Mike Quan: I had a Celica. It was a fully built 22R with a 20R head. You know, fully built. I got nitrous, gears, the whole setup. Then I was one of the first rotary turbos out there. I had a street port with a turbo in 1987.
Ron Lee: I just had my Celica. We pretty much used my car as a real car. It was a stock motor with a stock everything, but it had nitrous. Back then, nobody knew about nitrous on an import car.
Mike Quan: We hid the nitrous solenoid underneath the siren so you couldn't see it. We ran it through some plastic conduit so it looked like alarm wiring.
Ron Lee: But it was nitrous, and I had a stock air filter on. I would always pop up my hood, and everyone would just race me. We usually won all the time with my car. We used the money to go eat afterward. Every weekend, they called my car the meal car. Race Ron's car. We gotta eat. We're hungry [he laughs]. We wanted to be the kings. Everybody wanted to be the kings out there at the street races...Back then, we didn't have car shows. We had carnivals that we had to fix up our cars for.
Jon Kuroyama: They were the Japanese carnivals. The Buddhist Church Carnival, the DPI Carnival, which were the local ones. Then you had Nisei Week, which was a big one
Tod Kaneko: Nisei was kind of like the finale for the year, where everybody tried to get their cars finished for that event. There were hundreds and hundreds of cars.
Scott Kanemura: The whole thing started as an Asian type of thing. There's older people there. They go out and dance and stuff. And you have the food. Everybody talked about it. They had these gambling games and stuff like that. It was more than just cruising. It was-you got the whole Asian-Japanese thing, I guess.
Jon Kuroyama: We started by racing our parents' cars down the street. Then we started getting our own cars. That's when things started getting fixed up.
Ron Lee: It's like Battle of the Imports for the year. Everybody would save their money to get new rims or build the motor or get new body kits. It was in August. We used to cruise around the street all night, and there used to be thousands of people on the street. Literally packed. There were people on the sidewalks, and you couldn't walk. It was a moving auto show.
Mike Quan: There was all this bass. You could hear it from around every corner.
Scott Kanemura: It was like Import Showoff, I guess. It was people cruisin' up and down the street, like thousands of people out there. People doing burnouts and bumping their stereos. It did have its moments, I guess. It was mostly at the Nisei Carnival, though. It was basically car clubs. And there was that PCR club
Ron Lee: We kind of wanted to make [PCR] like a Hawaiian type of deal, like Hawaiian Island Creations. That was in '81 or '82.
Frank Choi: I grew up knowing about Paradise Creations Racing. At that time, I was like, "When I get a car, I want to be just like them." 'Cause they always had the cool cars. They always traveled in a group. So whenever they went to a Nisei Carnival or another carnival in a different city, they'd always be there cruising. Everybody would always remember them.
Ron Lee: We wanted to cruise together in one long line. That was the big thing, we had to be together.
Mike Quan: If we got broken up by a signal light, we had to wait. We wanted to represent the club well, and people expected it after that because we all had the nicest cars.
Ron Lee: We hung out all the time, every day, every weekend. We stayed up late all the time. It grew into a good relationship among us 10-15 guys. And we're still good friends to this day, which is after 20 years.
Mike Quan: A lot of people liked to fix up their cars, but we did it in a way that was slightly different. You either did it all the way or not at all. So we had to have nice stereos, [the car] had to look clean, and it had to be fast. It had to have all three things.