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RB: So where did you go to college and what did you study?

MM: Well, I went to Occidental College, which is a private liberal arts school in L.A. When it came down to it, I go, okay, I got accepted everywhere, my brother said I can't go to Colby because he went to Bates in Maine. Earlham College is Quaker and I've already got five other classmates going there, and maybe I should figure out something else. So it ended up between Middlebury and Occi, and my dad said, "You can go wherever you get in." I came down and I said, "Mom, if I go to Middlebury, I can ski, it's New England. And if I go to Occi, well, there's Los Angeles." Yeah, I didn't know what that would mean, and she goes, "There are more Japanese boys in California." [Laughs] So the irony is I came home with the Pennsylvania Dutch guy.

RB: So living in Los Angeles at this time, in the late '60s, the first time in a larger Asian American, Japanese American community, at least in the sense that...

MM: Yeah, there were more around.

RB: Did you interact with the Japanese American community?

MM: If you didn't have a car, and still, if you don't have a car in L.A., it's hard to get around. So I wasn't roaming much off campus. The Hawaiian kids were interesting because they're saying, "My god, it's freezing cold here in L.A." [Laughs] So I have to say no, that I wasn't particularly close friends. There was, by chance, a friend of a friend type of thing, and at one point, I had a blind date with a Chinese American class, not classmate, but next class. And her brother was at Cal Tech, that didn't go anywhere. Went to see Hair on stage, and that was kind of cool. But there was this big separation between '67, '68, and then '70, '71. Because the campus was still girls, the women had hours, you had to sign in and out of the dorm after seven o'clock at night or something, you had to be in the dorm at a certain time, so there were all of these traditional rules that I'm sure were in place in most small private schools across the country. And then '70, '71, it was all student head residents, and there were co-ed dorms. And I was a resident advisor, then head resident. And it was more the "Black is Beautiful" movement, Angela Davis was speaking. I took some Black History classes, not particularly interested in Asia, but my summer of '69, when we landed on the moon, and go, "Why don't I remember this?" And I go, "Oh, I was in that Ghana that summer."

And there is a program called Operation Crossroads Africa, and the minister who was head of it had come to speak. I called home and I said, "Mom, Dad, what do you think if I go to Africa this summer?" And later my dad said, "You could have heard your mom without the phone across the country," because she went, "Africa?" But I thought, I've saved the money, and I could pay for it myself, and it was an integrated work camp kind of program, so we had Canadians and American college students. Then there were Ghanaian and Ivorian students. And little did I know at that point that Africa, the continent, would become a focus for me, because my daughter lives there, she's married to a South African who were half Zulu. But that was the experience of living with that electricity, living with that running water, and they provided us a house and we were literally helping mix cement to build a school. And they had provided social workers, women who cook for us, and so we didn't have to go bargain for fish or figure out how to cook on a burner. And I just kind of realized, you know, all the conveniences we have in the world and in the United States, people live perfectly well without them. I mean, certainly, healthcare and sanitation might be some of the issues. The skies above were filled with stars, and not to romanticize it, because there was a bunch of racial tension. And at one point the five American Black African American students had kind of pulled away, everybody was, had been grouchy because of the food and had been sick at different times. And the one African American guy is that we're having a meeting just with the Africans. And then he looked at me and said, "Oh, you can come if you want." [Laughs] I chose not to, but it was an odd moment.

RB: Yeah, I mean, that's always fascinating, being Japanese American, being Asian American, somewhere in the middle and seeing how different people in different spaces interpret. Aside from that particular moment, do you have other examples in the time you spent in Africa, either that summer or it sounds like you spent a considerable amount of time there.

MM: I have, since in the last... Jesse's been there twelve years, I guess. No, just kindness of strangers. When I've traveled, it's just, we're in a lorry, in a truck, going into Accra, I'm holding onto the outside of the truck, we're bouncing along the road, and the Ghanaian woman sitting next to me just takes my hand and holds it, and I go, "Oh, this is interesting." And then this big branch goes by, and she knew it was coming, so she was just protecting me. So I think that's been one of the realizations of travel was how that kindness of strangers, you don't have to have the language. Easier if you do, but it just makes the difference if you're open to people and not too loud and not too insistent. It opens many doors.

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