Allegiance

Susan Kiyo Ito has been torn for most of her life between telling and not telling her story. “Since the start of my life, I have been a secret, my existence a wild inconvenience,” she writes in her memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere. One might say the same about the circumstances of her birth, interlocked with the dark chapter of internment of Japanese Americans in the US during World War II. The last forty years of Ito’s life are filled with drafts of her book — attempts to articulate that secret to herself and to understand her own hidden history and the hidden history of Japanese American people, suppressed by indifference both benign and by design. The dominant culture in which she was raised keeps hidden, to protect those who want to stay private, to grapple with what she owes to those who birthed and raised her. The result is a crucial reminder of the meaning of family, the work of love, and the forever-legacies of suffering and exclusion.

— Jina Moore Ngarambe for Guernica

My Japanese American parents waited on an adoption agency list for over ten years before I was offered up to them. My mother describes the social worker scrutinizing their one-bedroom apartment with white gloves, as if a speck of dust might render them unsuitable. They waited. The social worker intimated that their chances of success would increase if they had a house, with multiple bedrooms and a yard. My father scoured New Jersey for a home where they might one day raise a child. He had grown up in the rough streets of the Bronx, and he was searching for something safe and idyllic, a classic American town.

Summit Street, the street where I grew up, was only one block long. Its ends were capped at either side, Mountain Avenue to the north and Lakeview to the south. A humble street of small houses, canopied