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MR: Were there other Japanese children in your school?

MB: Yes. There were quite a few Japanese going to Woodlawn School at the time, and in our class alone, there were six of us; my cousin, Chiseo Shoji and Frank Maeda and Mieko Fujimoto and Yaye Akai besides Orga and myself. And the funny thing is when I was in the second grade, I learned that I was different from other children. The teachers picked on me. Any time something disappeared or some prank was played, the teacher always scolded me. She never asked who did this or who did that. It was always me she punished. And for a long time, I thought, I thought about it, but I was the only one being punished. At first, I thought, well, I'm Japanese, so that's why they were picking on me, but that wasn't the reason because none of the other, they never picked on Orga because she was slow in the head, but the other four were, you know, regular kids, and teachers never picked on them, so it was just me. There were something the matter with me that the teacher picked on me. Well, so I thought, well, it must be because I'm ugly, and it must be because even though Mama kept us clean, we looked, you know, we looked dirty. I mean, she washed our clothes and saw to it that we were dressed neat, but she never took time to iron them, so we looked messy, I guess, and so that's why the teacher picked on me.

MR: So how did that make you feel about school?

MB: Well, in school, I did, funny to say, but I did pretty well in school, and lots of times like when they gave a test, I'd have the highest grade. And I know in the lower grades like the third and fourth grade, the teacher would give stars for the person that got the best grade, I mean, the best grade got a gold star. The next highest grade got a silver star; blue star, green star, and white star. And whenever I won and got the highest grade, the teacher never could find her box of gold stars, or she'd say, "I'm all out of them. When I get them, I'll give you a star," but I never did get a star. And at end of the year, all the stars were counted up, and those who had the most stars, most of the gold stars, most of the silver stars, you know, like that would get a prize, and that used to make me cry, and I'd go home and I'd cry. And Mama always said, "Kamisama knows, God knows. And as long God knows, that's all that matters." But it took me about two years before I stopped crying because it hurt that, you know, the teachers would pick on me, and they'd ostracize me. But later on, it paid off because in later years, teachers wouldn't let me participate in games or participate in whatever the class was doing. And this one teacher, my geography class teacher, when we were studying Arabia brought, passed out dates to all the students. She passed all the dates, and then she was finished passing them out, and she still had one date left in the box, so she asked, "Who didn't get a date?" I raised up my hand. She looked at me and put the date in her mouth. I guess she expected me to cry. I didn't because by then, I realized that people are picking me, picking on me. I'm not going to give them the satisfaction that I hurt. And then I had one best friend, Bonnie London. She always shared her, whatever she got with me. One day, the same teacher had a party the day I was absent, and that day, all the pupils got marshmallows. Well, she saved that marshmallow until the next day so she could share it with me. But by the next day, the marshmallow was hard, and we had a time, you know, cutting it in half. And by the time we got it halved, you know, our hands were sticky, but, oh, how good that marshmallow was. And she shared all her things with us. And in later years after she got married and, her husband, she had married a sailor, and he wasn't a very good provider, and so she raised a lot of her vegetables. Since my folks sold plants, she used to come down to buy plants. And I could remember there were a couple times, two or three times that I had just given her the plants. I had to buy them from my sister, of course, but then I've given to Bonnie. And the last time Bonnie came, my sister said, "No. You're not going to buy any plants for Bonnie. She can buy her own." And so I let my sister win, and I didn't get anything for Bonnie. And the following year, Bonnie was gone. She was dead, and it has bothered me that one last time when Bonnie really needed help, I wasn't there for her. She was so good to me, and here I failed her.

MR: Did you, did you have, was Bonnie your friend through school, and you went all through high school with her?

MB: Uh-huh.

MR: And where did you go to high school?

MB: High school, I went to Jefferson High School. I was the, when I first went to Jefferson High School, I was twelve and the shortest in my gym class, I was the shortest one in my class. Well that summer, I shot up two or three inches. And when I went back in the fall, my sophomore year, I was, instead of being the shortest one in the class, in gym class, I was the thirteenth one about, you know, halfway through the class.

MR: And how did high school, you completed high school at Jefferson?

MB: I completed high school. Teachers in high school picked on me too. One teacher failed me. I failed history five. She'd asked me questions, what she would do was she'd asked me, you know, we had to study our lessons for the next day, but instead of asking us, me questions about what we, I had studied, she'd always me a question for the following day. Of course, I haven't read that, so I couldn't answer that, and that's what she did, and so I finally got to the point where when I went to class, I just sat there. I just, I wasn't going to learn anything from her, so I just sat there, so she failed me that year. And other teachers picked on me. My Latin teacher, I can't think of her name, had both my sister and brother as students, and she'd asked me a question. She did the same thing, asked me questions I couldn't answer. And then she'd say, "May and George were honor students. You don't know anything." And if I couldn't answer a question, she'd make me stay standing, and she'd ask me a question at the beginning of class, so I'd be standing up all the rest of the day. After I graduated from high school, let's see it was in, after I was married, so sometime in the '50s, she came, the Latin teacher came to visit me. She and Dorothy Flagel who was girl's, I mean she was at the school too, she worked with the girls, came with the Latin teacher, and the Latin teacher wanted to, me to forgive her for having treated me badly. She was dying and wanted forgiveness before she went on to her maker. And she remembered how cruelly she treated me, and it wasn't the right thing to do, but I was angry. My mother was angry at me, my sister was angry at me that I wouldn't forgive the teacher, but I never did forgive her. I heard later that when she died with her dying breath, the last thing she said was, "I'm sorry Mabel." But she remembered how cruelly she had treated me. I wasn't a very good student in high school. After I came back from Japan, since I wasn't finished with my senior year, I went back to finish it. But after having been in Japan, I learned how to study. No one had taught me how to study here in America. But back in Japan, they teach you. And so whatever you study, you learn it. And so my last year, I was an honor student.

<End Segment 5> - Copyright © 2003 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.