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KE: Awesome. Okay, hi. It's great to meet you. I'm Kristin, like Bill said. I'm going into my -- I'm in my second year at the University of Washington. I'm studying engineering and informatics. I was interested in being a part of this project because JACL has had such a big impact on my life. My grandpa was the president for... was the president of the JACL for the Puyallup Valley. And just growing up in the Seattle Japanese American community, it just had such a big impact on my life. So, when I was messaged by one of my old teachers to be a part of this project, I jumped at the chance. I was so excited, and it's been so much fun. And Bill has been great to work with. So, let's jump in. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Your upbringing, school activities, just a little bio about yourself?

SS: Well, I've got about fifty-nine years. So, are you just talking about originally where I'm from?

KE: Yeah, let's start with that.

SS: Okay, I'm a military, a child of a military family. So, I was born in Texas, on a military base. And traveled a little bit, lived in a few different areas, came here to live when my dad was stationed in Vietnam. And so he wanted his family to be here. He had been stationed in Fort Lewis in the '50s, which is when he met my mother. And so my mom is from Washington State. She grew up all her siblings, Kapowsin, I don't know if anybody knows where that is. It's kind of out by Mount Rainier. And so we've -- I've lived in this state since about 1972, 1973. So to me, I'm a Washingtonian, I basically grew up here. Went to the University of Washington. Yay, go Dogs. I grad... I started out in poli sci. I wanted to be in international affairs. Actually, I went my first year to PLU. And was looking to study international politics and government. A couple things happened in the world, and I thought, "Huh, wow, well, maybe that's not the place for me." I thought I wanted to be governor. [Laughs] I was so young. Governor, or in some kind of politics, transferred to the UW. And after I got a little taste of the poli sci major, and the people in it, and the professors, I thought another, huh, this is not... I don't think this is my cup of tea, and decided to go into more public relations, type of thing. So that's what I ended up studying: communication and public relations.

So, some of the, I think I skipped over a lot. I have to say, going back to... those are the things that kind of happened, the things that kind of affected, at least what brought me to maybe JACL, is when I was growing up in the, being around military, other military kids, at least during that time in the '60s, it just seemed like everyone looked like me, or I looked like everyone else in the environment that I was living in. And it wasn't until I kind of moved here and then started going to school out in the Franklin Pierce School District, that I realized that I look really different than everybody. And I kind of wasn't -- I was considered a minority, which I never considered myself that growing up in, on military bases, and I lived in Thailand. So really, everyone really, I did look like everyone. And I didn't really realize all that stuff. Sometimes kids just don't. And so it wasn't until I kind of moved to Washington state that I thought, oh, and then I started finding out that the different places that I went to, I don't know, people are always trying to figure out what I am.

I think I've been asked that over a million times in my life, "What are you?" Not, "What ethnicity are you?" or background, just, "What are you?" And I think I take that with me a lot, being a biracial person, and especially a biracial person of my age. Not quite as many of us during the '50s, '60s, '70s, as there are now. So and then wiggling my way through the University of Washington, I felt a little more at ease. Majority of people look a lot of different ways. And, but there was something that freaked me out when I was at the U Dub back in the '80s, the Ku Klux Klan came into town, and had a big convention or something like that. I don't know what they're called, rallies, conventions, I don't know. And I think David Duke was there and all of this. And, all of a sudden, some of my friends were getting beaten up in elevators, just getting on to go up to their dorm with people who they just thought lived in the same dorm were getting beat up. And I became scared. I was kind of afraid, just for a moment. And I knew then that... I always think of those kinds of organizations when I was that age, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one, as in the past. Yeah, they're kind of around, but they're only in certain areas. And so for me, that kind of was a little bit of a [turns pretend switch]. Now, it's right where you live, it's right where you live. So there might be people who belong to it, might be people that you know. So anyways, that just that's kind of led me here... and I'm married. And I have a daughter, who is a senior in her college over in Boston at Berklee School of Music. And so she's living in Boston right now. And then, I have an almost ninety-three-year-old mom. And then I have a brother who tootles around here, too. So that's, I guess that's me in a nutshell.

KE: That's really interesting about the story you were telling about the -- when the Ku Klux Klan came to University Washington. Because I have never heard that story before. Or heard about that. So that's really interesting.

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