Catherine Tsaur and Liberty Peralta

[00:05] CATHERINE TSAUR: Hi, my name is Catherine I'm 37 years old. Today's date is Tuesday, September 13, 2002. I'm recording from Honolulu, Hawaii, with liberty, who is a good friend of mine.

[00:22] LIBERTY PERALTA: Cool. Hi, my name is Liberty Peralta. I am 36 years old. Today's date is Tuesday, September 13, 2022. I'm recording from Honolulu, Hawaii, with Catherine Tsaur who is a good friend of mine as well. So why are we doing this, Catherine

[00:43] CATHERINE TSAUR: So I saw the call for stories about the military in Hawaii, and I thought that it would be fun to share some of my experiences with that. I am not a service member and I am not a veteran, but growing up in Hawaii, you inevitably interact with a lot of folks who are in the military. So my high school experience is what I wanted to talk about first. I did go to a heavily military adjacent high school where a lot of the students there were children of active service members. So we call it a military school here for short. And it was interesting because that was really my first exposure to folks in the military was through their children and the way that their lives were so different from mine. Having grown up and lived in Hawaii my whole life, living in the same house that my family brought me home from the hospital in, versus these, at the time, 15, 1415 year olds who had lived in four or five states, multiple countries, they had their lives uprooted every couple of years. It was, it was very interesting to, to get to know people like that.

[02:18] LIBERTY PERALTA: What, when you interacted with these classmates who had been to different places around the world and have lived different lives from yourself, like, and you're only 1415 as well, like, how did that change your perspective in any way?

[02:47] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah, it did. I think the thing that struck me the most was usually how close knit the families were. Even, you know, with my friends who had brothers and sisters, they would, they would fight like all siblings do, but there was definitely a closeness to their family bond that I thought was probably the result of having to lean on each other, especially whenever they moved to a new place, you know, every couple of years and the uncertainty of a lot of things in their lives.

[03:29] LIBERTY PERALTA: Is that something that you wish you had? Is that something that was maybe lacking in your life?

[03:36] CATHERINE TSAUR: I would say so, yeah. There's definitely a part of me that wished that I had had that same sort of, sort of unshakable faith that, you know, no matter what, you would have your family to kind of be your friend. I suppose, in that way that they related to each other a lot.

[04:00] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Yeah. Because I, my impression growing up here, I always thought that maybe. And maybe I haven't interacted with enough military families, but I always thought that maybe local families were a lot more tight knit. So I find it interesting that that was your takeaway. Yeah. So you want to continue with your story about high school?

[04:26] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah. So in addition to having a lot of friends whose families were in the military, I did have my first serious boyfriend in high school who. His father was a service member, so he was a military kid. He moved to Hawaii my junior year of high school. So he had moved here over the summer, and we started school. And he was pretty popular at first, I guess, with a. With a certain crowd. He was a pretty popular guy. And when we started dating, it was very new to me. Of course, it was my first serious relationship, but also just simple things, like going on base to see him was, you know, a new sort of experience for me, and that was eye opening because of the way that they felt about their homes. For instance, it was very common for him to never lock his car door or the front door to the house. I could. Once I had a guest pass and I could get on base, I could just drive up and walk in anytime I wanted to. There was. There was never any locked doors, which I think was very, very shocking to me.

[05:54] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Because we lock our doors all the time now. Yeah.

[05:58] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah. Granted, you know, they were on a secure base, so I'm sure that that had a lot to do with it, but just that they had that level of faith in, you know, how secure they were. Washington was very interesting to see.

[06:15] LIBERTY PERALTA: Can we take a step back and could you tell me about how you became an item? Like, how.

[06:25] CATHERINE TSAUR: How did.

[06:28] LIBERTY PERALTA: How'd that happen?

[06:31] CATHERINE TSAUR: I would have to think a little bit. I mean, it was more than 20 years ago. I hate to say. Gosh, how did it happen? I mean, how does anything in high school happen? It was a combination of forced proximity and spending a lot of time together. I think the. Oh, God, this is so embarrassing. Our first date was he invited me over to his house to watch a movie, and we. So we were sitting in his living room or, like, his dad's office, and we were watching a DVD together. And at the end of it, you know, we were sitting there on the couch together, and he pulled this prank on me that to this day, he and I are still friends. So to this day, he loves to tease me about this moment where, you know, this was the early two thousands. And I was nervous. So we were sitting there, the movie had just finished, and he asked me to get up and he was like, hey, could you rewind that for me? And I was like, oh, yeah, sure. So I got up and I walked over to his dvd player, and then I stopped and I looked at him and I went, wait, what? And he just started to laugh. Because obviously, you don't need to rewind a DVD. You just hit eject and it's fine. It's not a. It's not a VHS tape that you have to rewind.

[08:00] LIBERTY PERALTA: You like, rewind, like rewinding a tape when.

[08:03] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah, when you're. When you're done watching a tape, rewind it. So, I mean, this is, again, it's relatively early in the two thousands, so some people still had VHS. So it was definitely a moment where, like, it was just more nerves taking over my common sense. And that was kind of the moment where, you know, it was a little bit of a prank, and I was a little bit miffed. And I. He came over to, like, give me a hug and tease me a little bit about it. And from there, you know, things just kind of progressed into a romantic relationship.

[08:38] LIBERTY PERALTA: Because you guys were friends up until that point, is that correct? Yeah. What I must. You've. You've dated other people since then?

[08:51] CATHERINE TSAUR: I have.

[08:52] LIBERTY PERALTA: What made. I mean, it's tricky because he was also your first boyfriend and he was also from a military family.

[09:02] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yes.

[09:03] LIBERTY PERALTA: What, I guess, what. What idiosyncrasy or, like, what made this relationship different from your others?

[09:18] CATHERINE TSAUR: To an extent, it was like any other sort of high school relationship, I guess. But it had this sort of added element of, I almost want to say it's almost like an east meets west kind of a situation where it's basically somebody who is a foreigner, you know, not from Hawaii, getting involved with somebody who is local here. And that kind of the two cultures learning to adapt to each other. And on top of which, again, like a lot of high school relationships, there's this sort of expiration date of senior year and graduation and the big question marks there. So that was something kind of an added layer. But with him, it was actually even more complicated with how our relationship ended was actually, he moved away prior to our senior year. So normally for. My understanding is for duty stations, people are typically here for two to three years. And so his father had taken a duty station here in Honolulu with, you know, the expectation that he was going to be here for two years, however, towards or in the. Yeah, in the year that he was here, it was the year of the September 11 attacks. And so that changed a lot of, a lot of things in the world, including his father's role in the air force. So his father was transferred to another duty station, I think, in May or June of that year. So he had only lived in Hawaii for maybe eight or nine months before he had to move again.

[11:22] LIBERTY PERALTA: So you're only with him for less than a year?

[11:25] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yes.

[11:25] LIBERTY PERALTA: Am I understanding that correctly? Okay. Wow. And 911 basically ended it.

[11:32] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah. It's what started the events of him, of him leaving. And for me, it was obviously, it was devastating for me to have my relationship end because he was leaving. You know, we tried to say that we were going to see if we could do a long distance thing, but it, even at that time, I knew that it probably wouldn't, it wouldn't make it in terms of, you know, we both still had our senior years ahead of us and we hadn't decided on what college is or anything yet. You know, we discussed going to the same school, but only in a very vague sense. So for me, it was definitely devastating. And for him, he took it really hard as well because it was his senior year that he was starting all over again, you know, and not having any roots and going into what is supposed to be one of the most memorable years of your life, not having any friends, not having any sort of system around him. So it was very hard on him as well. And as I mentioned, we did try to stay together and we tried to stay friends, which we did manage to do. So I was still his friend throughout our senior year. While he was, I think his dad got transferred to, like, Mississippi or somewhere. So we stayed in touch and we stayed friends, but it was hard for a long time because it wasn't as though we had outgrown each other or anything, but it was more of a circumstantial thing as to why we didn't work.

[13:18] LIBERTY PERALTA: How are you staying in touch in those days? Because this is like early days of the Internet.

[13:26] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yes. So it was early days of the Internet where we would aim, I'm sorry, AOL instant messenger for those younger listeners. So we would message back and forth, occasionally send emails, and we would still talk on the phone. So I was lucky enough to have a cell phone. And back then they had this free nights and weekends kind of a deal. So instead of unlimited talk, it was just on the weekends that you could have unlimited data? Yeah.

[14:00] LIBERTY PERALTA: In the evenings?

[14:01] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yes.

[14:02] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. How did, how did your parents react? Did they know that this was happening?

[14:11] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah, my parents did know that I had a boyfriend who was in the military whose parents were in the military. They weren't particularly thrilled about it, but they were also understanding of, like, I think it was more just in general, the parents who don't want their kids to be dating in high school and not anything specifically about him being a military dependent. Yeah. But it was. It was definitely their first time as well, sort of having a child who was involved with somebody whose family was in the military.

[14:51] LIBERTY PERALTA: Were there any challenges throughout the relationship, you know, before it ended, that you both had to work through because of his military status?

[15:06] CATHERINE TSAUR: Something that he and I didn't see eye to eye on to an extent, was, I guess, sort of he didn't understand that. For instance, I come from a household where both parents work outside of the home. And so a lot of times, you know, my parents weren't available to do certain things, school activities or functions or things like that, versus his father was in the service, and his mother was a stay at home mom, so she had a lot more time to be a little bit more involved in certain things. And he once told me that, like, he believed his mom's job was to be. What was it? I think his father was like a colonel, and so he. He mentioned how being a colonel's wife is sort of a full time job in and of itself, that she has to do certain things, like host the families of the men who work in his dad's company or attend certain things with his dad and make appearances and that sort of thing. And I. And I thought it was interesting how he thought of that as his mother's work, because my mother had to do a lot of the same things in addition to her 40 hours a week job. You know, she still also had to go to dinner parties with my dad's clients and obviously raise her family and do all of that. So it was just a matter of a perspective, I think.

[16:59] LIBERTY PERALTA: What did your parents do?

[17:01] CATHERINE TSAUR: So my father was a sales manager for an airlines here in Hawaii, and my mother was a jury wholesaler.

[17:12] LIBERTY PERALTA: Oh, okay.

[17:13] CATHERINE TSAUR: Got it.

[17:13] LIBERTY PERALTA: Okay. Yeah. Has your perspective about military dependents or people who serve in the military? Has. Has it. Has there been a difference?

[17:39] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah. As, now that I'm older, there's definitely a difference in the way that I see service members and I think about them. So most of my interactions with the military in my lifetime have been due to some sort of romantic nature. So my first serious boyfriend in high school was a military dependent. My most recent relationship was also with somebody who active duty in the military. And that has really influenced the way I see service members to an extent, that story is a little less happy than the, you know, than my first serious love kind of a story. This story is about somebody who was an active duty service member. I met him on a dating app, so we were talking for several weeks. He was about to be stationed in Honolulu, and so he wanted to get to know somebody here who could show him around when he got here. And, you know, we talked for a few weeks and were in a long distance relationship with each other before he moved here. And then when he did get to Hawaii, we spent time together. And then, unexpectedly, after about three weeks, he just vanished. He stopped answering his phone. He stopped answering my texts. He basically ghosted me. And I want to say, at this point, we'd known each other for eight or nine weeks.

[19:47] LIBERTY PERALTA: Wow.

[19:48] CATHERINE TSAUR: Very unexpected. After we spent a weekend together at a staycation, kind of having established that we were in a relationship together, it was very unexpected for him to just ghost like that.

[20:09] LIBERTY PERALTA: I had no idea. I'm so sorry, Catherine

[20:12] CATHERINE TSAUR: Well, it's okay. Thanks, Liberty.

[20:14] LIBERTY PERALTA: It was recent.

[20:16] CATHERINE TSAUR: It was pretty recent, actually. It was just, um. It was just, it all happened in July and August of this year, so it was just a couple weeks ago. But during the days immediately following, when he stopped responding to me, I started to try to dig around a little, and I found out that he was actually married.

[20:45] LIBERTY PERALTA: I knew it. Oh, my God.

[20:47] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah. Yeah. So he. When he and I met, he was in, what did he call it? Ait school or something. He was. He was just in, just out of basic and in the training for whatever his. His job specialty was. So he was away from his wife.

[21:09] LIBERTY PERALTA: Okay.

[21:10] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah.

[21:12] LIBERTY PERALTA: Sorry.

[21:13] CATHERINE TSAUR: I don't know what it stands for. I never. I never asked what that acronym stood for, but. So he was at some sort of, you know, training school, and then he moved to Hawaii to be stationed here. And I guess his wife didn't come with him at first. I suppose that's pretty normal, actually, for families to move separately, for the service member to sort of come to the duty station first and then get the housing and everything set up for their families to come or. I don't know, actually, what. What normal is. But I suppose that's what happened with him, was that he had a few weeks here in Hawaii on his own, and he thought he would take advantage of that situation by having a girlfriend here. So it's definitely influenced the way that I think about the military here.

[22:16] LIBERTY PERALTA: In a negative way.

[22:21] CATHERINE TSAUR: Slightly. In a way, I guess I'm much more suspicious than I initially was with service members. That it's very easy for them to keep secrets because of fact that sometimes they would be deployed and be away from their families, or they're moving here and they have no one to vouch for them either way, so they can kind of pretend to be whoever they want to be. And with him in particular, he didn't have any social media. Like, he had no social media presence at all, which I didn't think was unusual because I know a lot of people who don't. But in his case, it was probably a deliberate choice so that he could present himself as a single man.

[23:19] LIBERTY PERALTA: Wow. So not important to the recording at all or anything. But we were originally supposed to do this recording last month.

[23:35] CATHERINE TSAUR: I think so. Or earlier. Earlier in July, possibly even.

[23:39] LIBERTY PERALTA: So, you would have had a totally different perspective if we had originally recorded this.

[23:47] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah, it would have totally been. The story wouldn't exist. And what's really interesting is that I told him that I was. That I was going to do this interview with you, the original one, and I told him about it, and he said he was really excited for me to do it. He said, yeah, that's really great. You can tell them about your old boyfriend who was a military kid, and you can tell them about your new boyfriend who's in the military. And, I mean, I guess part of his wish has come true that I'm telling a story about him, so.

[24:23] LIBERTY PERALTA: Wow.

[24:24] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah, it's definitely made me more cautious while I continue to date men who are in the military, but I'm definitely now googling them ahead of time. And it was really interesting because he gave me so much personal information about himself, you know, literally his entire phone, like, first, middle, last name, date of birth, where he was born, and his rank in the military. He told me so much about himself that it made it very easy to then find out that he, you know, he'd been keeping his wife a secret.

[25:07] LIBERTY PERALTA: Oh, man.

[25:08] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah.

[25:09] LIBERTY PERALTA: It's, like, shameless. Do you specifically seek out people who are in the military?

[25:19] CATHERINE TSAUR: I do, which is interesting.

[25:23] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. What's that about?

[25:26] CATHERINE TSAUR: I think because they, to me, they're just a little bit more interesting to get to know because they're not from Hawaii. They have a lot of different life experiences, especially if, you know, now being adults, they're the service members, so they've lived in amazing places around the world, or they've. Some of them have seen, you know, combat, and they have just a different worldview. I think.

[26:04] LIBERTY PERALTA: They'Re more global, cosmopolitan sometimes.

[26:11] CATHERINE TSAUR: But not always, you know. For instance, I did meet a really nice guy who is from. He was from a little town in Arkansas, and I'd never met anybody from Arkansas before. So he and I went out a few times, and I got to know him. It was really interesting that what he wanted to do when he got out of the service was to, I think he said he wanted to buy 125 acres of land right up against his brother's hundred acres of land. And then he would. And I told him I didn't even know how much space that is. You know, I'm like, I'm from Hawaii. I don't know what that even looks like. But, you know, he said, yeah, he would have the lot, I guess, had a pond that would belong to him that he could fish in, and he would be able to have several homes on his lot and a. An entire basic farm, I guess, with the whole thing with barns and livestock. And that was his, you know, his goal in five years was to have that after he got out of the service. And it was just so interesting that it's not a type of lifestyle that I would ever think I would want.

[27:30] LIBERTY PERALTA: But. But it's a different perspective.

[27:32] CATHERINE TSAUR: It is. And when he described it, it did sound sort of beautifully idealic, or, like, idealistic, where it's like, it's just a quiet farm. It's his land. You know, he had two daughters that he was hoping to see more of, so his kids would be able to spend time there. He would live close to his family, have some dogs. The entire sort of american dream, basically.

[28:01] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. I want to circle back on your first relationship, because we're recording this a few days after 911 or the anniversary of 911. Do you ever think back on that first relationship every time this date comes around?

[28:22] CATHERINE TSAUR: I do. Not specifically to the relationship. I think more about to that day in particular, because I did go to a military school with a lot of, you know, students whose families were service members. I remember going to school that day, and it was deserted. You know, a lot of, a lot of the students, their parents, I'm sorry, had kept them home just with all of the uncertainty and not knowing everything. So the school was deserted. The school itself was maybe just a block away from one of the housing bases. So even. Even getting to school, the traffic was just snared, backed up everywhere because the bases were hard to get onto. So even that, you know, traffic was just pushed back and pushed back into the sort of more civilian areas, I guess. And I remember the next day. So it was September 12 when the, you know, some of my friends did start to come back to school, and it was very surreal. They all knew that for, you know, their parents and for them that their lives were going to change, that something was going, you know, something very drastic was going to happen to all of them in terms of moving or their parents being deployed or just whatever they were going through. So my boyfriend at the time, he knew, I think, that something was going to happen with his father, but I don't think he thought that it would require the family to move. So that was for him.

[30:08] LIBERTY PERALTA: He hoped that it wouldn't require a move, I think.

[30:12] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah, I think it was more of a he hoped kind of thinking that, you know, his dad would maybe get deployed, but that he would deploy from Hawaii versus from somewhere else.

[30:22] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned that you. So you remain friends with this guy.

[30:28] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yes.

[30:29] LIBERTY PERALTA: And is he in Hawaii now or is he somewhere else?

[30:33] CATHERINE TSAUR: He is not. He is now in. I think he's in the DC area, and he is actually now an active duty service member as well, which is really interesting when he made that decision, because while we were in high school and all through college, he maintained that he would not go into the service, that he didn't want that life. He didn't want to be uprooted every couple of years. You know, he wanted to. To do something different. And then I'm not entirely sure when. When he decided that he changed his mind. I think it was out of college when he had realized that maybe there are a lot of benefits to being in the service in terms of a very clear career path and a very structured life with a lot of benefits, you know, medical and housing and all of that. So I think that made him to let him to decide to join the service.

[31:42] LIBERTY PERALTA: And it's kind of all he knows, too, right?

[31:45] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yeah. That's the life he grew up with. So I think that's definitely partly what attracted him as much as he fought against that.

[31:53] LIBERTY PERALTA: Did you ever believe whenever he'd say that he wouldn't join the military, or did you always have?

[32:01] CATHERINE TSAUR: No, I think I believed him. He was definitely stubborn enough to have made that come true, if that's, you know, what he had wanted to do in the end. But the things you want at 16 and 17 are probably very different than the things you want at 28.

[32:18] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Yeah. Have you ever thought about joining the service?

[32:25] CATHERINE TSAUR: I did not. I do not think that I have quite what it takes to be a service member, but I do admire those who are able to serve our country.

[32:36] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah.

[32:37] CATHERINE TSAUR: It definitely requires a level of discipline and sacrifice. That amazes me.

[32:46] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Is there anything else about either your first boyfriend or your most recent one that we didn't cover?

[32:58] CATHERINE TSAUR: I think it goes without saying, but maybe not that they were both also caucasian and I am an asian woman, so there's that dynamic as well that was added into the relationships.

[33:12] LIBERTY PERALTA: Do you mean, what do you mean by that?

[33:20] CATHERINE TSAUR: Just that oftentimes, men who are in the military tend to get married young, and they tend to marry somebody from their hometown because of the additional benefits they can enjoy being a married service member versus being a single service member.

[33:45] LIBERTY PERALTA: So do you think that it was unusual for them to be dating someone that wasn't from their hometown?

[33:56] CATHERINE TSAUR: I do. In both cases, they both mentioned, you know, in passing that, like, they had never been with somebody who wasn't also caucasian. So that was one of those things that was definitely a unique experience for them. And again, the benefits of being a married service member must be really very appealing because both of them have actually been married several times. So my first boyfriend, he's on his third marriage.

[34:29] LIBERTY PERALTA: Oh, wow.

[34:31] CATHERINE TSAUR: But this one, he has been married to his most recent wife for several years, so hopefully that settled now for him and my most recent ex, he was also on a second marriage as well. So I do think there's. That's an interesting phenomenon.

[34:52] LIBERTY PERALTA: Like, it's better to be married than not.

[34:57] CATHERINE TSAUR: Yes.

[34:58] LIBERTY PERALTA: Because of the benefits that are attached.

[34:59] CATHERINE TSAUR: Because of the benefits that they receive as a married service member.

[35:08] LIBERTY PERALTA: I learned quite a bit today about a lot of things about the military, about your experiences and about you. And we don't, I only see you during trivia nights, so we've only known.

[35:25] CATHERINE TSAUR: Each other as adults, so the high school stories are not something that we always get a chance to talk, talk about.

[35:31] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Right. And this most recent one, too, like, holy cow. I actually.

[35:35] CATHERINE TSAUR: It's amazing how much your life can change in just two months.

[35:39] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah. Yes, apparently. Yeah. I need to talk to you about. We'll chat offline, like, some other time, because definitely similar actually happened to a friend, another friend of mine, too.

[35:56] CATHERINE TSAUR: It was definitely great to talk to you, liberty. Thank you so much for recording this with me and helping me get my story out.

[36:04] LIBERTY PERALTA: Yeah, thanks so much, Catherine for having me be your listening partner.

[36:08] CATHERINE TSAUR: This was a lot of fun.