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RB: Just have a couple reflection questions, but before we get to that, was there anything in any of the topics that we've discussed that you feel we should have asked more about? Any periods of your life that you'd like explore further?

PU: Yeah, I guess one thing would be kind of my involvement with JACL after I was a kid, if that's relevant.

RB: Absolutely. So I mentioned earlier how I was kind of born into the organization, I used to go to activities and stuff, and then even some meetings when I was tagging along as a little kid with my parents. But I also know I got recruited to be on the chapter board in 1993. And so '93, I would have been done with law school and still I think that's, I would have been back at Community Legal Services, at that point, working in the Kensington office. And so I was on the board, but I was still pretty busy, you know, with the kids and all that and I don't think I was very productive on the board at that point, but I'm pretty sure it was my father that had recruited me, so I didn't really, I couldn't really say no to him. So I was on the board, and then, as you know how these things happen, after a while, if you start helping with some things, and pretty soon they'll say, "Well, you should be an officer." [Laughs] So I ended up being the president of the board. Would have been, I don't know, maybe '98, '97, something like that. It was the same year that we hosted the convention here. Which, you know, my experience was very different from yours and my outlook about hosting a convention, because I thought it was just like, why would you want to host a convention? It's so much work. [Laughs] And so many meetings, and there was so much that you had to figure out and so many people, you had to get involved in, like, figuring out the venue and the program and raising money and planning out all this stuff, which to me was like, it was a huge problem to solve.

Anyway, so I was the president then, and, you know, I remember helping to make some connections for speakers and stuff like that. I think, I'm pretty sure it was that year, coincidentally, that I was able to make a connection to the Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee, who was in charge of the Civil Rights Division, and get him to come up to give his speech at the convention. But, I mean, despite the work, the convention itself was a really nice experience, it was, I think, the first time I went to a convention, other than when I was a kid, so I kind of enjoyed, you know, the activities there and meeting people and so on. And it was also a setting where, because of who my parents were, I started what became a long term process of getting feedback from other people about who my parents were, which kind of reinforced, you know, the kind of legacy of their involvement, both of them, and not only the creation of the Philadelphia chapter, but also, you know, to work within the district, and work that they both did at the national level, you know, for decades, and the kind of respect and love that, you know, people would express that knew them from years back. I mean, it's, especially with my mom, like her history began when she was, like a college student, that she participated in JACL oratorical competitions, first one was when she was like nineteen years old, and she was really good. So one year, she won the national competition, and I think another year she was in second place. And so people would always come up to me and say, "Oh, my god," and tell you stories about your parents and what they did and what they were still doing.

And I remember one of our past chapter presidents, you know, we would go to, between the chapter meetings and the Eastern District Council meetings, it was Bill Kishi, who was a past chapter president, one day said at a meeting, he says, "It's pretty easy being a chapter president, you just have to come to the meeting and do whatever Grayce says, and that's how we decide things." Of course, he laughed. So I say that because there was just an environment there that was very kind of hospitable and comfortable and friendly, and provided space for people to do things and to participate and be involved in leadership and so on. So I know that I think it was in 2000, that I was appointed to the editorial board of the Pacific Citizen, which would have been the first kind of national position that I had. And I did that for one two-year term, and then I ended up being a governor for Eastern District, which put me on a national board, which I did for one term, and then I didn't want to do it anymore, because I realized it was really hard. And you could probably appreciate this now, that if you take four weekends in a year to attend board meetings in San Francisco, because we're so far away, it really takes three days, you know, that are totally blown up by the board meeting. And then the district meetings that you have to go to and the chapter functions, it's actually very time consuming to be the governor, and it was really like, I could really feel it. So I didn't want to do it again at that point, because there were too many things that needed to be done at home.

But I don't know whose idea this was, but somebody asked me to chair a Constitution and Bylaws Committee one year around that time, in the early 2000s, so I did that. And that was kind of fun and interesting to kind of figure that out and learn, you know, parliamentary procedure, and so on, and to kind of use my legal skills, and also to kind of start thinking about how to figure out how to work with a committee of people that's very divergent in terms of their skills and time and interest and so on, to figure out how to review amendments and let them be kind of debated intelligently and decided thoughtfully. So they asked me to do that a number of times, so I kind of got established and very familiar to people at the international level with conventions and so on, because of that role. Because you have to chair the National Council meetings when that business is taken care of. And at some point, I asked if I could switch to another committee, because I thought it was getting stale. And I needed to, you know, make space for somebody else to do it. Because I realized at that point that the convention committees should be utilized by JACL as a way to recruit people and kind of cement them in the organization and also promote and develop leadership within JACL. And it doesn't work very well if you get chairs that just kind of sit there, you know, for ten or twenty years, you need to put part of your energy into learning how to do it, but at the same time identifying people that you're working with, or people that you can recruit to serve on a committee to replace you, and to create their own pathways and pull in other people and so on.

So anyway, I switched to Resolutions and did that for several years. And then I kind of switched back again, several years, and then I periodically got involved in other things at the national level, the most noteworthy of which recently was just kind of randomly getting sucked in to serve on the Legacy Fund Review Committee, which was, has been in because it's not quite done yet like over two years later. This is the most difficult, challenging task I've ever done in JACL in my life, because it always, it was so contentious, and it was a difficult topic, and I was pretty isolated on the committee. And I had spent a lot of time and energy and it's very, it was a kind of issue where it was very document heavy, there were a lot of legal issues. There are a lot of financial questions and the record that we had to work with going back to when the Legacy Fund was created, which my mother was instrumental in, following a successful redress effort, it's not something you could just dabble in and understand how things should be handled. And because most of the committee was pushing in a direction that I came to the conclusion was the wrong direction, it just became very time consuming to do the analysis and argue about things and push different ways of doing things. And you know, that kind of coming to a head at the last convention, where we had a pitched battle, to a National Council meeting over, adopting a new policy about how the endowment was managed. And unfortunately, the skirmishing continued since the last convention, and hopefully it will be wrapped up this summer, so we can put it to rest. Yeah, and then, you know, at the same time, in a couple of weeks, I'll start serving again, as the governor on the Eastern District Council, so be back on the national board. And partly motivated by what I saw at the board meetings that I attended to fight at the Legacy Fund, and how I realized that, you know, now that I do have more time, because I don't have to go to work every day, that I should put some more time in to try to help, contribute to improving the leadership within the board structure for a couple of years. So that's the JACL part for me. [Laughs]

RB: Thank you for your service. Hopefully it doesn't take another three days of convention debates this summer. Okay, I do need to run now. I don't know if there were any other questions, other reflections. We covered a lot of ground. Yeah, all right, thank you.

PU: Okay, all right. Good, thank you.

RB: That was great, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

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