This episode I had the pleasure of speaking with Author Junko Geddes. Junko wrote a beautiful memoir about her life in China and then as an immigrant to the US. I truly enjoyed getting know her and learning about her journey
Junko's book - Obaachan's Story: Journey in the Land of Strangers is available on Amazon and other online ebook retailers.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082YHN1SL/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
Junko Geddes was born in Manchuria (now China) toward the end of the war. Her father was the founder and the leader of Japan’s first counter espionage activity. He captured Russian spies, converted them, then sent them back to Russia to obtain valuable military information. When she was four months old, by a fate of act, her father was summoned to Japan to become an instructor at Nakano Military Academy in Tokyo. Soon after, the US air raid began. The city was transformed into an inferno. Following the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan surrendered.
The mass population migrated within the country, her family of eight moved to Osaka. Since Japan had lost the war, the entire society repented the military actions and shunned military officers. Her father with a family of eight became unemployable. The family’s fortune steadily dwindled. She witnessed how her parents struggled and how close they had come to give in.
She loved studying, she aimed high, and nothing else--all her dreams stemmed from achieving her college education.
However, when she was a high school senior, she suffered a rheumatic fever that sharply changed the course of her future.
Instead of going to college, she went to work as an English typist. Still, she pursued her love of learning the English language. She joined a private English conversation group where she met her future husband, a Fulbright student from Canada. After she obtained Canadian Visa in 1966, she moved to Canada then married in Vancouver, an entirely different planet from Japan. She had no English skills but a dream.
She followed her husband to St. Louis, to Montreal, then to Canton, New York. By then, she was a mother of 16 years old daughter and 14 years old son, a breast cancer survivor, and her husband, now a stranger.
She refused to be trapped in a loveless marriage. She graduated from college with a computer science degree found a computer programming position, purchased a house for herself and for her two children then left her husband of twenty-eight years.
Her life was a young immigrant woman’s search for her identity, her human dignity, and her freedom.
