I Would Meet You Anywhere: A Memoir

By Susan Kiyo Ito

Mad Creek Books (2023)
ISBN-13: 978-0814258835

Review by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif

In this poignantly honest and intimate memoir, Susan Kiyo Ito recounts her journey as the mixed-race adopted child of Japanese-American parents, her journey to track down her birth mother as an adult, and how this affected the trajectory of her life.

Despite its heavy subject matter, the book has a surprisingly light-hearted tone, even verging into comedic in places - Ito’s account of kidnapping a couple of mice from the lab she is working at provides a much-needed moment of levity after the tension of her academic struggles and her attempts to connect with her birth mother. Throughout my reading experience, I felt as though I was sitting across from Ito in a coffee shop, listening to her telling her story, slipping into tangents and reflections as one tends to in conversation.

At other times, it felt as though I was reading a novel rather than a memoir. In the preface, Ito talks about her choice to change names to protect the privacy of certain individuals in her life. Despite this, the memoir is full of vivid, larger-than-life characters, refreshingly real as well as endearing. I got particularly attached to Ito’s adopted parents - well-meaning, loving, and fiercely supportive - and felt my heart break as I read about his death and her dementia. But Ito’s biological mother, Yumi, was the most compelling - frustrating as she was charismatic, and I found myself almost reliving Ito’s desperation for her affection and approval even as it spun further and further out of reach, holding out hope for that fairy-tale reconciliation even as she continued to disappoint Ito, and by extension, me as a reader.

Through her personal experiences, Ito sheds light on the complexities of the American adoption system and her challenges bypassing the barriers of closed adoption. There is a heart-breaking scene where Ito begs caseworker at the adoption agency where she was adopted from for details about her birth father, and the woman is only able to give her largely useless nuggets of information despite her obvious sympathy.

Lurking in the periphery, though it predates Ito’s story, is the spectre of the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Yumi spent time in an internment camp, and though it is something she hardly ever speaks about in her appearances, the impact it had on her life and her decision to give up her baby speaks volumes. In another painful scene, Ito’s adopted mother Kiku is asked by other elderly Japanese-Americans she meets at bowling which camp she was in, leading to a moment of awkwardness when she admits she was spared from the camps by virtue of being on the east coast.

What I appreciated most was the honest and above all nuanced, shades of grey perspective Ito offered on the subject of adoption, particularly the often contradictory emotions of an adopted child: torn between loyalty to her loving adopted parents and an unrelenting, almost primal pull towards her biological family. Each time she encounters a member of her biological family, Ito marvels at and is overwhelmed by points of connection with them, from similar features to a love for ice cream. As such, any rejection from them, whether it’s Yumi’s insistence on hiding their relationship or the eventual breakdown of their relations, is almost unbearably painful. Despite the loving family she was raised in, Ito cannot shake the intrinsic sense of abandonment from being given up as an infant. This torment bleeds into various aspects of Ito’s life, including her relationship with her parents and children, and her experiences of pregnancy, abortion, and miscarriage.

Particularly interesting was Ito’s portrayal of her experience as a transracial adoptee, being half Japanese and half white while her adoptive parents are both nisei (second generation Japanese immigrants). Ito grows up acutely conscious of her differences from them, from her thicker, curlier hair to the colour of her skin, constantly feeling othered by her mixed-race heritage. Ironically, when she meets her birth father’s family, she is struck by the realisation of how similar her experience would have been growing up with them, as someone who is white-passing but not quite white, always subject to the age-old question: what are you? Over the course of her life, she grapples with and eventually reconciles with and finds comfort in her Japanese heritage, from the familiarity of the language to a sense of catharsis in the art of Japanese taiko drumming. 

Unlike a novel, however, the memoir ends on a slightly unfinished note, fittingly for a life that hasn’t yet met its natural conclusion. There is no real resolution to Ito’s relationship with Yumi, and both she and we the readers acknowledge this with a kind of bittersweet resignation. Above all, the end of the book finds Ito grappling with the decision to publish her memoir, knowing the cost and the impact it may have on her relationships with people in her life. It is a sobering and meta-textual acknowledgment of what it means to write a memoir, to put a piece of yourself out into the world, lay your soul bare. But as Ito ultimately decides, her story needs to be told, for her own healing. She describes it as a bomb strapped to her body, taken the form of a manuscript.

I admire Ito’s bravery. She tackles her memoir with clinical precision but also staggering self-awareness and - more importantly - self-forgiveness, in a way I, as a writer, would struggle to do.