Description
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.
Table of Contents
PART 1
I Would Meet You Anywhere
Go for Broke
The Place I Came From
Not a Japanese Girl
Searching
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
What Do You Need?
A Small Crime
What I Did Over Spring Break
I Would Meet You at the Holiday Inn
PART 2
Your Mother Is Very Nice
The Mouse Room
Totaled
Lucky
I Would Meet You in a Hospital
Long-Lost Daughter
Just a Bee Sting
Dairy Queen
I Would Meet You at a Wedding
Origami
Undertow
Guest Room
Separation
Like a Heartbeat
PART 3
A Small Hole
Spit
I Would Meet You at the Ferry Building
I Had an Aunt
Got OBC?
Look at the Baby
The Most Japanese Person in the Family
Epilogue
Biographical Note:
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.
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.
Table of Contents
PART 1
I Would Meet You Anywhere
Go for Broke
The Place I Came From
Not a Japanese Girl
Searching
One of These Things Is Not Like the Other
What Do You Need?
A Small Crime
What I Did Over Spring Break
I Would Meet You at the Holiday Inn
PART 2
Your Mother Is Very Nice
The Mouse Room
Totaled
Lucky
I Would Meet You in a Hospital
Long-Lost Daughter
Just a Bee Sting
Dairy Queen
I Would Meet You at a Wedding
Origami
Undertow
Guest Room
Separation
Like a Heartbeat
PART 3
A Small Hole
Spit
I Would Meet You at the Ferry Building
I Had an Aunt
Got OBC?
Look at the Baby
The Most Japanese Person in the Family
Epilogue
Biographical Note:
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.