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LG: And could you talk a little bit about your parents? Their names, their personalities, what they did for work?

AN: Well, my mother and father had a sort of arranged marriage. My father had a need to go to Japan. He had, when he became an adult, he came back to California before the Depression started. And instead of being a farmworker like his parents, he decided to get into a profession that was more universal, I guess, is the word for it. He went to the Boston School of Cooking in San Francisco, and became a professional chef. So he could now put on banquets for a hundred people, put on fancy dinners for rich families and stuff like that. And he never had any problem finding a job, so that was a good choice. He had, his father joined him for a few years, back from Japan to California. And so his father lived with him for a couple years to make money. And unfortunately, he died of a stroke or something. And so in 1936 or so, he had his father's ashes and contacted the family back in Japan bringing the ashes for burial in a family plot in Japan in Yamaguchi-ken, and the village was Yanai. I've never been there, but those were the things that I learned from my parents. Anyway, so on this trip to Japan, taking the ashes back of his dad, the uncle and aunt heard that he was trying to visit. And he was, at that time, twenty-nine and almost thirty in age. And the uncle and aunts decided that he needs to get married, so they made all kinds of arrangements. What they did is they interviewed four families with eligible daughters and set that up. So when he went back to Japan with the ashes, which she deposited in the family plot, he also signed up, went to the city hall, and resigned his Japanese citizenship. Because at that time, his parents were Japanese immigrants to America, for example, and they were basically conferred a second citizenship, being Japanese. And for some reason, the U.S. government sort of acquiesced for that, even though they didn't promote dual citizenships.

Anyway, so my father went back, and after resigning his Japanese citizenship, which then made him ineligible for being drafted by the Japanese imperial army, which was raising hell in China, and the Rape of Nanking took place a couple of years before he went back, et cetera, et cetera. So there was a serious concern about that, especially if you were living in America and didn't want to get drafted by the Japanese army. Anyway, he met up with his uncle and aunt who arranged for a series of visits, literally interviews, for a potential spouse. Well, he ran across my mother, who was kind of young at that time, she was only seventeen or eighteen and very nice-looking, so I couldn't blame him. [Laughs] Anyway, he negotiated her as his preference for marrying. And my mother looked upon this opportunity as a way to easily get back to America. Because her father, who had died a couple years before, told her at his deathbed that maybe when an opportunity arises, for her to go back to America, and she should do so because she would be happier as a female adult because she didn't have to deal with a male chauvinist society. So my mother was a feminist way before her time, and she apparently took this opportunity to go back to California when my father made an offer, so they did, and the rest is history. It was not smooth, however, because she had, since she had been brought to Japan as a little kid, she did not have a passport. So one of her cousins from Watsonville, California, had emailed, I mean, mailed her a certified copy of her birth certificate in Watsonville, California, which proved to be the pivoting thing, so that she could reenter the United States. Because in 1924, there was a bill passed which banned immigration from Asia, Japan in particular.

So when she and my father, even though they were married in Japan, in the village, basically came as an unwed couple. They hid their wedding event in Japan, and came as two separate people back to California. Well, my father was let go from Angel Island and went to the apartment straight away, she was detained for two days of questioning. And then finally, when she showed the immigration authorities that she had this certified certificate, they kind of looked at it and then acquiesced through that as a reality and let her go. And so she was allowed to go into San Fran to join my father in his apartment. And they arranged a civil service, and civil ceremony at the city hall and got married in California again. [Laughs] So that's how it all became legal, as it were, and my mother was able to stay. Interestingly enough, I didn't realize this encounter with the immigration department until a couple years after she died. In 2006, I got an email from a historian who was tracking the outcome of various Japanese immigrants in the 20th century to the United States. She had run across my mother's name, but she had enough examples of other people, she had like sixty-eight different individuals for her book. But she, having gone through the trouble of finding this information, emailed me the link, and so that's how I learned about all this detail, yeah. That was a very interesting part of history that I was not aware of. Anyway, so that's how my mother and father got married. [Laughs]

LG: Did your mother do anything for work after they came to...

AN: Oh, she was not trained in anything. So a lot of the jobs that my father got as a live-in cook or day cook, involved affluent families who had other needs, housekeeping and cleaning and maintaining and so on. So my mother just kind of picked up on that and earned a living or added to the living by those kind of housework.

LG: As a child, did your father cook a lot of food for you and you and your siblings? Do you have memories of his cooking?

AN: Yes and no. I don't think he did anything special. My mother had to learn how to cook, because she had not had occasion to do a lot of that at home, since she was the only, well, she had a brother and mother and father did most of the stuff. And so my mother, she had to learn how to cook, and was clearly second in line in terms of skills and versatility and such.

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