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 by oaks and elms that stretched over the road to mingle leaves, like the queue of parents who joined hands in a bridge after soccer games, letting the children run through below.

When we first moved there, it was a dirt road. Hard-packed soil studded with the occasional flat rock. We neighborhood children pretended it was a river and that we needed to hop from one smooth foothold to the next. When the paving trucks arrived in 1969, the summer I was nine, the adults celebrated. We rolled the hot-warm tar between our palms, stretched it into long black taffy ropes, pinched the thick tar bubbles until they popped. The thick, oily smell hung in the neighborhood for weeks. Then the tar was rolled flat, and a river of black glass emerged. Our tires loved it; the cars and bikes glided over the road, but the deliciously complex pathway of stepping stones had been smothered.

There were other rocks. One, a boulder at the side of the road, tucked in the narrow copse of trees between street and yard, had a flat top like an ottoman. Queen rock, king rock: only the reigning kids got to perch there, while the others knelt below on a carpet of decomposing leaves.

I played with kids from Summit Street, from up and down Mountain. One family down the road had a half dozen kids sleeping on mattresses rowed up in their basement. I wasn’t sure if I should feel sorry for them, or jealous. Was it an endless slumber party or something like an orphanage? A hefty girl named Barbara once tackled me in my backyard and sat on me, my face pressed into soil and grass, my lungs flat as empty baggies. She was often queen of the flat rock. From my kneeling place, I stared at her name, which she’d written in blurred blue ink on the rubber toes of her sneakers. I wanted to tear the word off with my teeth: Barbara. But instead I knelt, and never let her behind me again.

There were the blond Westerdales, a sunny, blue-eyed bunch whose mother served the most tantalizing American snacks: round, salty Ritz crackers, peanut butter, American cheese shaped into rounds with a biscuit cutter. All of us children roamed the neighborhood in a pack, ignoring the invisible boundaries between yards. We ran through each other’s sprinklers, hid behind each other’s trees, and considered the backyard areas our shared domain. At night, when the fireflies started to dot the air between the trees, we heard our mothers call us home, each with their own sound: the Westerdales’ copper cowbell, the shriek of a whistle, the steel triangle, and my parents’ own Japanese gong. We pricked up our ears in the dusk like animals, listening for the sounds that would summon us.

Our street was home to the elderly and the childless as well: the old German Kiesselbachs next door; Peter with tiny wire-rimmed glasses, looking like the shoemaker or the woodcutter from old fairy tales. His enormously jolly wife, Elizabeth, who bought a hundred pounds of butter at Christmastime and filled the house with spritz cookies. I waited for the Kiesselbachs on Christmas mornings the way I waited for Santa Claus, and they would be there, huffing slightly from the three steps to our door, the plate of cookies in hand. His red velvet vest. Her curled bluish-white hair. The cookies that melted butter all down our throats.

Next door to the Kiesselbachs lived the Wubbes. It was not until I grew up and spoke of them, and people laughed incredulously, that I realized they had a funny name. Was it a funny name? They were kind people. He was like an enormous, round-bellied Teletubby, kind and avuncular. She was a schoolteacher on the other side of town.

I didn’t think it was special then, living on that street. Nobody ever does when they’re in the midst of it, when they are oblivious children who know nothing else. And maybe I’m romanticizing it. The canopy of trees that whispered against each other in the summertime, the great musty piles of leaves that the fathers raked into mountains, the humid nights bright with fireflies, the winter snows that blanketed it into silence. It was my street, Summit Street, short and knowable, every inch of it. My house sat back at a comfortable distance, the driveway curving like a wide smile against the road. It was the street my parents chose, out of all the streets and avenues in New Jersey. This was where they decided to raise me, the place they brought me home to when I was less than a year old. No matter that there were no other Asians or other minorities in the town. On weekends, we’d spend time with our extended Japanese American family, who lived in other small Jersey towns nearby, and attended the Japanese church in Manhattan.

The social worker at the adoption agency had told them that I would need to have my own room, and that keeping me in a bassinet in a one-bedroom apartment in Fort Lee wouldn’t do. It was a good street for a young life, and a good street to come back to, over and over, once I’d left. It was my river, my anchor, my cave, and my universe.

My mother worked in the office of the elementary school that I attended, a mile uphill. She’d gotten the job when I was in first grade so that she could keep an eye on me. She was in charge of the milk money, the attendance sheets, and the mimeograph machine that stained her fingers purple. She answered the phone: West Ridge Elementary. May I help you? She was the one who called the parents when a kid was sick, if they threw up or hurt themselves or had a fever. They waited in the nurse’s office, on the Naugahyde couch with the built-in pillow. She was in charge of the lost-and-found basket.

One day after school, I was frantic because I couldn’t find one white glove, part of my Brownie uniform. I’d had them both when I went to school; I’d stuffed them into the pocket of my wool winter coat. My mother had said she’d put them in her pocketbook until it was time for Girl Scouts, but I’d wanted to keep them with me. I’d said I could take care of them. It made me feel special, letting everyone know I was a Brownie, and that we would be meeting at the American Legion hall halfway up the hill of Ridge Avenue. I loved my brown dress, the color of chocolate milk, and the brown felt beanie bobby-pinned to my hair. The gold pin — the trefoil with the little elf dancing inside, pinned to my collar. My special brown knee socks and the white stretchy gloves. All of it said: I am a Brownie; it’s official. I was as American as the flag.

But a glove was missing. I searched the smelly coat closet in Mrs. Sharff’s room. Maybe it had fallen out on the blacktop during recess. I had played tetherball and freeze tag, and I had huddled with Jennifer and Karen and told fortunes with our paper cootie catchers.

I pushed open the heavy glass doors to the blacktop. It was starting to snow, and the new snowfall sifting down on top of the old, smeary black lumps was clean and sugary. The flakes were thick and fat, and the wind made them fly into my nose and mouth. I panicked. Soon the whole area would be blanketed in white, and my glove was white. My stomach squeezed, a ripple of pain, and I felt like I needed the bathroom. The tetherball chain was clanking hard, and the ball bounced against the pole, as if an invisible person was playing all alone.

I couldn’t go to the lost and found, the plastic laundry basket in the main office, because my mother was in charge of it. It sat right next to her desk, by the radiator.

Maybe my glove was already there and she’d found it. Thinking about that made my stomach cramp again. She’d know I lost it. Baka, she’d say. Stupid. I told you to put it in my pocketbook. Careless!

I was being careless. I couldn’t help it. I tried to keep track of my things, my hair clips and my special pencils that had my name stamped in gold: Susan Kiyo Ito. My father, who was a salesman, had had a gross of them — a dozen dozen — made for me: three dozen blue, three dozen yellow, three dozen pink, and three dozen green. I liked the blue ones best and had tried to use up the others first. He’d sharpened them in the electric sharpener in his workshop, and they’d come out with points sharp as needles. I had started out with 144, and now there were only 25 blues and 11 yellows left. The others were all gone, some used up but others disappeared. Careless, my mother had said. We can’t give you anything nice, can we?

I knew she was waiting for me. It was time to go to Brownies. She was putting on her own troop leader uniform now, in the staff restroom. She didn’t like to wear her uniform during the day like I did. I trudged slowly back to the main office.

She was there, putting on her coat. She was bobby-pinning her dark-green leader beret to her tight black curls. “Hey! I was wondering where you were. Didja get lost?” She smiled her funny, jokey smile. I glanced casually at the lost-and-found basket, trying to see through the jumble of coats and mittens, straining to see something white while trying to make it look as if I were not looking at all.

“All ready?” She came around the front counter, past the swinging half door on its hinge. Nobody got to pass that saloon door except her and Mrs. Schmidt, the principal’s private secretary. Kids waited on the couch if they’d been called to Mr. Frank’s office, if they were in trouble. My mother would peer at them over the counter while she counted papers or stacked up milk-money dimes.

So, whadja do? In big trouble, huh? She liked to see the bad kids wriggle while they waited to talk to Mr. Frank to see if he’d just give them a warning or say, Mrs. Ito, please call so-and-so’s mother. And then she’d dial the number and say, Mrs. So-and-So, this is West Ridge Elementary. I’m afraid you’ll have to come down. It seems that your child has been acting up. She told me these stories over dinner, as a warning.

I had never been sent to see Mr. Frank. It was a terrifying idea. What would happen? My mother would not call herself on the phone. Even if it was just a warning, she would know I was there; she would know I had done something wrong. She would probably drag me into the staff restroom and yell at me, and Mrs. Schmidt would hear through the door. Maybe even the nurse would hear from her office in the back. Well, I was never, ever going to be sent to Mr. Frank’s. That was for kids who talked back, who threw things, who disrupted lunch, who hit each other. I don’t do any of those things, and I never would.

I had to pretend that I believed I had both gloves in my pocket. I wouldn’t discover that one was missing until we were in the Legion hall. By that time, all the other Brownies would be there, and so would Mrs. Crevier, the other leader. There would be so much going on — the pledge to say, the activities and snack, that she wouldn’t have time to be mad, and not in front of everyone.

We walked out to her car, the cream-yellow station wagon. Her space was marked by a white wooden sign that said mrs. ito. Having her own sign showed that she was an important person at school. Not even the teachers had name signs.

It was freezing in the car. The icy plastic seat stuck to my thighs. My mother breathed into her hands, her breath a big white cloud.

“Here, I’ll put the heater on, but just our luck, it won’t get warm until we’re already there.” The American Legion hall was only a short way down the long hill of Ridge Avenue.

Most days, I walked home from school while my mother was finishing work. Sometimes she caught up with me and gave me a ride the last few blocks. I hated walking past the Legion by myself. There were always boys playing out front, on the real cannon that was painted white. It had a brass plaque affixed to it with all the names of Park Ridge men who had died in foreign wars. Some of the names belonged to grandfathers or uncles of kids I knew: Shea, Martini, Pullman.

The flag outside the American Legion was bigger than the one at school and the chain clanging against the pole even louder. The noise went through my teeth, going all the way through every bone in my head.

The boys who clambered all over the cannon were the same ones who had to see Mr. Frank. The ones my mother called troublemakers. She said they ran wild because their fathers were gone, fighting in Vietnam, and the mothers couldn’t handle them. Nobody was supposed to sit on the cannon or climb on it like a jungle gym — it was an official monument. A sign said so. But there weren’t any cannon monitors or police hanging out at the Legion hall, so they never got caught. They straddled its long nose like they were sitting atop a horse and waited for me to walk by. It didn’t matter that I was on the other side of the street.

Their voices went eh-eh-eh-eh, like a machine gun. They were the ones who were baka, who were stupid, because cannons went kaboom! and machine guns were different; they were small enough to hold, and they used big belts full of huge brass bullets. The boys made the machine-gun noise at the same time they aimed the cannon. At me.

They lined me up in the crosshairs between their fingers, and their mouths popped. “I got the Jap!” I heard them shout. Their voices carried across the street, blasting over the river of station wagons ferrying down Ridge Avenue. “Hey, Jap, you’re dead!”

I wanted to be dead. I wished I wouldn’t have to hear their voices. I couldn’t pretend they were talking to somebody else. I knew it was me they were looking for. We were the only Japanese people in Park Ridge, my parents and I.

But I felt safe on Girl Scout days. The gravel parking lot was always filled with cars, and Mrs. Crevier was there. She would chase the boys away from the cannon long before the meeting time, and nobody would bother me. Plus, they couldn’t call me a Jap when I was wearing a Girl Scout uniform. It was too American. It was like a shield.

I could see them there half a block away, through the wet blur of the windshield. Those troublemaking fifth graders were out on the sidewalk. I was not worried, though. My mother was what people called a tough cookie. We were both in uniform.

We pulled into the crunchy parking lot. My mother took out the plate of cookies she’d brought for snack time. I carried a bag of felt scraps and sequins for the art project. We were climbing the Legion steps when there was a white explosion, a pain in my nose, icy grit that knocked my glasses off. Dirt and snow and shards of ice filled my mouth, my nose. “Mom? Mommy? My glasses!”

Then I heard their voices.“Two Japs! We got ’em both!”

I scrambled to find my glasses. One temple was bent, and the lenses were smudged. I spit out dirty snow. Then I saw my mother, her leader’s cap knocked askew, the white clumps in her black hair, her red lipstick smeared.

“Mommy,” I whispered.

She reached out her hand to steady me. “Daijobu,” she said quietly, “it’s all right.” Broken cookies littered the ground. The boys were still jeering, but then she looked over and they scattered, running up the hill.

“Pay no attention,” she said. “Let’s go inside.”

I followed her into the building, shocked. We squeezed into the bathroom, and she combed her hair. She patted my face with a beige paper towel and wiped off my glasses. I wanted to ask: Why don’t you run after those boys, Mom? Why don’t you catch them and yell at them and make them pee their pants from fear? Why don’t you call them baka? But I didn’t say anything. I didn’t tell her: Those boys do that to me every day. I couldn’t believe they’d done it to a grown-up as well. To her.

We entered the meeting hall just in time for the pledge. I had only one glove, but it didn’t seem to matter. I looked at the small indoor flag on its slender wooden pole and felt a deep burning in my abdomen. Our uniforms, our being American, being Girl Scouts, hadn’t protected us at all. I turned and looked at my mother. Her lipstick was bright and perfect, as red as the stripes on the flag. She held her head straight, her voice clear. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. She pressed her hand, hard, over her heart.

Susan Kiyo Ito’s memoir, I Would Meet You Anywhere, is out this week from the Ohio State University Press.