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HH: Oh, that's, this church that you belong to, is that a church that you say you've been a member of for a long time?

LI: For forty years. We've been a member of the Baptist church in Palmyra for forty years now.

HH: Were you a Baptist when you were in California?

LI: No, I wasn't. I used to attend the Buddhist church in California.

HH: At what point did you become a Christian?

LI: Well, the reason was when we moved to West Philadelphia, when we left, we attended the church there. It's because my children attended a Bible school on Spruce Street where we lived, John Wanamaker's Presbyterian church, and we thought that wasn't right for us to have... then, first, they attended the Bible school in the summertime, and then they started to go to Sunday school and my husband, being a Methodist, he felt that we should send just the children to church, that we should attend, and that's how we started to go to the Presbyterian church.

HH: Oh, I see. And then I realized that your husband was a Methodist and you were a Buddhist.

LI: Yes.

HH: Your children did not have a religious...

LI: No, they didn't.

HH: ...arrived in Philadelphia?

LI: Right.

HH: And they, the way you describe it is they accidentally went to bible school?

LI: Yes.

HH: And then eventually became Christians.

LI: Right.

HH: And so did you.

LI: Yes. And we joined the Presbyterian church. When we moved to Jersey, my children played with friends. They made friend with the Baptist church group, and that's how we thought that instead of us separating and going to Presbyterian church, we visited there. We thought we'd better go to a church where we could all attend, so we joined the Baptist church there in Palmyra.

HH: In the United States today, there were certain people that had a more difficult time than others, and most people would say that people who had difficult times are the people of color, meaning Latinos, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Did you feel that you could identify with the kind of experiences that other people of color had?

LI: Yes, I think so, yes.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.