<Begin Segment 11>

MR: Beyond work, some of the camps had activities for people to do. Did you take part in those?

MB: No, I didn't. I lived, I lived and breathed hospital. I don't know why. I must be a good person. A lot of aides' patients didn't like certain aides, and they'd always asked for Mabel, and so I did a lot of work the other aides didn't do. That's why I spent more time at the hospital.

MR: During the time in camp, how are the holidays celebrated, and what were they like?

MB: Same as any. We never observed any holidays. I don't remember if we had turkey for Thanksgiving. We must have, but I don't remember it. I ate most of my meals at the hospital. Why did I eat at the hospital? It was better food. [Laughs]

MR: When you think of camp, are there any other memories that come to mind that I may not have asked about?

MB: No. My mother liked camp for the simple reason that she had other people she could talk to, you know, and she had her friends, and she learned, in camp, they taught various things. She learned to make crepe paper flowers. Later on, she made silk flowers, and she learned to write, I mean she could write, but she could learn, you know, better. And she took in sewing, joined in the various activities the other ladies were doing, and she more or less enjoyed life other than the fact that she was there all the time that she couldn't leave, but she enjoyed herself. I don't, I never joined in on any of the activities because like I said, I lived and breathed hospital. And I spent more time with my friends, most of the people who worked in the hospital were from Washington, and most of my, they were my friends, and they lived in the smaller blocks. When I say smaller blocks, like Blocks 3, 4, 5, you know, those blocks were closer to the hospital, and I spent a lot of time with the friends, so I was very seldom at home. But to get to home, they had two ambulances, and they brought the workers in the morning and took them home whenever their shift ended. We had three shifts at the hospital; seven to three is the day shift, three to ten, three to eleven was the afternoon shift, and the graveyard shift was eleven to seven. And we used to... oh, the hospital staff, we used to party. We had, for fun, you know, they would get together and have different activities, and that's how I met my fiance in camp. I was going with the pharmacist, that, you know, found me when I had a heart attack and we were supposed to go on a date, and he never showed up, eight o'clock, he never showed up, so I thought, well, I got stood up. Around about nine o'clock, ambulance driver came, he wanted to take me down to the hospital. I want to know what for. Well, you'll know when you get there. When we got there, he said for me to go to Ward 10. I went there, and there was my boyfriend, my date. He'd had an appendectomy that afternoon, and that's why he hadn't come there. And his best friend was visiting him, and that's how I met Johnny. And within two months, Johnny and I were engaged to be married, and we made plans. We got invitations written up, everything, or being made, and that's when I had my heart attack, and he dumped me. He dumped me Japanese style. In Japan when a man wants to get rid of his girlfriend, he sends her tofu, you know, soybean, tofu. Well, they didn't have tofu in camp, so he sent me a box of stationery. And his mother visited me every day. His parents liked me. But when Johnny broke our engagement, she'd visited me every day at the hospital. And she told me that Johnny had a bad heart, and I heard later he wanted a nurse for a wife.

[Interruption]

MR: When the "loyalty questions" came up, was that an issue in your family?

MB: It was an issue for a lot of people. They talked about how to answer the questions. If I answer it this way, they'll treat us badly. If we answer it that way, we don't really believe this way, but maybe we should answer that way. I mean, it was, they pondered over the questions. We, who were Niseis, it didn't bother us. We just answered them as you would any questionnaire. But after, oh, after they found out that I wasn't a spy and I was free, although they wouldn't let me out of camp, they asked me if I would work for the U.S. Army. They wanted me to work as, since I could read and write Japanese, they wanted me to spy on Japan, read their, decode their letters and see if I could translate them, and things like that, but I couldn't do that. Japan had been real good to me; America had not been good to me. Japan was good to me. I couldn't turn on Japan, so I said "No," so I was stuck in camp. My sister, on the other hand, wanted to get out and she was smart, and so she said she would take the job. And what she did was, well, spied on Japan for America, and she was treated real good. But in doing this, she lost a lot of friends, the Japanese people. I'm glad I didn't, but I just couldn't. Even though I knew the Japanese language real well, I was not about to. Although America was my native country, I wasn't about to turn my back on Japan.

<End Segment 11> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.