"My parents, well, they were from Hiroshima, Japan, and they eloped. The day that my mother was supposed to get married to someone else, my [mother's] sister took my father to a woodshed and had all my mother’s Japanese clothes, you know.…

"My mother, may she rest in peace, always told me I was a bum and I’d ask why I was a bum, and she’d say, 'Because you are 33 and you are not married.' I reunited with my father in 1961. He never came to this country. He stayed in…