Susan Kitazawa | Interview 1| January 19, 2022

TEWES: This is a first interview with Susan Kitazawa for the Japanese American Intergenerational Narratives Oral History Project. The interview is being conducted by Amanda Tewes on January 19, 2022. Ms. Kitazawa joins me from San Francisco, California, and I am in Walnut Creek, California. Thank you so much, Susan, for joining me today and for getting through and for starting on this great project.

KITAZAWA: Thank you.

TEWES: Starting from the beginning: can you tell me when and where you were born?

KITAZAWA: I was born in 1947 in Upstate New York, where my parents had moved for the first time after getting out of Manzanar. They ended up on the East Coast.

TEWES: And we will certainly be speaking about that circumstance more in the 00:01:00future. Is there a story about your name you would like to share?

KITAZAWA: Well, I have my original family last name, Kitazawa. And when I moved to California, I pronounced it with a profoundly gringo accent. That my father, the way he said it, more like Kitazawa and Japanese American people would go, "Oh, oh," and then they'd say, "Kitazawa," like you don't even know how to say your own name. So that's part of my name story, my last name. My first name is Susan. And my mother did not give any of the three of us children middle names, and we would ask, because always when you filled out forms at school or the teacher would want to know your middle name and we would say, "We don't have middle names." And the teacher would say, "Oh, don't be embarrassed. Just say what your middle name is." And we would say, "We don't have middle names." Come to find out, after I moved to 00:02:00California, that most Japanese American people have a Japanese given middle name, like Miyoko or something. And my mother was fierce about how we did not need middle names. So I think it's kind of interesting that she chose not to give us middle names, and particularly did not give us Japanese middle names.

TEWES: Yeah, that is interesting.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. And our names are Susan, Margaret, and Katherine. They're so British.

TEWES: Yes, that, too. Well, I'm also curious about what generation you identify as Japanese American.

KITAZAWA: I identify as Sansei, but my mom was born in Japan and came over as a toddler. So technically I'm Nisei on my mom's side and Sansei on my father's 00:03:00side, but culturally I'm Sansei. Culturally I'm probably like Irish American working class.

TEWES: Yeah. Let's talk about why that is more. So you were born in Upstate New York, and where did you grow up exactly?

KITAZAWA: I lived in Upstate New York until I was very young, young enough that I don't remember being there. And then my parents moved to outside of Washington, D.C., because my father had a job in D.C. And we rented a house there [where my parents had to shovel coal into the furnace all winter], and it was just me and my first sister, and then my second sister was born later [when we lived outside Boston]. And then we moved back to Upstate New York and lived there when I was in kindergarten and first grade. And then we moved to a small town in Massachusetts outside of Boston, because my father got a job in Boston, which is also why we moved back 00:04:00to Syracuse. It was because of his job. And then we lived outside of Boston when I was seven, eight, nine, ten years old, about three and a half years, and then we moved to a place in Pennsylvania, again because of my father's job changes. And then our last move when I was growing up was to a place about half an hour by car from the first place. We lived in Pennsylvania, and he still had the same job, but we finally bought a house. It was our first house that my parents owned. We were always renters before that and kind of gypsies growing up. And it was all because of my father's job changes and it was because basically he earned his PhD and then because of racism after World War II, wasn't able to get jobs that were at all commensurate with his level of 00:05:00education. I believe his first job was washing glassware in a chemistry lab, kind of like a chemistry lab dishwasher. And he moved from that eventually to being the head of a research laboratory by the time I was partway through ninth grade. So like every time he got a little bit better job we would move.

TEWES: And what was his degree in?

KITAZAWA: His degree was technically in wood technology, because his parents had a nursery and they wanted him to come back and run the family nursery. They wanted him to have a degree related to horticulture and nursery, so he took forestry for his bachelor's degree and then he ended up with a PhD in wood technology. But he took tons of chemistry and physics classes, because he was interested in chemistry research. And he didn't go back, obviously, and run the family nursery, which was a grave 00:06:00disappointment to his parents. But that wasn't something he wanted to do, to work fourteen hours a day, seven days a week on a very, very small family run nursery of flowering plants.

TEWES: Where was that nursery located?

KITAZAWA: It was in San José. Long time ago. His father was the chauffeur of the second car in San José. Before his father was able to buy the nursery, he actually -- Winchester Mystery House. I don't know if people listening to this would know about that, but the heir to the Winchester Rifle inheritance, she had a home and she was kind of mentally ill so she kept adding rooms to it constantly her entire life. But anyway, my grandfather mucked 00:07:00stables for her horses. So that's my family's long-time connection to San José.

TEWES: Wow. Yeah, I've definitely heard about Winchester Mystery House. That's so interesting.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. And then some people, especially in the Japanese American community, know about Kitazawa Seed Company, and that same company was the business of my grandfather's brother and his wife. So there were two brothers who were married to two sisters in Japan. And so the one set, my father's parents, had the nursery, and the other set had the seed company.

TEWES: Do you know what brought them to the States?

KITAZAWA: Yeah. Poverty in Japan. My father's father was an oldest son. The oldest son inherits everything, and if what you inherit is debt, then 00:08:00that's -- he was responsible for the family debt. I believe they came here temporarily to earn money and then they were going to go back to Japan. My father's grandfather, they had a silkworm business, and the mulberry trees became blighted in Japan and the mulberry trees died. And that's the only thing that silkworms eat, so the silkworms all died. It ended their business. So that's how we ended up here. And then on my mother's side, I don't know that much, but her father came from what sounds like a kind of dysfunctional family and he just wanted to get away, so he came here by himself to the US and then later he went back to Japan. Very poor and not doing well and was married to my 00:09:00grandmother who had already been married and her husband had died. And then they came back here to the United States. So basically they came here because of hardship in Japan.

TEWES: And where did your mother's family settle?

KITAZAWA: My mother's father got a job as the cook in a private boarding school for very wealthy white boys. And so he worked seven days a week, split shifts, like from 5:00 AM until 7:00 PM at night, working in the kitchen of the dining hall for the private boys' school. My grandmother, my mother's mother, was schizophrenic, only back then nobody dealt with things like that. So she just stayed in the little cabin cottage thing behind the dining hall where the family lived and wandered around 00:10:00hallucinating, basically was there. And that's probably why my grandfather got this job at the school, was because that way the three kids, my mother and her siblings, could have somebody kind of looking after them, because their mom wasn't really functional.

TEWES: Yes. Sounds like there was extra care needed.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah.

TEWES: Was the school in California?

KITAZAWA: Pardon?

TEWES: Was the school in California?

KITAZAWA: Yes, yes. It was in Los Gatos.

TEWES: Oh okay, also Bay Area.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah. My father was born in San José and my mother came here when she was two. So they basically are Californians and they grew up here, and then they went to Berkeley and then they went to Manzanar. Then after that, then we ended up on the East Coast or they ended up on the East Coast. I think of 00:11:00myself as a Californian who was just accidentally born in New York State.

TEWES: Well, I do want to speak about your family a bit later in our conversations. But getting back to New York State: you mentioned you felt somewhat connected to Irish American working-class culture, and I presume that's because most of the folks around you were of that background.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. From the time I was born until the time I left home to go to college, except for at the very end, like ninth grade until the end of high school when my parents bought a home, all the rental places we lived in were very, very working-class, lower-income, working-class places. And so the people who have those kinds of jobs are mostly Irish, Italian, and Polish Americans. So that's who I grew 00:12:00up around, which is very working-class, not-so-educated white people who did labor jobs. Steel mill. Like our next door neighbors in Massachusetts, the father was a janitor. The family on the other side, the parents were practicing alcoholics, so I'm not sure that either of them had jobs. And my mom used to have us take food over to their kids, because the kids were left alone a lot. So that's the kind of world I grew up in. Pretty low rent, simple, working class. And then only in the last three years, when my parents bought their own home, then we lived in a more middle-class, again, completing white community. And all my schooling from kindergarten basically until I graduated from my first 00:13:00college degree, I don't think there were any people of color in any of my classes, either students or teachers. Except I had a Japanese American teacher for a sociology class in college who thought I was really weird, because I was so un-Japanese American, from his point of view. And then there was a Latino guy who was from Spain, who was a Spanish teacher. I don't know if he would have thought of himself as Latino. He was a person who grew up and came over from Spain to teach. So probably thought of himself more as a European. But looking at him, you might have thought, Well, he's Latino. But that's it. The whole time: church, Girl Scouts -- unless my sister -- if it was a multi-age thing and my sister happened to be in the group with 00:14:00me, I was always the only person of color.

TEWES: What did that mean for you, being the only person of color in these situations?

KITAZAWA: It was really hard, and especially because it was after World War II. Being born with Japanese DNA after World War II is like being Muslim American after 9/11. Tremendous hostility toward what they called Japs. Lot of name-calling, bullying, getting kicked and shoved and beaten up fairly frequently. I learned how to be very good at physical self-defense by the time I was partway through elementary school. You come at me and I'm going to make sure that I stopped you. But until I learned how to protect 00:15:00myself, I'd get shoved on the ground a lot or have people throwing rocks at me. And it wasn't just me; it was my sisters, too. And I think my father, he didn't talk about the lack of safety, but I know when I was sixteen and my father taught me how to drive, I got the same instruction that Black people get when they learn how to drive -- or many of them do. "If you see the lights of a police car behind you, pull over in the first safe place you can pull over, roll down the driver's window as quickly as you can, put your hands on top of the steering wheel and freeze and don't move. And when the officer comes up and starts to talk to you, you call him sir. Don't reach in your purse, don't reach in the glove compartment to get anything. Don't do anything until he tells you to do it." 00:16:00[I learned that the world was not a safe place, and that people didn't really like people who looked like us.]

TEWES: Thank you for sharing that. That's a lot for especially a young person to deal with.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. And I think, besides my connection with poor, working-class, white people, is also there were no Black people in my school or Black Americans. But I was very aware, like in high school, of the Civil Rights Movement and I saw those folks as my allies and that they were in the same struggle. And then also when I was in later elementary school, we were the only family in our town who wasn't a white family. And then after we moved in, a Black family moved into the town next to our 00:17:00town. They were utterly harassed. Things like paint being thrown on their house and their cars vandalized and things like that. And eventually the word was that they were firebombed out of their house by a Molotov cocktail thrown through the window by someone. And at that point, my father, without saying why he was doing this, bought fire extinguishers. I remember when I was ten or eleven years old, my father said it was really important for me to know how to use a fire extinguisher. And we also used to have fire drills and my father would just suddenly say, "Okay, if there's a fire right here in the hall, what would you do? How would you get your sisters out of the house?" And he did not talk about the Black family, but I heard about this at school from the other kids, I knew about it. When I would hear noises at night, I would think, "Oh, they're coming to get us." So even though I think a lot of Black 00:18:00Americans will often look at Asian Americans as though you have money and you have everything and you're the good students and you don't understand our situation, because of the kind of life I had, I think I in a lot of ways feel more affinity with Black Americans than I do with a lot of Asian Americans who've lived a more comfortable life.

TEWES: It seems like you certainly understood the idea of racism, at an early age it impacted you in this meaningful way. Oh gosh, so many things. Go ahead.

KITAZAWA: But the sad part is I understood in a gut way the fears and everything, and I understood my father saying, "You have to be 150 or 200 percent as good as other people, in terms of grades, behavior, 00:19:00everything in order to just barely be equal." I understood that, the disadvantages. But I also internalized a lot of it, as I think many of us do, that we don't look right, we're not pretty. I mean, everybody in the Miss America contest or the Miss Universe contest back then was white. You couldn't be pretty and be a person who wasn't white, okay. I remember when I was sixteen years old, I was reading the New York Times in our living room and there was a Campbell's Soup ad with a bunch of pictures of little children in squares, their faces. And the kids were all white and there was one Black kid and there was one Asian kid. And I looked at that at sixteen and I thought, Whoa, there's an Asian person in a newspaper ad. Because I had never seen an Asian 00:20:00face in a TV ad, a newspaper ad, a magazine ad. And I was stunned that the picture of the kid was there and I was stunned by the realization that I had never noticed that we weren't there. And I understood in that moment that I had internalized the sense that, well, we're not really people, we don't really count. Of course we're not there, because they just have people in ads and we're not really among people. That was a big moment in my growing up, of just going, wow, I've internalized that so much that I never thought, How come people like us aren't in ads? I didn't even realize that until I saw this. It was a boy, it was a picture of an Asian boy in a Campbell's soup ad in the New York Times. So that was about 1963.

TEWES: Thank you for sharing 00:21:00that. I want to switch gears a little bit --

KITAZAWA: Sure.

TEWES: -- and think about -- sorry. We discussed previously the values you learned from your family over the years and I'm curious what you saw those as.

KITAZAWA: Well, hard work. A white Irish American librarian friend of mine said, "Japanese people are so earnest." And he was speaking of me, to me, and he goes, "Yes, you're very earnest." And I hadn't really thought of that word. But yes, you live your life making your best effort, doing the best you can do at your job. Give that extra 00:22:00oomph. Go beyond what's expected of you. And I don't know how much of that is from living in a racist world here in the US, but I see that in my relatives in Japan who didn't go through all that. It's just like hard work and group work and making your best effort. I think that work ethic is really big. The other thing is a really strong sense of community. This is not about you as an individual; this is about the family, this is about the community, this is about the well-being of everybody, and you need to think about the well-being of everybody and what would work the best for the most people and not just about yourself. I like those values. Taken to an extreme, sometimes they cannot be good for you, when you don't think about your own needs at all and just think about other people's needs. That can be harmful. But 00:23:00overall, I think they're good values and those are very much from my parents. Again, I don't know if this was Japanese or just my parents, but we three girls were very much given a sense of, "You're privileged." We weren't really rich or anything, but, "You're privileged, because you live indoors and have enough to eat. You're probably going to get to go to college. And so you owe it to the community to give back. You need to contribute back to the community for what you've received. You have an obligation to do something useful for the community." And so it's interesting. I'm the oldest. I worked as a registered nurse. My second sister worked as a physician, but she worked for the Native American Health Service, not like a doctor in private practice making a lot of money. And then my youngest 00:24:00sister is a retired public school teacher.

TEWES: Wow. I can see that through line, certainly.

KITAZAWA: Yeah.

TEWES: I know your mother was also interested in politics, and I wonder how she modeled that for you.

KITAZAWA: My parents were both deeply, deeply interested in national and international politics. Not so much mainstream political parties and all that, but just like the Civil Rights Movement. They were members of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. Politics in the sense of politics is about power and the law and how the world's going to be structured, and they were very interested in that. They were very interested in social justice. We were raised very much 00:25:00with the idea that everybody matters. And a lot of my parents' closer friends, wherever we lived, would be Jewish, because again, they were the others, so they were more connected with us than other people. And also because they were more educated, because, as I mentioned, my father had his PhD and my mother finished grad school. And she didn't finish her thesis, but otherwise she would have had a master's degree in biology. So my parents were well educated and they hung out -- to the extent that they did socialize -- with other well-educated people, rather than the people that we lived around. Although they were friends with them, too, and got along with the neighbors and everything.

TEWES: I'm curious that they were both interested in civil rights and other political issues. What influence do you think their incarceration experience has had on 00:26:00 that?

KITAZAWA: I think they were probably just by nature pretty politically left leaning before they were incarcerated, because just of who they were in terms of their own values, that everybody matters and you need to be fair to everybody and everyone should have an equal chance and those kinds of things. And then I think after they were incarcerated, my father was extremely bitter -- not surprisingly -- about that experience. And my mother believed that it was completely totally wrong and totally unjust, but she didn't share my father's bitterness. She just said, "People don't know what they're doing, and they have stupid, wrong ideas and they act on those ideas, and they don't even know that they're as messed up as they 00:27:00are." She just wasn't bitter about it. I mean, she would have really liked to have not had that experience, but she didn't carry the bitterness that my father carried for years. But I don't know. I don't think that that shaped their political views as much as just who they were to begin with.

TEWES: Right. So you mentioned all through your education you were basically the only student of color, and that influences your early life and education. But you were also doing some activism at a young age that I find very interesting. You had mentioned your interest in the Civil Rights Movement yourself.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah. Things that I did. 00:28:00This isn't really people activism, but when I was in elementary school, there were a group of girls who were friends. There were about eight of us, and we were really into animals and pets and everything, and several of us wanted to be veterinarians, including myself. And so we decided to do fundraisers for the SPCA [Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals], which was not like the one here in San Francisco that has a grand and glorious building. It was a little, funky shelter in a town nearby. So we organized garage sales and we would go around to our neighbors and gather things that they didn't want, and then we would have garage sales that we would move around to the different houses that we each lived in. And my mother was very involved in that, in terms of driving us and all our for-sale junk around. Back when I was about ten or eleven, I guess, so 00:29:001957, one summer we earned $250 for the SPCA, which is a lot of money for a bunch of elementary school girls to earn. So I did that.

And then in high school, I knew the Freedom Schools were happening in the South, when the Black Southern people were boycotting the segregated schools to protest having inferior crummy schools. And so they were doing the Freedom Schools outside of the school system, and I heard that they needed textbooks. So my high school German teacher, he knew they had this room where they had all the used textbooks. And the textbook companies had to deal with the schools, that when they weren't being used anymore they had to be sent back to the company to be destroyed. They couldn't be reused anyway. That was the rule. But he basically 00:30:00took reading books and English books and math books, because those were the two kinds of books they wanted, and after school I would go with him with my brown paper bags and he would give me books and I would take them home on the school bus little by little, because books are heavy. And then when I got a bunch together, I would put them in a box and mail them to the Freedom School place in the South.

Oh, and then I was in Girl Scouts. There were a group of Black moms who wanted to start a Girl Scout troop in the housing project, which I believe was 100 percent Black. They asked if anybody wanted to help them organize a Girl Scout troop. So my friend Moira, who was Irish American, and I, we worked with the moms and taught them about how to set up a Girl Scout troop and about the Girl Scout program. And we would meet with them with the kids until they got up and running, and then they ran the Girl Scout troop on their 00:31:00own. So we did that.

And then when I was in college, I was married to my first husband. He was in the draft resistance movement, and so I was pulled into that because of him. And then I tutored. There was a tutorial program which was college students from the University of Pittsburgh going up into the Hill, which is the Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, once a week to tutor kids in reading. And so I did that. Just things like that.

TEWES: Susan, what do you think motivated you to get involved in these ways?

KITAZAWA: That's a funny question. I think my question 00:32:00is: why isn't everybody doing that? Like aren't we here to do that? There's a lot of uneven playing fields in the world and in our lives here in San Francisco and the world and country. There's a lot of things that aren't just, and it's our responsibility to do what we can to fix that. That's how I see things. It's like I have a very hard time understanding what motivates people who just want to make as much money as they can for themselves and have a lot of things for themselves and just ignore all of that. That to me is not understandable. Yeah. So I guess it's just like what motivates anybody to do what they want. It's just your basic 00:33:00belief system, and my basic belief system is that everybody deserves a fair shake. Everybody doesn't have to have all the same things, but everybody deserves good adequate housing, nutritious food, healthcare, good education, freedom to travel, access. Everybody should have that. And if people don't have it, then, well, we ought to be doing something to try to make that better.

TEWES: You mentioned being involved in sort of the anti-Vietnam movement. Can you give an example of that? I should say anti-Vietnam War movement.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, 00:34:00yeah. You and probably people listening to this know like the different points of view about the War in Vietnam or, as it's called in Vietnam, the American War. And again, this was my first husband, who kind of ruled my life and I didn't have too much to say. The person who was the head of the American Friends Service Committee in Pittsburgh connected with the Quakers decided that it would be a good idea to have me dress up as a Vietnam peasant who had been napalmed. And so I was supposed to do this, because that was my part in this. I did not really exactly directly agree to do it. I don't think it was a good idea. But they hired a makeup man to use rubberized makeup stuff and make my face look like I'd been napalmed, and then I was given black 00:35:00pajamas to wear and sort of a flat conical straw hat, the stereotypic Asian hat. And I was put in the front of the anti-war peace march that went from the university down to the federal building one weekend. And I was being used as a prop to make people see how bad the war was, and, look, this poor Vietnamese peasant's been napalmed, and this is horrible and shouldn't be happening. And what I saw, looking out through the rubber stuff on my face, was on one side of the street there was all white people and on the other side of the street it was all Black people, because that street was the borderline between the Black and the white neighborhoods. And people looked horrified and sad, and I looked at the people and I thought, No, this is fake. I'm sorry, this is 00:36:00fake. And I couldn't say anything. But I thought, These are the people whose kids are over there in the war. These are the people whose kids have been drafted, and you who are in this march, the white middle-class, hippie, protestor people, you've got student deferments, you don't have anything to do with the war. And these people, their kids are over there or their brothers or whoever. It's something that I look back on and I wish I had done what I wanted to do, which was to peel off the rubber stuff and say, "It's all fake. I'm just a prop. I'm being used. Don't go through all the emotional turmoil that you're going through on account of this." So again, it was just another time in my life of seeing the world from somebody else's point 00:37:00of view.

TEWES: That's such a vivid memory you shared about seeing white people on one side of the street and Black people on the other side and you're in the middle as a prop, you said. That's just very vivid.

KITAZAWA: One thing I would toss in also --

TEWES: Go ahead.

KITAZAWA: -- it's like even though I was aware of racism and all this and I just told that story, I had internalized very much of the racism around me, that even though if someone asked me, "Do you feel less than white people?" I probably would have said no. But the way I lived my life was my white husband just said, like, "This is what you need to do," right, so I just did it. And I didn't like it and I didn't want to do 00:38:00it. I really didn't have a voice back then or I hadn't claimed my voice. I had a voice when I was a little kid, but I had lost my voice during those years.

TEWES: Do you have a sense of when you reclaimed your voice?

KITAZAWA: Just little by little once I was in the more diverse world of being in California. Although also, I have to say, I hadn't totally lost my voice, because when our sixth-grade teacher was going on and on about how everyone celebrates Christmas and my classmate Larry Goldberg raised his hand and said, "Mr. Wasiakowski, not everyone celebrates Christian Christmas. We're not all Christians." And Mr. Wasiakowski called Larry a Christ 00:39:00killer, "Jews are Christ killers." And I remember I stood up in class, right, I'm eleven years old, and I said, "I'm going to have my parents report you to the ACLU." I had a voice that stood up for other people that I felt were being mistreated, but I did not have a voice yet to stick up for myself back then.

TEWES: Oh wow. And actually, I would say, Susan, looking through your life, I've seen you advocate for others many times, so I see that trend, as well.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah. I think that's just how I was raised. If something bad's happening to you, just suck it up, put up with it. Don't whine, don't complain. Just do your 00:40:00best and keep moving. But there was also a message from my parents that people shouldn't mess over other people, and if other people are being messed up over, then you should try to do something to fix it. It just didn't include you yourself. If you were being messed over, just be tough, be brave. Just keep going. Don't complain.

TEWES: Do you think that was part of the cultural values you were speaking about?

KITAZAWA: Yeah, I think so, I think so. And I could be wrong, but I think that that's very traditional Japanese values, as in Japan, especially for females. Just do your best and keep your head down and just keep working away and don't complain and don't ask for things. Be 00:41:00inconspicuous. What else do you want to ask me about?

TEWES: I know, thanks. I'm looking ahead. Well, you already mentioned you were at University of Pittsburgh, so let's take you there. And I think you graduated in 1970. But can you tell me about the experience of that campus?

KITAZAWA: I lived on it for two years in the dorms, because that was my parents wish, and then afterwards I lived off campus in apartments. It was right next to the Pittsburgh Steelers stadium. There was just all this Pittsburgh Steelers stuff going on, because they were 00:42:00doing well back then.

TEWES: I think I meant to say the school more broadly. Tell me about your decision to attend.

KITAZAWA: Yeah. School more broadly. I'm still very close friends with one of my anthropology professors from the University of Pittsburgh. I ended up majoring in cultural anthropology. I think it was my attempt to major in something like ethnic studies, which didn't exist at the time. That was wonderful, just to give you a whole different perspective and way to think about 00:43:00things. I had some really cool German literature professors that were kind of interesting [and delightfully open-minded] people. And so I liked that there were some really good teachers. And then it was just also a very strange, isolating time, because after the first two years I was married to my first husband, who was, as I look back now, a very distorted, not happy human being. So I suffered what that was to be married to someone like that. And I also just really, really, really wanted to get away from the East Coast. When I was seven or eight years old, that was when I decided that I was going to move to San Francisco when I could. So I was just wanting to get out of there. I 00:44:00wanted to come out here. Just like okay.

TEWES: What was it about San Francisco?

KITAZAWA: My mom lived here when she first moved to the United States, which she didn't remember, and then she lived here in high school. She lived at the YWCA in Japantown and went to high school in San Francisco, and then she went to UC Berkeley when she was sixteen. She loved that time in San Francisco. She loved the city, she loved Berkeley, and she talked about it really, really a lot. So when I was little, like seven or eight years old, I'd never been here but I just thought, Oh yeah, that's where I'm going. And I did. I've been here ever since.

TEWES: Yeah, you made that happen. I think you moved in 1970 when you graduated.

KITAZAWA: Yeah, yeah. About five seconds 00:45:00after I graduated, I came to California. And it was hard at the beginning, again, I think, because of racism and not having connections that could help you get jobs. I worked for the US Census as a census taker and I worked in a vodka factory on an assembly line. I worked for Kelly Girls and Manpower, those temp agencies that just send you out on different kind of crummy jobs. It was hard getting started here. It was a time, if you went to a store, every single store clerk was white. The only Asian women I saw that had jobs were waitresses in Chinese restaurants. Women of color did housekeeping jobs and things like that. I did my share of hotel maid 00:46:00work and housekeeper jobs for families that had money, that kind of job. That was what was available, even though I had a college degree, was smart and hardworking and capable. But I did a lot of those very low end, minimum wage jobs for quite a while. And then eventually I decided I needed to really get a life, so I went back to school and got a bachelor's degree in nursing at UCSF [University of California, San Francisco]. And then ever since then, 1981, then I worked as a nurse after that.

And part of it was my own choices. If I had gotten a different degree than cultural anthropology with a double minor in English and German literature, it might have helped me get different kinds of jobs. But those are the kind of subjects you really need to have a graduate degree to get any work 00:47:00 in.

TEWES: It strikes me as interesting that as a little girl you saw your father struggle with job discrimination. Did you have any idea that this would still be a problem for you, and in San Francisco?

KITAZAWA: I don't think I knew it was a problem for him when I was a kid. I just knew we had to move a lot, because Papa was always changing his job and I don't think I had any insight into that growing up. I guess I was pretty aware of job discrimination. Because housing, like in Pittsburgh, I'd go try to rent an apartment. They'd say, "Oh, it's already rented." And so I would send a white friend and they'd say, "Oh, let me show you the place." And I think just looking around the world, when every single department store clerk, every single Walgreens clerk is 00:48:00white, you know people like you don't get hired. People who look like you don't get those jobs. It was sort of obvious. So in 1970 that was just how it was.

TEWES: And what drew you to nursing?

KITAZAWA: Spending a lot of times looking at want ads and seeing that there were three kinds of jobs. This was back in newspaper paper want ads. Overwhelmingly the jobs for females were waitressing jobs, nursing or healthcare. Like, nurse's aide jobs or basically sexual workers, like the escort service jobs. And I knew I didn't want to work for an escort service, I didn't want to work as a 00:49:00prostitute. There were secretarial jobs. And I can't type. I still can't type very fast. And so there were nursing jobs. And so I said, "Okay, I'll go to nursing school." I did actually go to a year of clinical psych graduate school. There were very few people of color in that program, and a Chinese American guy who was in the class a year ahead of me, he got out of the program. He graduated and he got a job as a counselor in a psychiatric halfway house, which happened to be the same job I had had before I went to grad school in clinical psych. And I thought, Oh my God, he's really happy to go work in the place that I left to go to graduate school, because that's what was available to him. So I thought this was a mistake, and so that's when I switched to nursing school. Basically a decision based on economic 00:50:00survival. And I liked people and I liked working with people, so I figured in healthcare I'd have that. But I think largely it was a question of economic survival. And then it turned out I really, really liked working as a registered nurse. Yeah, really it was largely a matter of economic survival.

TEWES: Were you seeing other women of color in your program, your nursing program?

KITAZAWA: There were 140 people in my class, and Dominica, who's from Nigeria, was my very dear friend, and my friend, Orlando, who's from the Philippines, we're still friends. Dominica and I are still friends. And then there were probably like maybe 4 or 5 Asian American women who grew up out here in California around other Asian Americans. They had the more suburban 00:51:00Asian American kind of more comfortable experience. And also, see, I was in my thirties when I was nursing school, and so the other people, they were in their twenties, they were like ten years younger.

TEWES: That is a good point. I'm curious how you saw those demographics shift over the years in nursing.

KITAZAWA: Well, like all of my nursing jobs, working at UCSF Medical Center, working at San Francisco General Hospital, and working for the [San Francisco Unified] School District, I would say 80 to 95 percent of my fellow RNs were white. The people of color were the nursing assistants, the cafeteria workers, the custodians. I retired from nursing in 00:52:002006. It was pretty white.

TEWES: That's very interesting. Did you have any professional mentors in nursing?

KITAZAWA: Yeah, for sure. One of my head nurses, we all get together, people who work together up at UCSF, Irish American -- I don't know. That's a hard question to answer. I don't know.

TEWES: That's okay.

KITAZAWA: Mentors. [laughs] Mentors.

TEWES: Not a trick question.

KITAZAWA: What are mentors? Yeah. My head nurse when I worked 00:53:00up at UCSF on the floor, yeah, she's great. Very down to earth, very working class, Irish American, okay. My other job, school nursing, I think I was more at that point a mentor to a lot of other people. I don't feel that I really had a lot of mentors. And then at San Francisco General, I think the people that were the strongest mentors and supporters for me were mostly physicians, older physicians from maybe non-mainstream backgrounds. A Jewish doctor who really had my back and respected me. Yeah. There wasn't a lot of 00:54:00mentoring. I never thought about that question. Sorry for interrupting.

TEWES: Go ahead.

KITAZAWA: I think probably my whole professional work pathway would have been quite different if I had had mentors. But I don't think I had a lot of mentors. Like when I was in college, my anthropology professor, who's still my friend, who's a white guy who grew up in the Midwest, he was and still is a powerful mentor. And in high school, I had a couple of teachers who were really mentors who could see who I was. But I think in my work life, other than that one head nurse, I don't think that a lot of people could really see who I was.

TEWES: Let's pause for a second.

KITAZAWA: Okay.

TEWES: [break in audio] All right, we are back from a break. And, Susan, we were just speaking about your nursing career. 00:55:00[a portion of this interview was removed by the 00:56:00 narrator]

KITAZAWA: [As an RN, I wasn't good at starting IVs or remembering the ranges of normal lab values. My strength was in having genuine relationships with patients. A young man who lived on the streets used to come to the clinic at San Francisco General. He was almost always barefoot, often was soaking wet from the rain, and always had needle track marks on his arms. I could see what a bright, kind-hearted person he was and told him this every time I saw him. I told him, over and over, that he could find a way to have a better life. He disappeared for a long time. I thought that he had died. Then one day, we passed by each other on the front lawn of the hospital. He was wearing a hospital worker uniform. He told me, after being incarcerated, he ended up in a drug treatment program for a full year. The program included lots of counseling and job training. He told me he wanted to drop out of the program many times, but, remembering what I had said to him, he stuck it out. He told me I could see who he was even when he didn't know who he was. This is something I learned from my parents, to look beyond the surface and see who someone else really is.]

I left because my daughter was born, and working twelve-hour day and night shifts, rotating back and forth between twelve-hour day shifts and twelve-hour night shifts and all the sleep deprivation of 00:57:00that and having a new baby at home who was also on a twenty-four-hour schedule, it was too exhausting. I couldn't do it, I physically couldn't do it.

TEWES: Yeah, I bet. That's a great reason to get out of that. [both laugh] Okay. You mentioned your daughter. She was born in '84, I think. But you also have an older son. Can you tell me about him?

KITAZAWA: Yeah. My husband and I wanted to have kids, and before we were married, we talked about maybe having like four kids, and maybe we would have two the regular way and two by adoption. Again, because there's people in the world who need parents. That thing, again, of just do something constructive for other people. Not like in a bleeding heart, oh, I'm going to be a goody 00:58:00two-shoes and help people, but just you're here and you have resources and abilities and so you should use them for something constructive. So anyway, we ended up taking our son in -- at the time, we were told he was seven, but he was actually nine -- through the Department of Social Services. He was from Vietnam, and we were told that his mother had given him up as an infant and didn't want him and she was still in Vietnam. So we took him in on that basis with the plan to adopt him. And after he moved in, we found out that what they told us was false, and that he'd actually been taken from his mother in Vietnam by his uncle, who had since passed away, and that's what threw him into the system. So that's a whole long, long, long, long story. But he was with us for three years and we were eventually, through a great deal of work, able to get in touch with his mother, who by that time was in a refugee camp in the 00:59:00Philippines. And so I myself legally sponsored her into the United States, since her son, he was not of age so he couldn't sponsor a relative. And amazingly, INS [Immigration and Naturalization Service], because I was his legal guardian, accepted me as a relative of hers, which is pretty much a stretch, but they let me sponsor her. So she came over and a year later he went to live with her, and we all stayed in touch. She and her new husband live in San José, and we're all a big, extended family. So there's him and then there's our daughter who was born to us. So he's Vietnamese and she's half Irish, half Japanese American. She had her DNA done. She's 50 percent 01:00:00Irish and 50 percent Japanese. Nothing else mixed in there.

TEWES: Oh wow. You've got quite the multicultural family, Susan, and an international one, as well. I'm wondering how you approached raising your children with the idea of these Japanese American cultural values that you'd mentioned, and then also thinking about what you did and didn't want to pass on.

KITAZAWA: I think my husband and I, we have similar values. He's Irish American. But the hard work, do your part for the community, yada, yada. And we did our level best to pass this on to our kids. We were sort of surprised to find that we didn't manage to do this very well. My daughter works in corporate 01:01:00banking and values-wise fits in fairly well to that world. And my son has kind of gone the other direction of sort of -- I think most people's point of view, sort of underachieving. He dropped out of high school and got his GED and he's done stuff like working in a pizza place and working for Tower Records and things. Right now, he's a full-time house husband. His wife works and he takes care of their daughter. Well, they both do, but he's the main childcare person. I don't think either of my children do any volunteer work. I kind of doubt that they donate money to anything. They're a different generation. What can I say? They're good people. My parents' 01:02:00values of give back to the community and all that, that got lost someplace.

TEWES: I'm also thinking about the multicultural aspect of the family and what you wanted to make sure you shared about Japanese American culture and history with a family that has Vietnamese and Irish ancestry.

KITAZAWA: Well, my husband and I, we wanted to have it all there. Our son had moved out of the house by then and was living again with his birth mother in San José. But our daughter went with me to Japan for two weeks when I won two roundtrip airplane tickets through a community organization raffle. And then the following year, she went to Ireland with her dad 01:03:00for two weeks. So she got to see both of the, quote, unquote, homeland places. And then, yeah, just in conversation and everything, we just taught them about things. And with our son, we were hoping to maintain his Vietnamese language so that if his mom ever came over he would be able to talk with her. But he has like an emotional block or something against speaking Vietnamese and he just doesn't speak it and that didn't work. So as far as conscious plans to transmit cultural knowledge, I think we failed, but the intention was there. And also my daughter, I don't know what happened to my 01:04:00genes. I mean, 99.9 percent of people when they look at her assume she's pure European American. They're very surprised when they see me. Like, "Whoa, your mother's Asian." And so she lives in the world of a white person. And she said to me, "Mom -- " when I was protesting this -- she says, "Mom, it's like Barack Obama. They don't say he was our first mixed race, white/Black president, they say he was our first Black president. And he is considered a Black person and treated like a Black person, because he looks Black, even though he's light enough that obviously he's not pure African, right." My daughter says, "Look at me. I look white. I'm treated in the world as a white person. I live in the world of a white person. My experience in life is that of a white person, because that's the way 01:05:00people classify me. And so I'm a white person just like Barack Obama is a Black person. We're both 50/50 but the world doesn't know it or doesn't recognize it."

TEWES: What an interesting observation. How does that make you feel?

KITAZAWA: I felt sad, but I could see her point. She said, "Don't take it personally. It's not like I'm denying that I'm partly Japanese." But she said, "My life, my day-to-day life, my day-to-day life experience is as a white person. The world treats me as a white person, just like the world treats Barack Obama a Black person. It doesn't matter that his mother was pure European American. It's like her genes don't 01:06:00count in his experience in life." So that's a whole other topic, just what you look like shaping your experience. And going back to mentors and not having mentors and not being seen. I think if I were exactly the same person but I looked white, I would have been seen differently in terms of my potential than I was seen, because I don't look white. And your experience is just shaped by how other people categorize you. And I'm not saying that's good or bad or anything, but just it is. It's a fact.

TEWES: Yes. Thank you for sharing that. I want 01:07:00to broaden our look here and think historically a bit. One of the things that was happening during your early career in nursing and you had a young family, is that the redress movement was happening on a national level. I'm curious what you knew about that at that time.

KITAZAWA: I heard pretty much about it and I thought it was a really good idea, and I was interested in my parents take on it, which was, "No amount of money they can ever give us would make any difference. It already happened to us and no amount of money's going to take a difference. So therefore, we're not going to get involved in it. That was my parents." And my mother said, as she would often say in similar 01:08:00situations, she said, "If anybody deserves reparations it's the Native Americans and the people who are descended from people who were enslaved." And she said, "They deserve reparations much, much more than we do, because our experience was fairly short and limited and for the most part they didn't kill us," although a few people got killed. But she said, "Look what they did to the Native people that were here first. Look what they did to the Black people they brought over as slaves. If there's going to be reparations, they're the ones that should get reparations way before we should get reparations." And my mother felt quite strongly about that. I might add that when we watched cowboy shows on TV when I was -- later on and we finally got a TV, sometimes when the Indians would 01:09:00succeed in shooting some of the cowboys that were trying to kill them, my mother would go, "Yes! Fight them off. It's your land." [laughs] My mother was a very unusual Japanese immigrant. So anyway, that was my parents' take on redress. I think I was just too overwhelmed by my life to do anything about anything.

Plus, I felt very, very, very excluded by the Japanese American community here in San Francisco. And I shouldn't say the whole community. But my initial experiment of my attempts to enter the Japanese American community in San Francisco were horribly painful and disappointing. And so it tended that my allies were from a broad range 01:10:00of other people -- Latinos, Blacks, poor white people, Filipinos -- and I wasn't that connected with the Japanese American community. Do you want to hear my story about when I went to Japanese Community Youth Council? I had heard about this organization and I had heard that they wanted volunteers. And so when I first moved to San Francisco, I went over there one day, called ahead and made an appointment, because I said I wanted to talk to them about volunteering. And I went in the entrance, and at the entrance I remembered there were two women and a man, and they were sort of about my age. I guess I was twenty-four or twenty-five then. I said, "Oh, I'm here to talk with you about volunteering, and I called ahead and everything." And he said, "Who are 01:11:00you? I've never seen you at any community events." And I said, "Well, no, because I just moved out here. I grew up on the East Coast. I moved up here a couple of years ago, but I had to live down in San Mateo County, because that's where jobs are, and I've just moved up to the city now and I want to volunteer." He said, "Oh, you grew up with white people then on the East Coast?" And I said, "Yeah, I grew up with white people." And he goes, "Oh, you're a banana. We don't need people like you." And I was just crushed. And I said, "So I can't volunteer here?" And he goes, "We don't need people like you. You're a banana," which is like you're an Oreo, right? So I left and I was walking down the street crying, because I was so happy I was finally going to be with other Japanese American people. Well, I guess I wasn't crying yet. I was just looking very sad, and a Black 01:12:00man walked by me and he said, "Hey, sister, it can't be that bad." And I burst into tears. And he goes, "Oh, I'm sorry. You're going through something really hard. I guess it is that bad." And he goes, "Well, you take care of yourself." And I said, "Yeah, thank you." And I went home. It's like, okay, there you go. Like the Black people have my back; the Japanese American people, I don't count. And I was very hurt by that experience and so even though it was just one person talking to me, because the women didn't say anything, it was just such a slam that I just was afraid to go to anything in the Japanese American community for a while. So I used to go to the festivals, because anybody can walk around at the festivals, and I used to watch Seiichi Tanaka and the San Francisco Taiko Dojo people 01:13:00play. It was like, yeah, I wish I could do that. I loved that. I tried to be part of it, but I was on the margins.

Oh, and I went to a Japanese American church. I forget which one. I went to one. I think I went to the Presbyterian church in Japantown and I got the same kind of cold shoulder, sort of, who are you, where'd you come from thing. They weren't as mean, but I didn't feel like I was welcome there. So I made a few little initial stabs at being part of the Japanese American community here in San Francisco and then I just gave up and said, "Okay. I'm a Japanese American reject, and I'll just hang out with the people who don't feel that way toward me."

TEWES: Do you have a sense looking back on why it was so threatening that you were coming from outside the 01:14:00 community?

KITAZAWA: Well, after I took three semesters of Japanese at City College -- like in Japanese language you actually use -- just like you use different verbs for -- like if I give a book to my professor, to my friend, or to a little child, the word "give" changes. It's like a different verb defending on the hierarchy of the person in relationship to you. It's like if you're bowing, the lower hierarchy person has to bow deeper. And also in Japanese language, there's like in-group and out-group. And if you're talking to someone in your in-group, you use certain language, and if you're talking to someone in an out-group, you use other language. There's a very strong sense of in-group and out-group in traditional Japanese culture, and I came in, I was in the out-group. I was Japanese American, but I was not of them. And I think that that's 01:15:00worked in my favor. I attend a Saturday morning Zoom group with Wesley United Methodist Church in San José, which was originally the immigrant Japanese church in San José, and my grandparents were there, like, around 1915 and my father grew up in that church. And as soon as I -- "Oh, yeah, you're Buemon and Kiyo Kitazawa's granddaughter. Yeah, George, we knew George." So I was, like, instantly in in that group of people. It was like, "Oh, you're one of us." And they were utterly welcoming to me. Maybe part of it is that they're mostly older people. They're mostly older than I am, so they're not like young and insecure like that guy was. But part of it is just, yeah, I'm in their in-group, they know my people. I think that that's a big piece of what happened to 01:16:00 me.

TEWES: Thank you for sharing that. As I'm looking --

KITAZAWA: But it was just so disappointing. I just so wanted, after being not part of the Japanese American community where I grew up, because there wasn't any, finally I'm going to be part of the community. And to have the guy say, "You're a banana. We don't want people like you around." I was like, Oh, man. Break my heart.

TEWES: Do you feel like that has changed for you over the years in finding your place in the community?

KITAZAWA: Yeah. Maybe starting from that moment, walking out of that building. It was like, Okay, I have to find my people, because obviously these aren't my people, or at least they don't think 01:17:00I'm their person. And I think also, just because I had to bridge across cultural and racial divides, because I didn't have any choice growing up, because there wasn't anybody in my cultural group the whole time I was growing up. So, "Yo puedo hablar bien español," I speak Spanish pretty well. I look kind of Native American, more Native American than Japanese, and I've actually been mistaken as Native by Native people. Just because I grew up with white, working-class people, they kind of know, like once they get to know me, that I get it. Yeah. I have a very, very diverse group of friends and much, much more than 01:18:00other people do. Good, good friends. Long-time, deep friends. So that's the silver lining in the storm cloud, is just I have this richness in my life that maybe I wouldn't have had. Maybe if I'd been welcomed into the Japanese American community, maybe I would just live in this little, insular bubble and not know all the people I know.

TEWES: That's a wonderful way to think about it. Susan, I'm coming to the end of my questions for today. Is there anything from this portion of your life and experiences you want to make sure that we discuss?

KITAZAWA: No, I can't think of anything off the top of my head. I guess my only other thought, besides ethnic and racial and 01:19:00immigrant/non-immigrant diversity in my world, is that I also have a lot of gay friends and people who have -- like my goddaughter is trans. I have a lot of social class diversity among friends. Like my father -- okay, this is another values thing. My father had his PhD and he was a research scientist, but his very dearest, dearest friend, Charlie Shinkonis, when I was in high school, they were dear, dear friends and they went fishing really, really a lot together on the weekends. Shinkonis, I think he was Greek, I'm not sure, Greek American. He was the night watchman at the chemistry lab where my father was the head of one of the research 01:20:00departments. So it's like he's like a research scientist and his best friend is the night watchman. I think that that's something very much also from my parents, in terms of values, that social class is kind of an arbitrary not so important divider between people. And I don't think that that is the tiniest bit Japanese. Japanese culture is so hierarchical and so stratified. I don't know why my father was like that. And I don't know that my mom had a lot of really close friends when I was growing up, but I don't know who she would have hung out with by choice. But my father, definitely social class was not a wall for 01:21:00him, it just didn't matter. And that's not Japanese. That's just darn right weird if you're Japanese. [laughs]

TEWES: Well, that sounds like a good place for us to leave it. Thank you so much for your time today --

KITAZAWA: Alright.

TEWES: -- Susan. I appreciate it.

KITAZAWA: Thank you very much, Amanda.