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RB: So as an employee of the federal government, were there restrictions on what kind of advocacy work you could do on your own time? Because I know that, I think, prior to that position, you had helped to found Asian Americans United, obviously you've been involved in JACL for a very long time, I think maybe APABA as well. But I'm just curious, how did that work out? Can you maybe describe some of the activities that you were doing outside of your career?

PU: Yeah. So there are restrictions when you work for the government. And I remember, I think when I was asked to chair the Resolutions Committee for National JACL, I had to get approval from the office, like I had to submit this formal memorandum about outside activities to describe what this entailed, for somebody to make a determination about whether it could put me in a position where I'm in conflict with the government. Because if it did, then I couldn't do it. So I had to explain when I wrote this memo and get it approved for various levels of command there, that the Resolutions Committee isn't responsible for taking positions, it's just responsible for cleaning up ideas that other people have and not advocating for them, but cleaning them up so they can be debated and decided on by the national council. So they said, "Okay, that's okay under those circumstances." And there would be other things where if you were going to go to a certain event, you had to make sure that nobody was kind of giving you something to go to an event that might create some other kind of conflict, and would have to do a memo on that and get approval.

And so I think, you know, I continued being very involved in JACL, but not so much as an advocate, but more as somebody who was providing that kind of neutral administrative assistance within the organization as a volunteer. And I remember I was also, when I was working there, that I was able to participate as a chaperone in the Kakehashi program, and that very difficult to do. [Laughs] And why? Because the Japanese government was paying for part of our costs. And that's a big no-no, to have a foreign government giving you something as a Justice Department lawyer. So we had to go through a lot of clearances and change the way the money flowed, so it wasn't coming from the government. And I forget the details, but somebody else had to pay for the transportation. I don't know if it's JACL, or how it was done, and they got reimbursed by the embassy, so it'd keep us one step removed from that. Yeah, and things like National Asian Pacific American Bar Association, and then the Asian bar entities in D.C. and Pennsylvania, I was involved in them and would go to their activities and stuff. But they were, you know, largely kind of professional organization kind of things that wouldn't raise any eyebrows so long as I wasn't necessarily sticking my nose into an issue that they were working on. And one time... actually, that was before I went. So I had helped them on an advocacy issue when I was in legal services. So they put out this big report on language access, I helped them a lot on that project. And then they wanted to redo the report, I don't know, like ten years later. And I started having discussions with them about, you know, providing input on the new one. And then somebody yanked my leash and said, "You cannot do that." And I'm not sure if that was during a different administration that was more restrictive on our activities, but yeah, so I couldn't comment on their drafting or their committee work. And anything I did had to be very kind of under the radar kind of feedback through other people. But yeah, so that's kind of how that went.

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