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LG: So you mentioned that you came back and started third grade and had to focus on your English skills. What was your school experience, your grade school experience like? Do you have any memories of classmates, what you did for fun?

AN: Hmm, I can't remember very much. In terms of interaction with schoolmates, for a couple years, but following that, I had, along with my brothers, was getting racial attacks, getting beat up on the way to school and that kind of stuff. So we developed a path going by the town library, and that became our transient refuge when we saw a group of guys coming to beat us up, we would dig into, get into the library to avoid them. So I remember that happening in third grade, fourth grade. The other one was that, I don't remember the details, but a girl that I met as a classmate whose mother was a teacher and father eventually became a principal in the same school district, and I kept in contract all these years. Except that I haven't been able to get, talk with her for the last two years, because she moved to Florida and retired there. She was a physician. She and I went to Berkeley at the same time in high school, after high school, then from there, she went to McGill University medical school and got a degree in medicine. Whereas I went to graduate school in Oregon and got a PhD. So we remained friends and kept in contact, except for the last three years, I haven't been able to reach her. Her phone doesn't work or goes into a voicemail thing which is overloaded, et cetera. So my worry is that she expired someplace. When I last had talked to her about four years ago, she had COPD, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, because she used to be a smoker. And unfortunately, even though she quit like thirty or forty years ago, she was one of those unlucky people that came down with lung problems, and so she had that happen. And then when I last talked with her, she had, was complaining about having, I guess technically it would be called cognitive decline, she was beginning to lose her short term memory and things like that. And I haven't been able to reach her ever since, so I'm only surmising, but given all those conditions, that she's probably not around anymore. But I haven't been able to find other classmates who might help me get in touch with her. She was last living in Florida. Anyway, so that's the only other connection to my early school grades, that just happened. Because we happened to be, they used to have groupings of students, A B and C, which was based on academic performance. But this was all the way through high school, so we were in the same A group all along, and we took chemistry and physics and math and all that, same classes.

LG: What was the racial and ethnic makeup of your grade school?

AN: Yeah, there were, I had classmates, and maybe out of a hundred, eight or ten were like myself, Japanese American. The largest ethnicity was Hispanic, probably twenty-five percent of the class. And the rest were a mix, many whites were basically of Italian descent, because a lot of the Italian families in Gilroy, they ran vineyards and things like that, which had been in the family line for multiple generations. They came from Italy, running vineyards, and so they did the same thing in Gilroy. Then they took over for the, it was the garlic business, and Gilroy eventually became the garlic capital of the world, growing more garlic than anybody. So anyway, I guess the generic white population was roughly half, and so there was quite a mix. There were no Blacks that I can remember, students. So Asians and then also among the Asians of the world, Chinese Americans, so I have friends from those days, one that I'm still in touch with, who lives in Walnut Creek, he's essentially a third generation Chinese American just like I am. And who else? So that would be kind of the makeup of the, growing up in Gilroy.

LG: Did your family stay connected to anyone from the camps? Did anyone settle near you?

AN: I don't recall per se. Of course, many of the families that we interacted with had been in other camps. But I don't recall I ever specifically, somebody else that had been in Poston, let alone Camp I, Poston. Later on, I met a few people at a JACL meeting or something like that, who during conversations revealed that he may have been in Poston, but these were just kind of random occurrences. We didn't know them intimately while we were in camp.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.