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HH: Where were you born?

GU: I was born in Stockton, California.

HH: Will you give a brief account of your early life in Stockton, California?

GU: I was born on July 4, 1919, so my name, Ritsu, the Japanese character is "law," because my parents were aware of what Fourth of July was all about. And in our large family, of course, things were very, very hard because my father, who came to California in 1906, went through the very difficult period from the immigrants who were not accepted. And California had gone through pushing Chinese immigrants around, and many people couldn't tell the difference between Japanese and Chinese. And Japanese were only brought in as laborers anyway, and so my father told me that in the early days, when he was driving the laundry wagon in Stockton, these bullies would come around and knock over the laundry wagon so that we all had to start out dealing with some real active racism. And took a long, long time before we could buy a house. We were able to have a little house, which only had two bedrooms, and so the garage was converted into a dormitory for the four boys.

But my mother was a very sociable woman, and it's amazing when I think back, and that little living room that we had that she entertained people who came from Japan, and she also entertained people that my father worked for, particularly New Year's parties. And I recall specifically, whenever I see this Japanese pastry that has an made from bean paste, I'm not too excited about it and never made any. So my husband Hiroshi has to make his own pastry. And the reason why I had such distaste for that particular pastry is that my mother wouldn't let me go to a New Year's Eve dance until I finished stirring for hours until that an got thick enough. And my boyfriend had to sit out there, you know, in the living room, waiting.

So it was a very interesting childhood. We did live in the suburbs in the little town of Stockton, there was the north side where the power structure lived. And then the central part of town, there was Japantown and Chinatown, but we lived on the other side of the bridge on the south side of town. So that was all residential, but many of the Japanese families lived in small homes, but they were farmers who worked for larger corporations. My father worked for the power structure in that he was a day worker. He cleaned their homes and he catered, put on parties for them and things like that. And I recall that, from the south side of town, he would go on his bicycle, taking his waxing iron and all. But he made the difference when it was time for us to go into camp because he worked for the head of the Board of Education and I could get textbooks and start school in camp.

<End Segment 2> - Copyright © 1994 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.