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LG: Do you want to talk about your Peace Corps experience first? After you finished high school, did you go to college?

TM: Yes. After high school, I went to the University of Washington, and graduated with a B.A. in English history in education. And then I joined the Peace Corps.

LG: So coming from your high school experience, in a white community, what was college like?

TM: Well, the college experience was just really hectic in the sense that I lived in the dorms, and there wasn't any social, you made your own social arrangements. And my parents urged us, there was no question we would go to college, but we had to pay for it. So college was a lot of work, both to earn money to go there, and I took a lot of subjects. I'm this kind of person who liked a challenge, so I probably overdid it. But I think in the second year, I decided, okay, to save money, I'm going to live off campus. So I persuaded about three of my friends to join me, so we lived off campus, did our own cooking, et cetera. So we saved some money there.

LG: Did you have a job at this time?

TM: I did. I guess you would call it a work study, and I worked in the cafeteria of one of the dorms.

LG: Were you a part of any social groups, community groups, during college?

TM: No. It was 24/7 studying and working, and having a little bit of a social life.

LG: So you had experiences during college that you can remember that [inaudible]?

TM: Well, I think some of the courses that I took in English and some of the teachers I had in history, I enjoyed those. But it's interesting because I never took an Asian American course because it didn't exist. I graduated from high school in '63, went to college through '67. So at that time, there was no such thing. So my whole orientation of learning was Western Civilization. And I realized that I wanted to teach, and I wanted to teach secondary English, and I thought, "If I'm going to teach, I don't know anything in terms of life." So I decided that that's why I decided that I wanted to take a couple of years off and go into the Peace Corps and kind of get rooted, I think, in what life experience was.

LG: What made you want to teach secondary?

TM: Well, I guess in high school I had some really good teachers in high school, English. And I always liked reading and writing, I think I did quite well in those subjects. It's interesting because I belonged to a book group and we have discussions and I'd say, "How many of you were English majors?" and almost all of them were, it was kind of interesting.

LG: So how did you hear about the Peace Corps?

TM: Well, I graduated in 1963 and went to college in '63. '63 to '67, the war, the Vietnam War was raging. And the Peace Corps was a John F. Kennedy program, and we were all enamored of him. And many of male classmates were looking into it because it was an alternative way to serve and not go to war. So it intrigued me and I always liked the idea of, I always liked the stories of pioneers, of doing things that were simple, but difficult. And I thought, well, I can maybe for two years camp out. I think I can handle that. And so it was a little better than camping out, but not too much above that.

LG: What was your experience?

TM: When I went, there were many of us. We were in Micronesia, which was, at that time, a territory of the United States. And there were six little districts, island districts, that's why they called it Micronesia. And they had no common language, so they wanted English to be the lingua franca. And so in order to do that, they had to send English teachers, so that's what we did. Most of us, not all of us, but most of us taught English as a second language. So that's what I did, and it was a life changing experience because there were many things I realized that were important, and what was important was the relationships with other people and not material things, because you didn't have material things, you lived very simply. Of course, in Micronesia, we didn't have to worry about heat, we had to worry about being too hot, but we didn't have the modern conveniences, we had makeshift showers and toilets that were outside et cetera. So it was very basic living. But the people that I served with were wonderful, and to this day are some of my best friends. Plus the people that I taught and worked with there, were just so eager to learn, they really wanted to know us but they also wanted to know English. And here were teachers sort of infused in all these islands, but the other interesting thing about Saipan in the Marianas was that it had been taken over just before the war by Japan. So in fact, one of the houses that we were trained in was the Japanese House. It wasn't like this, I mean, it wasn't a traditional house, but you could tell there were, it had touches of the Japanese House. And I worried a bit about how would people accept me because when they look at me, they don't see American. And when I was walking through the village one day, one of the older gentlemen from the village came up to he and he was a little crazy, and he started speaking to me in Japanese. And I said, "I don't understand, I don't speak English." And he just got so angry and enraged, he said, "You do too." And he wanted to use the Japanese he learned when he went to Japanese school, because Japan is fairly close to Sapian, and they taught the inhabitants rigorously. So the United States being so far away, they were very neglectful. So if they got any education it was something. And in some senses, I think I had an easier entre into the village with the people because they saw me as different, and they identified with me a little bit closer because they didn't see me as white. So that's what I feel, I felt.

<End Segment 8> - Copyright © 2023 Densho. All Rights Reserved.