I Would Meet You Anywhere, A MemoirPosted in Asian Diaspora, Autobiography, Forthcoming Media, Identity Development/Psychology, United States on 2023-06-09 17:04Z by Steven |
I Would Meet You Anywhere, A Memoir
Mad Creek Books (an imprint of Ohio State University Press)
2023-11-04
248 pages
5.5 x 8.5 inches
Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8142-5883-5
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
- Preface
- 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
- Acknowledgments