Names

Susan Kiyo Ito

This is what my parents told me about my name. When they adopted me at the age of three months, they chose “Susan” because it’s American. Because it was the second most popular girl’s name (behind Mary) in 1959, the year I was born. They chose it so I would fit in.

“Kiyo” is for my adoptive father’s younger sister. He said she was a good girl. She helped the family make ends meet during the war, when all the brothers were overseas in the army, by setting up a lampshade business on Lexington Avenue. She sewed silk designs by hand onto the lampshades, and wealthy customers bought them for more than forty dollars each, a huge sum during wartime.

Kiyo went to Oberlin College in Ohio, the first of her siblings to go beyond high school. She went there on her own, my father told me—no parents or brothers to help her move into her dormitory. She was an adventurer, a bright girl. One day during her first semester she called him and said she wasn’t feeling well; she was going to the college infirmary. All the girls on her floor went there to recover from the flu, from mono, from urinary tract infections. They spent a few days resting in the white beds, eating soup from a tray. But Kiyo was transferred from the infirmary to the hospital. She called her big brother again and and told him, “I have kidney cancer.” After the kidney was removed, Kiyo seemed to be recovering well, and the doctors said she should be up and about soon. But three weeks later, my father received another phone call from a college official: “We’re sorry to tell you your sister has died.”

I remember my father’s eyes softened and liquefied when he told me the story. “My dad wasn’t well,” he said. “He was almost blind and couldn’t travel. My mother was dead. My other brothers couldn’t make it, either. I drove out there to Ohio, by myself, and buried her there in Oberlin.”

I think about my young father, in his twenties, making the drive from the Bronx to Ohio to bury his favorite sister. He gave me her name. I think about this aunt I never knew—perhaps she is the person in our family to whom I would have talked about books and literature and art. “My hair went from black to gray in a week,” he told me. “I turned into an old man when I lost our Kiyo.”

Ito is our family name. My father said it meant “string” or “thread,” and the first time I heard this I thought, What an odd thing to be named for. I imagined an umbilical cord formed by fabric, stronger than flesh, binding me to my family. Recently I looked up our name again, and found that another meaning is “from wisteria,” or “near the wisteria fields.”

Later I discovered, on Ancestry.com, a copy of my paternal grandparents’ marriage certificate from 1915. It lists my grandfather’s name as Umekichi Itow. Startling. Where did that “w” come from? Was that the original spelling? No. In subsequent documents—his draft record, and the signature on my father’s 1928 report card—it’s always Ito. I wonder if that “w” wasn’t the error of a clerk who wrote down the phonetic sound, what he imagined.

From This Day Forward

I was in college when I first laid eyes on my adoption papers. “From this day forward, the child Mika Yamada* shall be known as Susan Kiyo Ito.” It charmed and rattled me. I tested out the name in my mouth and it felt like a sourball, tart and sweet at the same time. I whispered it into the mirror. Mika.

I shyly wrote it down and showed it to my friends. “This was my first name,” I told them. A few of them abruptly stopped calling me Susan or Sue. “Hey, Mika!” they would call, and I ignored them or did double takes, not realizing they were talking to me. It made my chest flutter inside. This was the name my birth mother chose for me. She wrote it down, a letter at a time, on my birth certificate.

I thought about her hand holding the pen. A slow-motion calligraphy, then that final dotting of the i. I felt a visceral connection when I read these four letters linked together. Aside from life, it was one thing I knew she had deliberately given me. I wondered when she had decided—if she had considered other names as well, and then discarded them.

The First/The Other

I was twenty when I masqueraded as my former self, Mika Yamada, and stole my own hospital birth records from an unwitting gynecologist. This document led to me finding and ultimately meeting my birth mother. She and I sat in an anonymous Midwestern hotel room in an atmosphere of tension and wonder. She wasn’t happy at being discovered, but she was curious about who I was. She brought out her wallet to share photos of her two children, my half siblings. I was startled when I saw a girl with thick wavy hair, Frida Kahlo eyebrows, and round cheeks like mine. Across her sweatshirt I saw the appliqué letters: mika.

I may have gasped out loud. I pointed at her name. My birth mother said, “Well, I really liked that name. I had been thinking about it for a long time. I put it on your birth certificate. But then I realized you wouldn’t be keeping it for long . . .” She shrugged. “So when she was born . . .” Her hands fell open, empty.

It felt like being instantly erased. Like not being born or named at all. Like being a duplicate, a carbon copy, a fraud and yet an original. And this girl, with this name, with this mother? She believed she was the firstborn. The eldest child. The only daughter. The one and only Mika.

I went home and told everyone I knew to stop calling me that name. Immediately.

“But it’s such a beautiful name! So unique!”

“Just stop.”

Five years later, I hurried to my birth mother’s hospital room after learning she’d undergone a complicated hysterectomy. In the grip of grave illness, she made a spontaneous decision. “Go to the Sears store next door and wait there for half an hour,” she instructed me. Mika was on her way to the hospital, and when she arrived, she’d be learning that she had an older sister. Me.

I paced the aisles of Sears, between snow tires and washing machines, and nervously consumed a bag of malt balls and candy corn. When I got back to the hospital room, my half-sister Mika was standing next to our mother’s bed, looking stunned. My birth mother said weakly, “You girls go get some dinner. I’m sure you have a lot to talk about.” She pressed a twenty-dollar bill into my palm. And then she closed her eyes, plunging into unconsciousness, leaving us alone together.

Can two girls named Mika exist at once? Would one have to be erased?

We went to a Chinese restaurant and sat facing each other, fiddling with the chopsticks, arranging them in patterns on the tablecloth. “I didn’t ask her to tell you today,” I said. “She just decided, and I . . . It was all very sudden.”

Mika shook her head slowly, looking across at me for only a second at a time, and then staring down again. She built a small teepee out of fried noodles.

I cleared my thoughts and started again. “Did you have any idea? About me?”

She snorted. “Not a clue.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

She knocked over the noodle structure with her hand. “Hey. You shouldn’t have to apologize. Not for being alive.”

I was stunned by her vehemence, her fierceness.

She sat up, and the dozen bracelets on her arm made a sound like silverware in a drawer. “You know, there’s a picture of you in her room. It’s framed, and it’s right on her bureau, next to ones of me and my brother.” She stopped. “Does he know too?”

“No. She said he wasn’t ready, that he wouldn’t be for a long time.” I sighed. “I can’t believe she had that picture out in the open. Didn’t you ever ask?”

She laughed then, a wild, rolling sound. “That’s one thing we know in our family. We don’t ask her anything.” One of her eyebrows rose. “If she wants to say something, she will, but she doesn’t like questions.”

I felt a blooming of relief. I wasn’t the only one. She was like that with them, too. Hiding.

After dinner, we walked to a park where there was an outdoor concert. People were scattered across the lawn on blankets and folding chairs. A jazz band played into the warm indigo sky, and strings of tiny white lights glittered in the trees. We stopped at an ice cream cart and ordered the same flavor. We grinned at the vendor and looked at our reflections, blurred and dancing, in the metal door of the freezer. As we walked away, she turned to me. “Do you think that guy could tell we were sisters?”

It was a giddy moment. She had taken me in, had recognized me as kin. We held our palms up, measured the wide expanse from thumb to finger.

“My, what big hands you have, my dear.” Her voice was mischievous, wolfy. “Just . . . like . . . mine!”

We started laughing, running and twirling to the music, skipping along the park’s gravel path. We wanted to tell everyone, to run from blanket to blanket, whoop and scream at all the people sitting in the grass. We’re sisters. It didn’t matter that she had my name, or that I had her name. For the first time in either of our lives, we had a sister.

Grandparents

I never knew my birth mother’s parents’ names, those invisible grandparents. She kept them hidden from me in the same way she had hidden me from them, her pregnancy concealed under her girdle and loose smocks. But I did know a few things. I knew her brothers’ names, which she had let slip during conversation. I knew that their family had been interned during World War II, in a camp called Heart Mountain.

This historical event, the Japanese American internment, years before I was born, had shaped my entire existence. My birth mother was born on the West Coast, where her family once ran a prosperous business. But the war changed that, and after four years of living behind barbed wire, the business had dissolved and they accepted an offer to be sponsored by a church and relocate to a tiny town in the Midwest. My birth mother began her adolescence there, an Asian-American novelty among her peers. Well-liked, but not for dating. And not for marriage. Her only opportunity for love was secret love. Which was how I came to be.

Last year, I led a writing workshop at the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. While I waited for the participants to arrive, I explored the tiny exhibit hall, previously a Buddhist temple. I thumbed through a three-ring binder with preserved documents from the camps. heart mountain camp census, I read on one plastic-wrapped page.

My heartbeat thudded in my ears. I turned to the letter Y and there it was. Family of five. I read her name, in faded type. Her two brothers’ names, which I recognized. And then, my grandparents’ names: Ichiro and Masako. It made me tremble to see them, my hidden, forbidden ancestors. I snapped a photograph with my iPhone. I whispered the names into the empty hall, echoing silently against a wall of family identification tags. Now they were visible to me in a way that I never had been to them.

I’m a Yamada, too, I thought. Or I was.

Him

He’s the biggest mystery of all, my invisible and nameless birth father. She won’t tell me who he is, but I have my guess. I’ve been putting together crumbs of information for decades. There is a name, of a man now deceased, and some photographs that I hold up to the mirror, scanning for the outline of our jaw—is it the same angle?

What I need, for the definitive answer, is a test tube filled with saliva bubbles. If she won’t tell me, then maybe DNA will. I need one of this man’s sons to agree to spit into a tube and mail the sample to a genetics site. My hands tremble over the keyboard. What words can I use? How can I convince them?

I compose a letter to one of my potential half-siblings, but I’m afraid to use my full name or expose my face. I worry that my Japanese surname will link them to my birth mother. That they’ll guess at her identity, and then the tower of anonymity she’s guarded for decades will crumble in an instant—and so will our fragile relationship.

I create an extra email account: [email protected]. I send the hopeful letter, and hold my breath. My inbox remains empty.

* All birth family names in this piece have been changed to protect my relatives’ privacy.

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