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VA
Interviewee: Toshiko Takaezu     
Interviewer: Richard Polsky      
Session #1
Quakertown, New Jersey

Date: September 3, 1986

Q: I said that I would like to ask you first about your family, your early life, what things were like--

Takaezu: Well, I come from a very big family, a family of eleven. My parents came from the [[strikethrough]] Orient [[/strikethrough]] Japan to work in Hawaii and they came as immigrants to Hawaii, and they worked in plantations, pineapple fields, and mostly cane fields. And we were all raised in Hawaii, all eleven of us, and we're all alive. My mother recently died at ninety-six. My dad died twelve or thirteen years ago. So life for us and for my parents must have been very, very hard, to have so many kids. It so happened that my older sister[[strikethrough]] - you see [[/strikethrough]] & brother, I'm right in the center of eleven and I keep telling people that I'm the navel of the family. So my older sisters quit school when they were pretty young to work.

Q: In the fields?

Takaezu: No. They worked as housemaids and whatever and to send money home to help, and that has been going on and that's how we survived. Except that we always had a place where we could grow