By Kayla Kuo
Content notes: miscarriage, abortion, death of a parent
At times heartbreaking, infuriating, and validating, I Would Meet You Anywhere is a searing memoir written by Susan Ito, a biracial Japanese American and white domestic adoptee, surrounding the search for her birth family, for herself, and for genuine connection.
In this critical essay, I focus specifically on the theme of connection and how this craving for connection is tied to Ito’s identity, as a daughter, a woman seeking access to reproductive healthcare, and as an adoptee. In these three sections, I highlight the ways that connection–relational, cultural, geographical, and emotional–all show up throughout her memoir.
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The Right to Knowledge and the Temporality of Relationships
As a transracial and transnational adoptee, there are several methods to search and possibly reunite with birth families. Each of the options come with their own emotional preparation, financial affordability, and privacy. Too often, the burden of seeking information is cast on the adoptee, unnecessarily requiring them to jump through legal, financial, and emotional hoops in order to access knowledge about themselves.
At age 19, Ito attended her first Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA) meeting in New York City, a space to meet other adoptees and receive emotional and material support. Ito voluntarily met with a “search angel,” an open records activist, to help find her birth family through search forms and legal information. Unlike some adoptees who had manila envelopes stuffed with their vital documents, Ito’s hands were empty. She recollects, “All I had was the paltry information I’d known all along: the date of my birth, the city where it happened. The name of the agency that had brokered the deal: Spence-Chapin.” The possibility of finding her family felt daunting based on the lack of information.
This consultation spurred Ito’s decades-long journey of searching for her birth family, attempting to extract fragments of her story from institutions and individuals alike: the adoption agency that recited breadcrumbs of non-identifying information; the county courthouse to request a copy of her adoption records with the help of her adoptive mom; the New Rochelle Hospital to ask for her birth records; and an OBGYN office to obtain the physical copies of her birth records. All of this effort to uncover her birth mother’s name, Yumi Noguchi.
With the help of a few friends and a catalog of phone numbers associated with her birth mother’s maiden name, Ito began the next step in her search: contacting Yumi. Ito dialed the first few phone numbers though all led to dead ends. With only one phone number left, there was palpable anxiety as Ito wrote, “It was the final call, and dialing those last numbers would mean one of two things: either it would mean I had found my birth family, or it meant that my trail would be cold again. The beginning, or the end.” Fortunately, the last phone number led Ito to her birth mother, including her married name and address.
In three days, Ito planned to visit a close friend who, coincidentally, lived in the same city as Yumi. Within that same momentous week of searching for her birth family, Ito surreally reunites with Yumi at a Holiday Inn in an unfamiliar city, the seclusion being an important factor and an ongoing pattern to their time together. Essentially strangers, these short meetings offered them a chance to reunite under their old family name. “She was married, with a different name, and I carried the name of my adoptive parents. But for a few hours we would meet in an anonymous room reserved under that old name we had both shed.” Names hold significant meaning and, while it was a way for Yumi to be more secretive about her current life, it also preserved and acknowledged Ito and Yumi’s former life together.
Eventually, these meetings take place across the United States, indicative of how Ito would suddenly rearrange her schedule to accommodate Yumi’s sporadic visits. Ito would do anything – initially – to build a relationship with her birth mother, though the irregular visits and lack of communication began to strain their relationship.
There was another looming aspect to their fragile relationship: the fact that Yumi refused to share the name of Ito’s birth father. There is a fine line to respecting one’s right to privacy and intentionally withholding information from others, often with manipulative intentions. As adoptees, information is often gate kept from us, but what happens when our birth parents are the gatekeepers of this information?
Reunion with our birth families is often glorified as the end goal. I Would Meet You Anywhere openly and honestly pushes back on this unrealistic narrative and expectation. Rather, reunion is another chapter of the adoptee experience. Ito also illustrates the continuum of relationships with her maternal birth family, showing the fluidity and temporality between reunion, separation, and reconciliation.
I Would Meet You Anywhere initially begins as a commitment to her birth mother and their newly established relationship, indicating how Ito would meet her anywhere geographically and emotionally. Over time, this statement shifts to different relationships – her adoptive parents, adoptees, her readers and, most importantly, herself.
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Advocating and Fighting for Liberation in All Forms
I Would Meet You Anywhere serves as a stark reminder that we all deserve to be free, whether that means giving ourselves permission to share our stories, being able to choose and access reproductive healthcare, or fighting against all forms of family separation.
In an adoptee book club and author chat with Ito, she acknowledged how writing this memoir became a physical manifestation of letting go of the heavy emotions – grief, fear, confusion, anxiety – that were stuck in her body for the past several decades. Writing was a way for Ito to not only process her adoption, but to prioritize herself and her feelings regardless of the consequences of publishing this book. It’s a reminder of how writing and storytelling are acts of liberation that can bring us relief and allow us to let go of what we’ve carried for so long.
While the focal point of Ito’s memoir is her search for her birth family and for answers, the backdrop reveals an underlying theme of reproductive justice, particularly illuminating who has the option to be a parent and whether it’s on their own terms and timeline. Ito intimately shares her decisions to access abortion services, to emotionally and physically recover from a miscarriage, and to determine whether pursuing adoption was the pathway towards family building when she was ready to become a parent. Bodily autonomy, agency, and choice are necessary rights, and it becomes, as Ito learns, impossible to untangle the ways that U.S. militarism and white supremacy affect access to reproductive healthcare.
Ito discovers how her biological family was part of the “eighty percent of the Japanese American population on the US mainland [who were] forcibly removed from their homes” and required to live in the designated internment camps based on Executive Order 9066 signed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1942. The incarceration of Japanese Americans left a traumatic impact, affecting generations of Japanese Americans and their families.
Ito grapples with the limited reproductive healthcare options for Japanese Americans. She harrowingly writes of her birth mother:
“Her choices had narrowed long before the day she found out she was pregnant with me, though. They started shrinking when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor… Her family had no choice when their West Coast business was shuttered, and they had to pack their lives into a single truck. They were forced to show their allegiance by moving into a barbed-wire compound in the high, dusty desert. She was ten years old.”
During the time of Yumi’s pregnancy, and as is the case now, the right to have an abortion is not constitutionally protected. Ito grapples with the consequences of internment camps and the ways that families have been separated, whether from racist U.S. policies, incarceration, or adoption.
I Would Meet You Anywhere illuminates the necessity to fight against U.S. imperialism, at home and abroad, as a means to end family separation and the violence against women. This memoir serves as an absolute reminder of the ways our struggles are interconnected whether as adoptees or as people fighting for reproductive justice (or both).
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Support for Libraries and Adoptee-Only Spaces
I Would Meet You Anywhere is a tribute to public libraries and adoptee-only spaces, given the significance around accessing information, sharing knowledge and material resources, and finding refuge, whether in books or shared experiences.
It was at her town’s library where Ito, at age 13, discovered The Search for Anna Fisher (1973), a memoir by adoptee Florence Fisher, an advocate for open records and the founder of the Adoptees Liberty Movement Association (ALMA). ALMA, which Ito later attended as an adult and was the impetus for her birth family search, was integral to her adoptee identity. As one of the ALMA attendees mentioned, ALMA meant being surrounded by “their people” indicating that they felt a sense of connection among their shared adoptee identities even if their experiences were vastly distinct.
Similarly to how ALMA helped Ito find community, I Would Meet You Anywhere, too, helped me “find my people.” I’ve had a chance to participate in two (virtual) adoptee book clubs featuring Ito herself: the Adult Adoptee Movement in the UK and the Starlings Collective in the U.S. It’s crucial to know that I am not alone and how important it is to share our stories not only for ourselves, but to also broaden adoption literature and to push against the singular narrative of gratitude.
Kayla Kuo is a queer transracial and transnational adoptee born in Taiwan and raised in the Midwest. She is learning how to embrace slowness and be more creative. Lately, she spends her time sewing, reading too many books at once, deepening her community organizing, and snuggling with her miniature pinscher, Kenny.
You can find her book reviews on Instagram (@ThatBookBinch) and more reflections/essays as an adoptee on her blog.