Densho Digital Archive - Ted Hachiya Interview (denshovh-hted

<Begin Segment 24>

MP: Do you still have friends that are alive that share your childhood, share childhood with you?

TH: No. Most of them are gone. Jack Yoshihara and I were both about the same rank in judo. He lost his wife six years ago, but he remarried a neighborhood girl. And he, his wife has a home up in Seattle, and he has a home over in, I don't know what area this is, Jewish neighborhood.

MP: And you carry on the cooking tradition.

TH: Well, it's been forced, a lot of people find out that I can make things. They will ask me sometime, and I make sometime a rare dish. I don't know whether you ever heard of a steamed fish, I mean, steamed pork and fish. It smells. You go to a Chinese restaurant and somebody orders it and they take it, the restaurants don't like to serve it when they got too much, too many Caucasians in there. God, you can almost throw up on the smell of the stuff. But boy, does it taste good.

MP: And you make this?

TH: I make this thing for 'em.

MP: For whom?

TH: Oh, people who want it. They know I can make it. I tell them now I don't have the right dried fish. I have, gee, it costs ten bucks for dried fish about that long. That's what you use to flavor the fish with. You ever taste fish sauce? You open the lid, you have to keep your nose out of there. God, it makes you want to throw up. Even me to this day, but I stick my finger in and taste it. Boy, it taste good.

MP: But you cook for a few people --

TH: Mostly widowers that can't cook. I cook for one widow, that was the girl that was on the phone. She called to thank me for the meatloaf I sent her.

MP: What do you cook usually?

TH: Well, my, I pickle more than I cook actually, but I make a lot of kim chee and in season, you know. But I cook a lot of, our people make a chow mein that is dry. It's not like Chinese chow mein that's all, people, they eat the noodles more than the vegetables that you use to flavor it with. But our chow mein, I got to tell you a story about when we used to go to grade school. My mother used to make chow mein sandwiches. Everything smells like a Chinese restaurant. You know when you walk in a Chinese restaurant, you can smell certain kind of cooking. I used to take sandwiches, and we were, we had to put our lunches up in the cloak, where you put your clothes.

MP: The cloak room.

TH: Yeah, that's right. Every time when lunchtime came, not every time but a few times, I miss my lunch. Somebody swiped my sandwich. I look for my sandwich, I can't find it. But I see a bag there, I take it, and I got peanut butter sandwiches or bologna sandwich somebody left. But I never did get over that. It happened to me two or three times. And then the teacher always sit there by the cloak room, see, because you usually wrote your name on the bag, your paper bag, or you had a lunch box. My mother always used paper bags. I don't know why. I didn't have a lunch box because I used to kick it home all the time and put holes in or dents in it.

MP: You kicked it home, your lunch, your lunch box?

TH: Oh, yeah. Did you play ever Kick the Can?

MP: Sure.

TH: Used my lunch box. It was bigger and heavier.

MP: I'd really like to know what a chow mein sandwich is?

TH: It's dry. It's like a Chinese chow mein except it isn't, doesn't have a gravy in it. It doesn't have all this soup in it.

MP: Was there vegetables?

TH: It's got a lot of vegetables in it, but you don't see the vegetables. But our younger people, the third generation, they want to eat the noodles. It's flavored. See we flavor the noodles first before we put the vegetables in. Someday, I'll make it.

MP: You're famous for your chow mein noodles, right?

TH: Yeah. I'm not, I'm a Christian, but I'm not a Methodist church, you know, pardon to the people that support it. I do help them though. They always ask me to come down and do this, do that. I volunteer, but they, I don't, they have a Caucasian minister now. She's a lady. Good. She speaks Japanese, can't say anything bad around her.

MP: She is Japanese.

TH: Yeah. She gave a sermon yesterday, you know, at a funeral, and she did an excellent job. But she recognizes kim chee, boy. I make that stinky stuff. They have the church bazaar once a year in October, last Sunday in October, and a lot of people come to eat there. I was surprised. They make so much money. They make 17, $18,000 just in four hours.

MP: Do you do kim chee for that event?

TH: Yeah. I make ten gallons of it for them. I don't know what they do with it. I see people eating it, but then I know they can't, that crowd can't eat that much one time. Well, I eased up a little bit. Well, some people didn't like it. It was a little bit too hot. Our people don't like it that hot as Koreans, so I eased up on it. But this time, boy, they cleaned it up.

MP: What's the population of this area? Is it Japanese, Korean, or what?

TH: In this area here?

MP: Yeah.

TH: Well, there's hardly any Japanese here. There used to be quite a few over here. I don't know why my wife, well, I think she liked the swimming pool that was in the front yard. But I said if you could buy a house for $2,500 down, go ahead. She objected living in a hotel for so long because our children were growing, and the areas are getting rougher all the time. She came home and says, "We own a house." "Yeah? What you paid for it?" She said, "Oh, I gave him $2,500 down. You told me I could write a check for it." And then I met the realtor. She happened to be a customer, and so she got a good buy. I think I only paid $22,500 for this house.

MP: What do you think it is worth now?

TH: One hundred twenty-nine thousand maybe. I had an appraisal for this. This is a big lot, 20,000 square foot lot. There was a baby acre here. I sold the back half, and I paid for my house. I had, I think I paid into the house about five years, but the principal never goes down, you know, the first five years or ten years. Anyway, I figured that it paid for my house, so I live in here free, but I got to pay property tax. It doesn't take a lot at all. The thing that I object to is this darn, the sewer tax. I don't mind, but they charge that, you know, the rain runoff water. I think, I don't know what they call that. But I said, "Gee, we got our well." I said, "How do you base your assessment?" He says on the amount of water you use, the sewage charge. I said, "Well, I'm a single man, and I don't use this john here at home. I'm out most of the time." I said, and my water, the property absorbed my water because there was a time when they asked us to put in dry wells which we did. We just disconnected. Of course, we were always, didn't have sewer. We were, what the heck they call those things. Well, there was a well anyway. So we, they just put in my sewer about four years ago, but it's a well-built house.