Densho Digital Archive - Alice E. Sumida Interview (denshovh-salice

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MR: This is an interview with Alice Sumida, a Nisei woman, ninety years old, at Portland Community Media, in Portland, Oregon, on January 25, 2005. The interviewer is Margaret Barton Ross of Oregon Nikkei Legacy Center's Oral History Project. Good afternoon, Mrs. Sumida, and thank you so much for coming to talk with us today.

AS: Good afternoon.

MR: I'd like to just start out by asking the circumstances of your birth, where were you born and when?

AS: Uh-huh. Well, I was born in Oso Flaco, California, which is in Santa Barbara County, and --

MR: And your birth date?

AS: And my birthday is July 18, 1914.

MR: What did your family do in California?

AS: My father was a farmer, so that's what he was doing, growing produce.

[Interruption]

MR: Did you have brothers and sisters?

AS: Yes. I have one brother and seven sisters, no, six sisters.

MR: So there were eight of you?

AS: Yes.

MR: What position were you in the family?

AS: I'm number three.

MR: When you were growing up, did the children help your parents?

AS: Well, when I was three, my father moved to Pismo Beach, California, and my two oldest sisters were sent to Japan to study Japanese and the culture of the country. So I was the oldest, and my younger brother right below me was born, so I helped take care of him whenever I was able to.

MR: And in Pismo Beach, what was the family work?

AS: My father grew green peas. It's called dry land farming. They have to depend on the rain for irrigation, no irrigation whatsoever at that time. And so that's what he grew, and he had about five or six men working for him, single men.

MR: Where did you go to school?

AS: I was too young yet to go to school when we were in Pismo Beach. My mother in those days had to hitch a horse and, to get groceries in town, so I rode with her. We always dressed up very nicely when we went out, not like today. And she would drive the horse and buggy right onto Pismo Beach. And in those days, she just put her bucket into the sandy soil, had a bucket full of baby clams. That's how plentiful the clams were at that time. And she'd bring them home and fix them for a meal. And what was leftover, she fed it to the chickens, so they had a very good meal. And I was not attending school then. After my father moved again to Los Osos, California, which is in San Luis Obispo County, then I was placed in a children's home, a Buddhist temple dormitory. That's when I was six, and I cried a lot for my mother. She left me there, and I was there from six years to twelve years and went home only during summer vacation and winter vacation, and it was very, very difficult. I was not the only one. There were thirty young boys and thirty, about thirty girls, young girls about my age, and so we cried a lot in those days. But, we were, went to the public school during the day, learn English. Then as soon as we came home, the upstairs of the dormitory was Japanese language school, so we went upstairs and studied Japanese. And then when we, it was over, we came downstairs, had our meals, and the regulation there was very strict. We would help set the table, and the older ladies who were there would help cook the meal. Then we had to pray. They would put on a long classical record, and we had to pray until the record finished which is very long, but I learned a lot of music like the "Traumerei," different classical musics. I am glad for that. But it was a very difficult life there. The daily life was very, very strict. And after we had our meal, we help clean, and then we had to go to the temple and pray because it was a Buddhist temple. After we prayed, we came back to the dormitory, and we had to study, do homework for Japanese school and English school, two schools, and we had to finish by nine o'clock; otherwise, they put the light out at nine, so we tried very hard to do both. And then we had to brush our teeth and go to bed.

Then next morning, we had to get up early and make our bed, clean our room, and help with the breakfast table. After we finished, why we had to clean everything up before we went to school. And for our lunch, we had one sandwich, buttered sandwich and one fruit, apple or orange, and no sandwich meat or cheese or anything inside. So lunchtime at school, we would sit on the porch, and children from outside of the home would be eating such delicious sandwich with the meat and all kinds of delicious food, and they would have cake and cookies, and so we just, oh, we just looked at them, wish we had a little bit of it. But that's, that was our life there, very frugal, you might say. And when we came home from school, we were so hungry, because the lunch was not much of a lunch, and we had to go straight upstairs to study Japanese. There was a Japanese cook hired there. He was so nice. He would slip us one hard piece of candy like quietly so the lady of the house wouldn't see, and we would be so happy to get that hard candy. I remember that so much because we were hungry all the time. Anyway, that was the gist of our life at the dormitory I lived in from my six years old to twelve years old. And the children there were so unhappy living there. They were hungry all the time. They missed their parents, so they decided to disband the dormitory. And so when I came home to my parents, I was so happy, and there was a country school.