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DS: So World War II ended in 1945. And what did you do after the war, and how did you decide to return to Seattle?

LT: I was working in Chicago, I think I was working at the optometry college. And I had a lot of friends in Chicago, and my sister, my two sisters were there. My youngest sister Jane, she had married. Yeah, she had married before I came back, and my other sister was there, and I had a lot of friends in Chicago. And this one year, my mother wanted to see her granddaughter, who was my sister Beth's oldest daughter. Audrey was five and a half years old, and so I took her home on the train. I took her back to Seattle on the train. And Audrey was five and a half, and I think when you turn five, you have to pay child's passage on the train. So I told Audrey, I said, "Audrey, I'm going to pretend like you're four and a half because I don't have to pay fare for you." So I said, "If you meet anybody, you're not to say you're five, you're to say you're four and a half." She was insulted. She met some friends on the train, and she had to tell them she was five. [Laughs] I didn't want to pay fare for her.

So I took her back to see my mother, and when I was there, I had some friends in Portland, so I went down, took the train and went down to see my friends in Portland. And one of the fellows said, oh, he'd be happy to drive us around, so three of us get out of the thing, Portland girls, we got in his car and he took us around and we went to see Lillian Toyota. We knew her in camp, all of us knew her in camp. She was married to Tom Toyota. And we dropped in to see her for half an hour or so, and then Lillian called, wanted to know what my address in Seattle was. And she sent her brother up, who was Ray, she told her brother about this gal who came to see her the other night with some of the girls, and, "She's from Chicago, and you ought to go up to Seattle to see her." So what's what he did. He came up to Seattle to see me. Yeah, and then he went back and would you believe he brought his mother and father up to see me? [Laughs] That was something. He brought his mother and father up to Seattle to meet me. And they had some friend in Seattle who also knew my mother, and so he wanted us to have dinner with him and I said, "No, I don't think I'll have dinner with you." I didn't know him, you know, I didn't know his parents, and I wasn't going to be on display. [Laughs] I said no, I wasn't going to go to dinner, so he went and took his folks home and came back up again. And then I had to leave for Chicago about two days after that, and that's when it started. He was very interested, and he called me all the time and sent me flowers, you know. When I was taking Audrey back on the train, she said, "Auntie Do has a boyfriend," because he gave me a dozen roses to go home, I mean, on the train. And that's when it started. And after corresponding and all that, I came back, I think I came back in December of '49 or something like that. Then we got married in February 1950. So that was a quick one, wasn't it? [Laughs]

And for me to get married and to be in Parkdale, Oregon, I mean, it was beautiful. But I'm from the city, living in Chicago with all the Elevateds going and all the noise and everything, I couldn't even sleep at night in Parkdale, it was so quiet. Now I can't go to the city and sleep because it's too noisy. But yes, it was definitely an adjustment for me being from the city to this place in Parkdale which I love, but it was really a definitely adjustment for me. First of all, they were raising chickens and what did I know about chickens? What do you feed 'em? And then I had to live with his father and mother, which when he said that, I didn't even, it didn't even make a difference to me. My friends were just aghast. They said, "What?" But I went along with it, and I knew a half a year into it, it wasn't going to work. I had to get out. But it took four years for me to get out, I mean, to get our own place, but I did. And you know, Japanese Issei, they tend to regard their daughter-in-laws almost like a maid, that, "You're going to do this and you're going to do that," and that's wasn't, it was not for me.

LT: Can you give an example of an expectation that an Issei mother-in-law might have and then what you, how you responded?

DS: Well, Issei mother-in-law, they want you to... well, first of all, Ray's mother thought that I should do everything she told me to do, wear an apron, you know, when I'm in the house, I'm supposed to do the dishes and all that kind of jazz. And I went along with it for a while, but then I figured it was not for me. I mean, I was not to be bossed around like that. I was not to live somebody else's life. And so I mean, I wasn't very popular with them because I didn't do everything they asked me to do, very little. So, you know, it just was not going to work out, especially with children, too. She was bad with the kids.

LT: I'm trying to decide, how would one tell an Issei mother-in-law that you don't want to wash the dishes any longer? You don't want to follow all the orders. That must have been difficult.

DS: Well, it was difficult, but you had to do it. I mean, I figured that she wasn't going to take hints. I mean, she was a person in her own right, don't get me wrong. She was a person in her own right, and I was not there to judge her where it affected me as a person. And didn't beat around the bush, I just straight out, I flat out told her that I didn't like what she told me, I wasn't going to do this, I wasn't going to do that. I was not married to her, I was married to her son. And that's what my marriage was, to her son. And I mean, it sounds bad, but I had to tell her flat out, I mean, no hemming and hawing. So as a result, they weren't very fond of me, the mother and father weren't very fond of me, but I didn't marry them.

LT: It must have taken a lot of courage.

DS: It did; it took a lot of guts. And I was, the whole family looked upon me as, oh god, you got to treat 'em better. It's not treating them better, it's asserting my rights as a human being, and as a wife to my husband. And I did that. So you can imagine how displeased they were with me, because they look around, and, Linda, you know, in the valley, a lot of sons and their wives lived with their in-laws, right, you knew that? And it wasn't working, but they thought, well, their standing in the community would be looked upon as you don't have power anymore. You're letting her tell you what to do. You know, so among their friends, they thought they'd lose a little respect among their Issei friends. I think that kind of worried them: "what are my friends going to say?" But anyway, I stuck up for my rights as a human being and as a wife to their son. Where did not like to estrange them from me, I felt that it was something I had to do, and it wasn't easy. It was not easy, because the whole family hated me because of that, I mean, because of my, they figured my disrespect. And it was not disrespect, it was standing up for your rights. But anyway, that's what I did. So life was bearable. I mean, it wouldn't have been otherwise. And I've talked to other gals in my situation in Hood River and they've said the same thing, where it was very hard. I didn't need any encouragement from other people, I mean, that was what I was gonna do. But I was looked upon as, "Wow, she's something else," you know?

LT: That was very un-Japanese, right?

DS: Yeah, yeah.

<End Segment 13> - Copyright © 2013 Oregon Nikkei Endowment and Densho. All Rights Reserved.