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RB: Well, I guess, moving on from your time, what did you do after living in Japan and teaching at the...

MM: Friends School? I did this three and a half months travel, which was totally one of the best things I ever did in my life. I got to India on that trip for about three weeks. And again got to stay with people, traveled, got to the middle of India and thought, "I might never come here again in my life, I'd better to see the Taj Mahal," went on up to Agra. But it felt so different from having been in Japan and Southeast Asia. Partly because of the poverty, but also Hinduism was just very different from... so the second daughter was married to Siddharthja whose family is in New Delhi, India. So I have returned to India. And with WhatsApp, there's ongoing family connection to both South Africa, not daily, but several times a week, South Africa to India, so it makes my life outward looking in many ways.

RB: I can imagine it must. So did you start your family after your international time?

MM: Yeah. So I came back, and there was a boyfriend from Hanover, Pennsylvania. And so we kind of went back and forth between our two homes, mine and Moorestown with my parents. And Bruce said, "Well, why don't you just move over here?" And this was the situation that worried my parents. One, they didn't think you should live together without being married, and two, I was going into his hometown where his family had been for generations, and it's pretty much all white. There was one Chinese restaurant at the time, and one McDonald's at the time. It was 1974. And a friend of his was putting together a photography studio, and so I was down in the basement learning how to process black and white and color photos, and putting together wedding albums and worked for Jim for a year, and then decided, okay, enough of that. And anyway, eventually we got married in '78. His grandmother suggested we move into one of the family homes, which was a 1905 twenty-plus room mansion with a 40-foot tall marble floor. So we moved in, and that's where my two daughters were brought up. And there was this whole family network there, grandmother lived up on the hill and had the swimming pool. I mean, life was... and I made friends but through a lot, a fair amount of volunteer work. I was involved with Planned Parenthood and with the YWCA and the Literacy Council, which was one... and I ended up being president of different organizations. So I called myself a professional volunteer at that point, and I was also able to not get stretched as much as my daughters are now in terms of working and raising a family.

RB: You have two daughters?

MM: Two daughters.

RB: And what are their names and when were they born?

MM: So Jessica Kiku Revert was born in Hanover, January of 1981, and Trudy Sumiko Revert was born March 22nd of 1984, and so Jesse's the one in South Africa, and Trudy is in Queens, New York, and Jackson Heights, and moved to Washington to work for the Department of Labor as a policy advisor. And each of them have had... I think my grandparents who came over to this country, and I think the grandmothers probably only had about a sixth grade education, would be astonished that their great grandchildren would have PhDs and law degrees. Education was important from the beginning, because my paternal grandmother had said to her husband, "We have to stay in one place, we can't be migrant farmers. We have to stay in one place so Takashi can go to school." He ended up being the only child, but they made that commitment.

RB: What was it like raising biracial children in that time period?

MM: Well, it was fine for the first... it was fine. Because the family was known in the community, and initially, versus Mom, who was very taciturn, she said, "You know, you should get married." So we're getting the same message from both sets of parents. And Bruce said, "Well, we're not ready," and so we moved into an apartment on our own. And I had not known that he had said to his mother, "If Miyo is not welcome to family events, I'm not coming either." So he kind of pushed the issue. My kids grew up, we'd left the front door unlocked, the cars were unlocked. This was a town of thirty thousand people. And now it's well known for Utz potato chips and Snyder's. [Laughs] So it was a good place to bring his kids. They went to a small, I'd say, progressive, private school, which was kind of a one-woman schoolhouse, and she taught from K through eighth grade with the help of some mothers coming in. And we had a great time. There weren't grades, they called her Bobbi. Not even Miss Bobbi, it was Bobbi. And when my kids started doing homework from kindergarten, and then they, I had them shift over in eighth grade to the public school. At which point, Jesse, the older one, got asked, "Where are you from?" And she'd go, "Hanover." And they'd go, "Where were you born?" She goes, "Hanover Hospital." My family has been here ten generations," and we'd go, "Oh, you don't look like you're from Hanover." So Jesse had some of that, but Trudy never talked about it, but Jesse got some of that. They also know she was, knew they were the borough manager's daughter, so there was one time Jesse was a senior in high school. She's in her dad's jeep, and I don't know if the inspection was past or something, but she got pulled over. She came home from school that day and she said, "That was the most embarrassing day of my whole life." But they realized, "Oh, oh, you're the town manager's daughter." [Laughs] So small town growing up.

[Interruption]

RB: So I guess picking up on what we were just talking about, did your daughter spend a lot of time with your parents?

MM: Not a lot, it's a three-hour drive. And so there was, Christmas would always be in Hanover, but then a week later, it was New Year's, and we did Oshogatsu, and my mother would... by the time they were living at Medford Leas, we were making the whole range of Japanese New Year's for sixty people. Because it was family plus all the Nisei who were living over at Medford Leas. So we got pretty good at it. [Laughs] We also had a series of exchange students who lived with us. So my daughters had a Swedish sister, a Danish sister. Ritsuko was from Japan, she was the oddest of everybody, and an Australian young woman. So I was pretty, didn't realize, but pretty purposefully saying to my daughters, "There's more to the world than Hanover." Because Hanover you'd see in the newspaper, five generation photos. People just sort of stayed put, there were people in Hanover who had, would rarely go even to York, which was sixteen miles away, the Black people were over there. And there were, the Ku Klux Klan came through one time. It was a non-diverse area, it's become more so. So part of my volunteer work was with Literacy Council, and it was with international folks from all over the place. And I realize that also was part of my, being personally in touch with people from other countries. And when you had the experience of living abroad, and not knowing the language, you realize you're silenced, that you are not who you are unless you have, that's why groups, that first generation comes over from anywhere and they stick together, because they want to laugh, they want to share stuff. And I guess that's sort of the, maybe the transition of why I had all this volunteer experience doing ESL.

And about 2004, well, it was earlier than that, 1999. A friend of mine who had been coming over from York, she said, "Miyo, you should get a degree, you should get a master's degree in this." And she said, "I've been going down to American University," and she would go down, like for the summer, take her three kids down there, and she would, she blasted through her master's degree. I stretched it out for quite a few years, but it seemed pretty evident about 2003, '04, that we were heading for a divorce. So it would behoove me to get a degree. So that worked out, and I ended up then, because of this friend who was a mentor, she said, "You should apply for this fellowship. It's for people who have new master's degree," and he saw to work abroad for a year. And so they interviewed me and they said, "Is there a country you want to go to?" And I got, "Oh, we get a choice?" I go, "Thailand," and they said, "Why?" I said, "The people and the food." And that had been the experience I'd had thirty years before that. So that sort of opened the door to kind of redoing life again in a way of going, "Okay, I'm going to live abroad, and let's just see how the doors open. And returning, people would say, "What do you want?" And I go, "I want to live within an hour of Yuri and Tak, my parents. I want to study tea ceremony again, I want to dance, I want to live in the community with Quakers, and I guess I need a job," and it all happened. And so I ended up in Chestnut Hill, and the doors kept opening.

<End Segment 7> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.