Summary
National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist
"Susan Kiyo Ito is like a surgeon operating on herself. She is delicate, precise, and at times cutting with her words. But it is all in service of her own healing and to encourage us all to be brave enough to do the same in our own stories." --W. Kamau Bell
Growing up with adoptive nisei parents, Susan Kiyo Ito knew only that her birth mother was Japanese American and her father white. But finding and meeting her birth mother in her early twenties was only the beginning of her search for answers, history, and identity. Though the two share a physical likeness, an affinity for ice cream, and a relationship that sometimes even feels familial, there is an ever-present tension between them, as a decades-long tug-of-war pits her birth mother's desire for anonymity against Ito's need to know her origins, to see and be seen. Along the way, Ito grapples with her own reproductive choices, the legacy of the Japanese American incarceration experience during World War II, and the true meaning of family. An account of love, what it's like to feel neither here nor there, and one writer's quest for the missing pieces that might make her feel whole, I Would Meet You Anywhere is the stirring culmination of Ito's decision to embrace her right to know and tell her own story.
Author Notes
Susan Kiyo Ito is the coeditor of the literary anthology A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. A MacDowell Fellow, she has also been awarded residencies at the Mesa Refuge, Hedgebrook, and Blue Mountain Center. She has performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the US and adapted Untold Stories: Life, Love, and Reproduction for the theater. She writes and teaches in the Bay Area.
Library Journal Review
This is a story that was never supposed to be told, the author's life and origins a secret that was never meant to be revealed. These were the terms and promises of the institution of closed adoption--never agreed to, of course, by Ito (coeditor, A Ghost at Heart's Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption) herself. While books about adoption often address themes like secrets, loss, displacement, and grief, this thoughtful memoir expertly and courageously depicts the specifics and context of Ito's story--the legacy of a U.S. concentration camp for Japanese people; growing up in all-white small towns; the challenges of reconnecting with family members who either clung to promised anonymity or weren't aware of the author's existence. Readers will be immersed in Ito's yearning and bewilderment when basic facts (the identity of her biological father; that her children are indeed her birth mother's grandchildren) are denied or deflected. The book's descriptions of being hanbun hanbun (half and half) are beautifully and painfully wrought and illuminating. VERDICT The tension and fear of wanting to tell one's story, to be seen, to know and be known are palatable throughout Ito's stunning, brave, extraordinary book.--Amy Cheney
Excerpts
My clogs squeaked in the snow as I approached the Holiday Inn in an unfamiliar, wintery city. I searched the lobby for an Asian woman but didn't see one. Was she already here? Was she going to show up as planned? Or had she bailed on me, reenacting the ghosting of two decades ago? The note in my pocket just said, "Holiday Inn, noon on Saturday, room under the name NOGUCHI." I sidled into the restroom to brush my hair and practice making a cheerful/intelligent/sensitive/mature face in the mirror. At twenty years old, I was still sometimes mistaken for a middle schooler. Suddenly, my outfit of jeans, mock turtleneck, sweater, and chunky clogs seemed wrong. Too casual? Too college student? I was a college student. But maybe I should have dressed up more. "Hi," I said to my reflection. "Hello. I'm Susan. Hello!" I arranged my face into a variety of expressions: smiling, solemn, in between. I pushed back a tsunami of anxious tears. Then it was time. I walked through the lobby to the hotel's front desk and spoke her surname. Our name. My original name from the papers my adoptive parents had wrangled out of a county clerk only months ago. Noguchi . "Room 1211. She's expecting you," said the red-haired clerk with a badly knotted tie. He pointed toward a bank of elevators. The doors pinged open on the twelfth floor, and I edged slowly down the hallway. I paused in front of each door. 1207. 1209. I stopped in front of 1211. My watch read 11:58. I brushed the fake wood laminate door with my knuckles. Time ticked like a tiny bomb on my wrist. Two minutes to twelve. One hundred and twenty seconds. I stood with my palm against the door, watching the hand sweep its way around once, twice, a little blade slicing away at the time. I recited a little rhyme in my head. I would meet you in a house. I would meet you with a mouse. I would meet you in a room. I'd meet you at exactly noon. At five seconds to twelve, my hand curled into a loose fist and knocked twice. Then I stepped back, breathing hard. The door opened. I half expected a blinding light and that I would step over the threshold into an abyss. But on the other side was an ordinary hotel room, and a Japanese woman my height stood in the doorway. She was my birth mother. I took in her ink-black hair, razor straight, with a sharp line of bangs above her eyebrows. No pin curls or foam rollers for her, no beauty-parlor perms like my adoptive mother. My heart pinched, thinking about that mother, oblivious back in New Jersey. I blinked and stared again at the soft rounded blip of her nose, her full lips. Her face, her rounded cheeks, looked familiar. She wasn't smiling. Her eyes took me in. They moved over me, head to toe, quickly, expressionless. Then she spoke. "You must be Susan." Her voice sounded professional. "Yes." She stepped aside to let me pass. "I hope you don't mind that we've met here." "Oh, no. Not at all." A giggle bubbled up from my gut and once again, my mind rhymed. I would meet you in a car. I would sit inside a jar. I would meet you--anywhere. I scanned the room. Two double beds with gold quilted spreads. Suddenly, I was exhausted. I wanted to lie down. I wondered if we might take a nap, side by side. Two rounded chairs like parentheses perched next to the huge glass windows. "Let's sit by the window," she said. I awkwardly pushed the chairs together, then apart, trying to arrange them so that the sun, shining through the white winter sky, wouldn't glare in either of our faces. For a moment, I considered heaving myself against the glass, flying through shards of window into the swirling snow. Finally, we sat facing each other. I chewed my lip. "I don't know what to say," I murmured. "Neither do I." Her voice was cold. It wasn't a "me too" comment of solidarity. It was more like, then why are we wasting our time here? I shrank into my chair. She hates me. I fiddled with my envelope of photos and papers, my show and tell. "You probably would like to know how . . . how I found you." Excerpted from I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir by Susan Kiyo Ito All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
