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LG: But first, so you said that your family settled in Gilroy after the camp?

AN: Yeah, okay. So when I finally, my father finally decided to return back to California, it was practically, it was after the atomic bomb had been dropped. So it was that way in 1944, '5, even though the camps were technically closed on January 2, 1945, because of the Supreme Court decision in December of 1944. Anyway, when we returned back to California, we were temporarily billeted at the San Jose Buddhist Temple, which had been converted into a huge dorm, and they've taken out all the cubes and brought in cots, so some fifteen, twenty families could sleep there for whatever the number of days necessary. And we did that and ended up in the government providing temporary housing in a military camp in San Francisco. Because the war had ended, and so all the officers that were using these were gone. And so families were billeted there temporarily, and so we spent about ten months in San Francisco, and I went to second grade there. In the meantime, my father cashed some insurance papers, raised money, and through an old family friend in Gilroy who was a Japanese immigrant, found a restaurant which happened to be, guess what, a Chinese restaurant. It was called the Pacific Café Chop Suey House. And so my father decided that he wanted to try the restaurant business. So it was basically a mom and pop restaurant, and my father was the head chef, and my mother was the head waitress. And so we moved there and it was kind of primitive. The living quarters were in the back of the restaurant to barracks, nothing fancy about that. What can we do as kids? As we got older, we got roped into cleaning tables and washing dishes and all scutwork, to help the whole family survive in the business.

One interesting event during that time was a Black man came in one day with kind of a polite manner, and went to my mother and said, "Do you serve colored people?" And my mother was sort of struck by this question, and she said, "Of course we do." And then he turned around, went out, brought his family of four or five people, and they had lunch and so on, and they enjoyed it and then went. That was the first time I had heard, overheard any kind of a conversation between an Asian family people and a Black family. And at that time, this is after World War II, there was still a number of Blacks migrating from southern states in the U.S. to north and to the west. And so this fellow was one of those Black immigrants coming from the South because had an accent. And it was the first time I ran into one. There weren't that many Blacks in California at that time, not in a place like Gilroy. And so that was, to me, unusual. But to overhear this conversation, I thought, "Wow." And that kind of stuck in my head because I didn't expect it, my mother didn't expect it, and it was for real. And there were people caught in this situation, and I didn't run across a Black person until I went to Berkeley a number of years later. Because then I ran into students from all over, because Berkeley is a big international campus. And so I got to know a few students who happened to be Black, but they were from elsewhere.

LG: Do you have any other memories of sort of growing up in the restaurants? Were there other workers there?

AN: Time to time, depending on the day of the week and so on, and the volume of customers, they would, my parents would hire somebody as a supplement to the waitress staff, and/or taking care of dishwashing and that kind of stuff. But the mostly it was run by Mother and Father, and as we got older, we got roped into doing some of the chores.

LG: So your father was preparing Chinese dishes?

AN: Yep. He learned how to stir fry, it took him all of one morning to learn how to do that, because he could cook anything. And stir frying was pretty easy for him, no sweat.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2023 JACL Philadelphia. All Rights Reserved.