Returning to San Francisco was brutal. We were housed in government dormitories in Hunter’s Point in San Francisco. We lived next to the Mochida family (famously photographed by Dorothea Lange during the “forced removal”). The room had only beds and a pull-down table. We couldn’t cook. There was a cafeteria, but we couldn’t afford to eat there. So we would go up the hill to a market and buy a loaf of bread, sandwich filling, and mustard; come back to the dorm and make sandwiches on the pull-down table. Then we would sit on our beds and eat. Once, a young woman who had a job took me to the cafeteria. My dad found a job as a janitor, and eventually someone got a rice cooker, so we were able to have rice.
During this time, I attended Everett Jr. High (at 18th and Dolores). I had a hard time, as I had spoken mainly Japanese with my family, and often didn’t understand what the teacher meant. I remember being instructed to “pick up the lid” and I didn’t know what a lid was, as at Topaz, I never saw pots and pans. No one helped me. The transition from a cramped barrack to an urban school in a large building was disorienting. I didn’t know how to find my next classroom when the bell rang. Two Black teenagers (Clara Williams and Blanche Anderson) took me under their wing and started showing me how to get around.
After six months at Hunters’ Point, we were moved to government housing in Richmond. Here we could cook, and we lived there for maybe a year until we could afford a house in Berkeley. In the Richmond complex, there was a row of Japanese, a row of Black families, and a row for people who had migrated out to California from Oklahoma.
I worked as a “school girl” in Piedmont (like many other young Nisei women). I did household tasks in exchange for room, board, and $30 a month while I went to school. I attended Oakland Tech and took business courses because I knew I would have to get a job to help my family, who was still living in housing in Richmond.
I married in 1951. My husband was a gardener. We had one son, who now lives in Oklahoma, where he had to transfer for his government job.