Interview

Published on February 15th, 2024 | by Cheryl Klein

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“That Intersection is Everything”: Susan Kiyo Ito on Owning Her Adoption Story

Susan Kiyo Ito was born in 1959, smack in the middle of the “baby scoop era,” a time when closed, often coerced adoptions were standard, and it was common for parents to keep their children’s adoption a secret from them. 

As depicted in her recent memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere (Ohio State University Press), Ito is adopted by a kind, Japanese-American couple from New Jersey, who are candid about her adoption and share the bit of information they have. But their goodness has little to do with Ito’s fierce desire to learn about her birth parents, a drive that burns bright as part of her selfhood.

What follows is a roller coaster of reunion and rejection, surprises and struggles and specifics. The latter is important to me as an adoptive mom, because only the accumulation of adoptee stories can counter the many, many stereotypes that dominate our cultural ideas about adoption, which range from “Adoptive parents are saviors” to “Adoption is child trafficking.” 

I admit the fact of Ito’s loving adoptive parents was a draw for me. It’s reassuring to know that adoptees can have satisfying childhoods, despite/in addition to a certain pervasive longing. It’s also refreshing to read about non-white adoptive parents. 

I Would Meet You Anywhere is first and foremost a memoir of simultaneous truths, and the complexities that exist in every parent-child bond, whether created by blood or paper. Ito’s adoption wounds echo throughout her decisions and relationships, sometimes in unexpected ways. You can read an excerpt from one such moment here.

Susan Kiyo Ito emailed with me about both of her mothers, her mothering, and adoption abolition. 

Book cover: I Would Meet You Anywhere
Ohio State University Press

Cheryl Klein: Your biological mother, Yumi, is extremely wary of integrating you into her present-day life. You express hesitance about writing this book because of how it might impact her, but you rightly point out that your own story belongs to you alone. How did you come to the decision to begin the book? How would you describe the emotional journey of creating it?

Susan Kiyo Ito: Well, my own story DOES belong to me, but for better or worse, it is inextricably entwined with hers. There’s no way around that. I began the book over thirty years ago, and my ambivalence about also revealing HER story is one of the factors that made it take so long. I would describe the emotional journey as harrowing, endless, filled with doubt, but ultimately empowering. Now that it is out in the world, I have felt a tremendous shift. This story, and experience, has been the source of much anguish and shame, and that feels different now. All of that can live in the book, and I can literally put it down. I don’t need to carry it around in my head in the same way.

Your parents were very open about the process of adopting you, at a time when honesty with adoptees wasn’t the default. Did they ever talk to you about why they made that choice, other than the fact that you didn’t look 100% Japanese [Ito’s birth father is white]? (I’ve heard stories about adoptive families making up somewhat outlandish stories to “explain” why their child has a different skin tone from them.)

I never asked them why they made the choice to be open about the process. I honestly don’t think it was a conscious choice at all, it was just how they were. I think my being biracial probably had something to do with it, because it wasn’t something they could hide. But they were also very straightforward, matter-of-fact people. They didn’t ruminate about things very deeply. It is only in hindsight, and after speaking to hundreds of other adoptees, that I can see that they were extraordinary in their acceptance of my search and relationship with my birth mother. They never showed or expressed the slightest bit of being threatened or hurt, even if they may have felt it, and I will be grateful to them for this forever. They truly centered me, always, in everything. Even when she was 98 years old and on her deathbed, my mother was concerned and worried for me, wanting to be sure I ate enough, that I drove carefully, that I got enough rest. She never stopped putting me first (sob).

A biracial (Japanese and white) woman with gray shoulder length hair leans against a tree. She wears glasses, a black sweater, and a slight smile.

You note your surprise at learning your mother was 27 when you were born, and not a college student. Often when people have asked me about my children’s first mothers, they’ve said “Was she really young?” (Neither was.) Why do you think youth is an “acceptable” reason to place a child, whereas other reasons are not?

That’s such a good question. There are so many stereotypes and tropes about why first parents choose to place. But youth is always something that people will say, “Oh, that makes sense.” But we now know that so many very young mothers are heartbroken, and never really recover, after placing a child (which is why the movie Juno made me so enraged, making it seem like a lighthearted decision with no consequences). Why not support that young parent, and give them resources to succeed, if they want to parent their child? 

But at the time I bought into that trope, and when I learned she was a working professional, I was stunned. Then she could have raised me. It wasn’t about finances, or youth, or inexperience. It was one hundred percent based on stigma and shame. I mean, obviously it would have been a huge challenge to raise me as a single mother. But the stigma of being unmarried, which was tremendous back then, and the external as well as internalized shame, that was the major factor. I find this heartbreaking. I truly think there should be resources for single mothers, more than there are. Back then there was virtually nothing, on top of the stigma. So she really didn’t have a viable choice.

Ito as a young child, from the author’s website

Somewhat related to the previous question, this sentence stood out to me: “[Yumi’s] choices had narrowed long before the day she found out she was pregnant with me, though. They started shrinking when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. When our country went to war with a country whose people looked like her family.” Where do you see the intersections of racism, culture, and adoption in your story?

Well, that intersection is everything. That intersection is me. Because she was already isolated as an Asian American in her community, because she was already dealing with racism (nobody would date her, let alone marry her!), there was no way she could have survived the ostracism that an “illegitimate” biracial child would have brought. If the incarceration of Japanese Americans had not happened, the entire situation would have had a different outcome.

What feelings about motherhood did losing Samuel [the baby Ito lost in her second trimester] bring up for you? (I’m asking because I miscarried years ago, at just nine weeks, and it shook me to my core. The experience stirred up so much residual grief for my own mom, who died eight years earlier. There is something about that mother-child-mother loop that is so powerful.)

I’m sorry for your loss. It’s a big one, and one that is so rarely acknowledged in our culture. We’re just supposed to get over it, just as first parents are supposed to “get over” relinquishing and being separated from their child. At the time, it was absolutely devastating. I think it would have been much different if I hadn’t become pregnant again relatively quickly. The pain and loss continued, but I had a different focus. At the time, I was in a writing group for pregnant people, which was incredibly evocative, and I wrote much of that chapter in that workshop. There was a young girl in the workshop, who had received a scholarship to attend, and I learned that she was probably not going to raise her child. For a period of time, I desperately thought about trying to convince her to let me adopt her baby, and it gave me a glimmer of insight into what some pre-adoptive parents might experience.

How did being an adoptee shape how you parented your own children?

Phew. That’s a big question. It absolutely impacted me as a parent, which impacted them. I think I was shaped by two things: one, to be the center of a family where I had been long awaited and doted on as an only child. I was the absolute focus of my parents’ life. Maybe I was kind of emotionally “spoiled.” I didn’t have siblings, so I didn’t learn to share. I was used to a lot of attention and care. Which is not in itself a bad thing, but shapes one. I think it made me more self-centered than if I had had siblings, or if I had not been adopted and waited for, for so long.

Two, in spite of this love and care, I also carried my wounds and losses and questions. I continued to need a lot of reassurance. Unintentionally, I carried this neediness into my parenting sometimes. I loved them so much, but think at times I burdened my children. I also was not experienced with how to deal with siblings. I could have done many things better. I think this is inevitable, whether we are adopted or not. We have our own history and it ends up impacting the next generation, for good and bad.

You mention the concept of adoption abolition. The term sounds extreme, but I’ve often told people that poverty should never be the reason for an adoption, and I’ve personally felt very frustrated by even the most well meaning of for-profit adoption professionals. What thoughts do you have on current adoption law and practices?

Oh gosh. I could go on (maybe I will). Abolition might sound extreme, but what if most of the core reasons for adoptions were dealt with on a systemic level? What if people weren’t making these decisions because of poverty? What if the exorbitant fees that people paid for adoptions were instead given to support families in staying together? What if parents were not punished for not having more resources? I highly recommend reading the work of Dorothy Roberts, Alan Detlaff and Gretchen Sisson, who delve into these systemic issues in a really thoughtful way.

Read an excerpt from Susan Kiyo Ito’s I Would Meet You Anywhere.

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About the Author

Cheryl Klein’s column, “Hold it Lightly,” appears monthly(ish) in MUTHA. She is the author of Crybaby (out in 2022 from Brown Paper Press), a memoir about wanting a baby and getting cancer instead. She also wrote a story collection, The Commuters (City Works Press) and a novel, Lilac Mines (Manic D Press). Her stories and essays have appeared in Blunderbuss, The Normal School, Razorcake, Literary Mama, and several anthologies. Her MUTHA column “Onesie, Never Worn” was selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2022. She blogs about the intersection of art, life and carbohydrates at breadandbread.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter: @cherylekleinla.



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