Susan Ito

Susan Ito is the author of The Mouse Room and co-edited the literary anthology A Ghost At Heart’s Edge: Stories & Poems of Adoption. Her work has appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Choice, Literary Mama, The Bellevue Literary Review, Making More Waves and elsewhere. She writes and teaches at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, Mills College and the MFA Program at Bay Path University.

November Nonfiction: "The Missing Half" by Susan Ito

Susan Ito - November 9, 2017
An adoptee goes in search of her birth father and finds a new and unexpected source of family.
the author at her birth father's grave

“What are you?”

“I’m half Japanese.”

“And half what?”

I’ve had this conversation more times than I can count. For years, my response to that last question was simply a shrug, or “Your guess is as good as mine.”