopped in Topaz and we came home together as a family unit. My brother Jim and my father had a pickup truck they drove home from Topaz to Redwood City, and so they met us at San Francisco at the Ferry Building where we came home by train from Topaz. So we're finally together in 1945.

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2010 Manzanar National Historic Site and Densho. All Rights Reserved.