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This episode contains discussion of suicide. Listener discretion is advised.
It had taken me years to understand that not everyone was adopted and that babies did not magically appear in crips. My friend's mothers had swollen with pregnancy, and I had learned, at age ten, shockingly about the details of reproduction from the Breading Your Keyshn chapter of Our Dog Book. My heart stuttered in my chest as my fingers walked through the cards ad adoption, The Search for Anna Fisher by Florence Fisher. I wrote down the book's number and pursued
it like a treasure hunt. Through the stacks. I pulled out a thick book with a green cloth cover. On the first page, the epigraph shook me. Oh, why does the wind blow upon me so wild? Is it because I'm nobody's child?
That's Susan kiyo Eto, author of the recent memoir I Would Meet You Anywhere. Susan's is the story of an unfolding secret upon secret upon secret, one unlocking the next over the course of many years. It's also the story of courage and persistence and an overpowering desire to know one's own history. I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
I grew up in a small town where my parents got this house right after I was adopted because the social worker told them that I had to have my own room, and prior to that they had lived in a one bedroom apartment. So they bought this house in this small little town in New Jersey, and we were the only Asian family in that town for a really long time. There was no black families or Latino families at that time. It was a very homogeneous town. So when I went to school, it was me just playing
with the other kids in the neighborhood. On the weekends, though, we spent a lot of time with my Japanese American extended family cousins, aunts and uncles, and then we went to a Japanese American church in New York City, which took us an hour to get there, and we would spend like six hours. It was a marathon situation every week, which I objected to very strenuously. It was important for them.
It was the three of you, right.
Yes, I was an only child. I consider ms I'm biracial, and so I feel like my life felt very half in half, Like I had my school week life with all the people in this little town, and then I had my weekend life, and they were so different, but they were both really important parts of my existence.
So you knew from as early as you can remember that you were adopted, is that right?
Yes?
Did you also know that you were half Japanese and half not Japanese?
I did. I mean, I think I was very conscious from a very young age that I did not look like my parents. I felt different from them. So I was very aware. And then they would say too. They would say things like, oh, you're humbun humbun, which means half and half.
Tell me about your mom, your adoptive mother, Kikuko.
She's a character. She was a real tough cookie. She was like under five feet tall, but very tough, and she would put up with no nonsense, but very loving. She was born in Brooklyn, and you could tell from the minute she opened her mouth. She sounded like, I want to say, Robert de Niro, own taxi driver, although I don't even remember what that sounds like, but she would be like, what's the matter with you? Where you go?
What's going on? She was just very rough. She grew up on the streets of Brooklyn with her two brothers, who were also very tough, and she had to stand up for herself when people would meet her. Her voice was not what one would expect coming out of her mouth. People were often like, wait, what's going on here?
And your dad, Massagie, what was he like?
He was a salesman and the most gregarious charismatic. He was just larger than life, super friendly and like. He could sell you the Brooklyn Bridge. He could sell you anything, and you would gladly buy a dozen of whatever it
was he was selling. He was a traveling salesman. In his territory was the southeast, like Virginia through Georgia, Kentucky all that, and he would sell souvenirs to gift shops on I ninety five and Stucky stores, those little spoons that say state of South Carolina or Georgia, or those felt banners and anything like that. He would sell. Gift shops was his thing, and he would pack up his car with sample boxes and sell his wares.
And so He'd be gone for chunks of time.
Huge chunks, and I didn't really understand until I was an adult when he would say, I'm so lucky. Those guys they only get two three weeks of vacation a year, but I get twelve weeks of vacation. And that sounded impressive, right, But what I really put together was that meant that forty weeks out of the year he wasn't living at home. I knew that other dads would come on the commuter train from New York City and they would have dinner
at home every night. And for my dad, it was like when he came, he would home for a week, and then he would be gone for two weeks and they would come back for five days. I think it really was hard on my mom.
And your father fought in the.
War, he did. He enlisted and was part of the four four second, which was the all Japanese regimen of the military, and he was in Italy for three years, and.
That was considered to be a really legendary unit, right, the four to four second.
Quite legendary and as they used to say, the most decorated. And another thing. As child, I was like, oh, fancyist the most decorated must have had the most medals, But I didn't realize that also meant the most casualties.
When Susan is quite young, her mom casually mentions the name of the adoption agency from which they adopted her, Spence Chapin. Though this information is dropped into a conversation like it's no big deal, its implications in Susan's life are a very big deal. This information plants the seed of curiosity and long to know more about her origins.
My parents spoke about the agency and also the social worker, Crystal Breeding. Yes it's a real name, Crystal Breeding, Like she was this legendary person in their minds. She was the person who brought me to them and who made it possible for us to be a family. And my dad had a picture of Crystal Breeding, the social worker, holding me in his wallet. He carried it around and he would open it up and he would show me, Oh,
there's Crystal Breeding. She's why you're here. And both her name and the name of the agency loomed large in my imagination. So it wasn't a secret that I was adopted. Clearly this woman had a lot to do with it, and they would talk about how she would come and do the white glove test in their apartment to make sure that they were up to snuff, and it was a big deal for them to have gone through this process with her, which took over ten years.
When Susan's around twelve years old, she's in the library one day and her curiosity and longing lead her to the card catalog. Up until this point, she has known about her adoption, but not much about adoption in general. What is it really there, she discovers a book called The Search for Anna Fisher by Florence Fisher.
It was a huge moment. I remember the feeling of the card catalog, those blonde wood catalogs and with the little cards, and when I saw adoption and that there was a book about adoption, it was like scary for me to look that word up, to be like, what does this even mean? Reading it, I was shocked. It was really radical, This whole idea of like I have the right to see my birth certificate, I have the right to know where I came from, And that was
planted really early. That was planted at the moment I saw that book. And in the back of the book it said Florence Fisher is the founder of ALMAH, the Adoptee's Liberty Movement Association, which also sounded extremely radical. And I wrote to them immediately saying, help me. I want to be part of this. I want to know more about where I came from too, And they wrote back right away. This was all like with a typewriter, in
envelopes and stamps and things. And they wrote back and said, we understand how you feel, but we really we can't help you till you're eighteen. As soon as I turned eighteen, I wrote to them again and they said, come on down. We can help. We have a support group and consultants, and we'll help you.
During this time. Susan is a student at Ethica College. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she has found herself drawn to studying certain subjects that mirror her own life experiences. She is extremely interested in the psychology of family. For instance, she studies and writes papers on adoption. So when Alma tells her to come on down, she does. She also calls and visits the adoption agency her mother had mentioned all those years ago, it Spen's Chapin.
I called and they said, yes, we have records that you came through our adoption agency, and Crystal Reading had long retired. She wasn't there anymore. But I met with somebody else and it turned out that it felt more like she was interrogating me than giving me information. And she spent a lot of time asking me about how was it growing up in your family? Oh, you had a dog, Oh, you went on vacations, you went to camp. Oh,
you must have had a great life. And she really wanted to hear about what a success story I was, which is great for her. But then when it came to me asking questions, she was very stingy in her offering anything to me. But they have a phrase called non identifying information, so she gave me a few you little titbits. She said, your mother was Japanese, which I had known, and she just gave me a few little crumbs.
And it was a really frustrating experience for me because I had been, of course, hoping for more answers and they were not to come.
Yeah, you describe her as sitting on the other side of a desk from you and leafing through this big fat folder, and you know, it's almost as if she was going, Oh, I can tell her this and then again like, oh this little morsel. So at this point, you hadn't told your parents that you were doing this, so you write them a letter.
Yes, I sent them this letter saying I love you, but this is something I have to do. And my mother, in her fantastic prickle accent, called up and said, what took you so long? We've been waiting for this. I was shocked because we hadn't ever talked about it. They had talked about Spence Japin, and they talked about other kids who were adopted, and every once in a while I would say, do you know anything about my mother? And they basically said they didn't know much, and they
were just like, what can we do for you? And it blew my mind, And I think about it now and it blows my mind even more because I know so many adoptive families don't react like that. I've been in conversation with hundreds of adoptees now and I know that their reaction is unusual, and I feel so grateful
to them. The support groups that the first thing you need is your adoption papers, your official adoption papers, which says the child X y Z will forever now be known as ABC, and this is the change of name. And my parents never had been given this. It was part of the sealed records, but they said sometimes adoptive parents had them and if they didn't, they could call the courthouse where it was finalized and ask for the papers, and that's what my mother did. So I said, this
is something you can do for me. It's a suggestion that I heard and if it works, great, and they were like, sure, we'll do that, no problem, And so I told them what to say, and they called up, and then a week later I had my adoption papers, which had my original birth name, which none of us had ever known or seen before. It was Mika no Gucci.
Susan endeavors down the road of next steps. First, she calls the hospital where she was born to get her birth records, but she has to concoct a story to make sure they release them, so she lies and tells them she's pregnant, which is why she needs her medical history. The hospital says, no problem, absolutely, we'll send those right over to your obgyn. Please give us their contact information.
But Susan hadn't prepared to include this level of detail into her lie, so she reaches for the nearby phone book and randomly picks the name of a local obgim and provides that contact information. Well, great, the hospital will send the records. But now she's really in the belly of the lie and needs to figure out how in the world she will actually get these records from this random OBGYN of whom, of course she's never been a patient.
Yeah, So after I realized what I had done, I was really plorrified, like, now what am I going to do? Now this obgyn is going to have my records? And how am I going to get them? What is the next step? So I called that office and I continued my fabricated story of being pregnant and hearing that my mother had complications and pregnancy and it would be helpful and I needed to be seen, and so they made me appointment and then I went, and I really was
in that moment in the doctor's office. They told me to take off my everything from the waist down and get up on the examining table with the stirrups and everything. And I was just like, Oh my gosh, what am I going to do here? And I thought, if I tell the truth, these papers, these records could just slip away and I'll never get another chance. This is it. And so you know how in a doctor's office there's a little folder container outside the door. So I I
never took my clothes off. I just grabbed the file, put it under my coat and quickly walked out, and I said to the receptionist, I just need to get something from my car. I'll be right back. And I race walked out to my car and threw it in the seat and just drove off as fast as I could. And that was how I got those records which had my birth mother's name. I think about it now and I can't even believe that whole thing happened. I was like, I am like breaking the law. What am I doing here?
Is this a crime? Is this? What am I going to jail for this? What did I do? I was terrified and my heart was pounding so hard. But then there it was. I had it.
So now finally Susan has this pivotal piece of information, the name of her birth mother, Yumiko Nagucci. But when it comes to taking a next step to somehow using this pivotal piece of information, Susan solicits the help of one of her coworkers. She's working at a deli at the time. A man named Henry, whose personality seems perfectly suited for this kind of hunt for truth.
He was somebody who was very detail oriented. He was really into UFOs. That was like his thing, and he had this system little cards or something where there were UFO sightings. He was like a fanatic in this very focused way. And he was like, well, what are you obsessed with? And I was like, oh, I'm obsessed with finding my mother. And then when I told him, he was immediately interested and well, what do you know? What
do you have? What do you got? And I told him about my whole story and how far I had gotten so far that I had my adoption record, I had the hospital record, I had her name, and that I was like, now what do I do. I'm stuck. I didn't really know the next step. And he said, well, give me what you got and I'll see what I can and he went and scoured every phone book from the country or something and found people with her name.
I was flabbergasted. But it took hours, and I think I had narrowed it to a certain part of the country, and so he focused there. He founded her. So it turned out it was just a wild coincidence that I had already made plane reservations to go to the city over spring break to visit my high school friend. And so I totally lost my nerve at that point because I felt like I was so close and I was, and so I begged my friend to call for me, and she did and confirmed that this was indeed the person.
And at first she did not have a good response to the phone call. She was not happy about it, and my friend, she said she sounded tipped off, and I was just crushed the fact that she would be upset at being contacted. When I was doing my research for my psychology family class and I was doing my paper on adoption, I read this book about adoptees in England who had open records and so suddenly in the seventies they were able to make contact. They had ten
case studies and eight of them were horrible. Oh, this person found out that their mother had taken their own life. This person found out that they were in a psychiatric institution. They weren't happy endings. And I really tried to brace myself that I wasn't going to have a good outcome. I really tried to try on all these things and say, how would I feel if I found this, How would I feel if this happened. I tried them all on and ultimately decided it was still worth it. But I
still wanted to do it. I tried to prepare and so then I flew to that city. And when I got there, my friend said that she had called and left a note saying that she would be willing to meet me, and she said, go to this hotel at this time and go to the room under this name. I was shocked.
We'll be right back. When Susan arrives at the Holiday Inn, the front desk tells her that Yumako Nogucci is waiting for her in her room. Shaken but excited, Susan gets in the elevator and goes up. She knocks on the hotel room door, and when it opens, there she is Susan is seeing her birth mother for the first time.
It was really been out of body experience. I think one of the first things I noticed that we were exactly the same height, and then I started taking in different parts of her face, looking at her cheeks and her nose and her lips. And feeling like there was something there that I recognized. She had this impeccable haircut and beautiful nails, and just a beautiful suit with fancy jewelry that looked like it came out of a museum. It just dazzled me. My adoptive mother dressed very plainly,
and it was just very different. I think she was very utilitarian in her dress and her style, and my birth mother to me, just seemed glamorous. I was blown away. I also could tell that she wasn't like, Hey, come on in, I'm happy to see you. It was tense. She felt completely betrayed and felt that she had been promised I suppose by the agency that this was going to be her secret, and that it wasn't going to come out and nobody would know.
She says to you, this was all supposed to be secret, and she's upset. Something that was supposed to be secret has been laid bare. This wasn't her narrative how things were going to go. She also tells you during that
meeting that you never crossed her mind. In twenty one years, there's a lot of twists and turns in your interactions with your birth mother, and you know, it's sort of like that old thing that people say of everything you need to know about like the person that you marry, if you go back to your first date, it's all there.
So true.
I do think that's true of first dates and marriages, but it's true of it seems true of your relationship with your birth mother. That kind of everything that then plays out for the rest of your relationship is already present in that first bunch of hours that you spend together.
Everything. Yeah, it was like a microcosm of the next forty five years. We went through so many different seasons and phases during that one meeting. But I think when I started showing her pictures, like childhood pictures, because you know, here I was twenty years old and she hadn't known what had happened to me since I was born. So I brought family pictures also, so I could show her this is the family I grew up with, this was
my life. And I think that made her happy. I think there were things that she felt that she connected to. She was glad. She was glad to see that I'd had the life that I had, and I think it softened her quite a bit. And also she didn't know that I was adopted by Japanese American parents. They knew that she was Japanese, but she didn't know where I ended up, and so she had no idea that I
was raised in this family. And I think there was something about that that made her really happy, that softened her, and she became more comfortable as we found that we had things in common, and as we got to know each other, we started to develop a little connection. We had lunch and then we were walking around a little bit and there was an ice cream stand nearby, and we both simultaneously ordered the same flavor of ice cream, and we both looked at each other, what did you say?
And we just started laughing and making jokes about, oh, is this genetic ice cream preference? And I think we were starting to get excited about the ways and that we were connected. Even though it's like totally random, you and I might have the same ice cream preference, but it felt really meaningful at that moment.
You me and Susan share more meaningful moments, and the softening in their dynamic continues. You may tells Susan she has a family, she has children. Of course, this is the first time Susan is hearing that she has half siblings. She learns she has a half sister and a half brother. Umi shows Susan a picture of her daughter. In the photo, she's wearing a monogram sweatshirt. Susan looks closely at the name.
That was a pretty shocking moment when I see this picture and the sweatshirt says Mika, which is of course my birth name, and it was shattering. It was a shattering I did not know what to make of it. I had been almost trying that name on internally, like what would have been like if that was my name. I'd been playing with it inside my mind, and when I saw it on this other girl, I was just I don't know. It was shocking.
Did your birth mother explain that to you at the time.
She did. She said, well, I really liked that name. I always wanted to use it if I had a girl, and so that's the name I gave you. But then I realized that you hadn't been able to keep that name, and so I could use it again. It was a moment, it was big.
And you also learned that you have a half brother whose names ca And before the end of this first visit with your birth mother. You asked her about your birth father.
She says that he's very friendly and gregarious and that he knows about me, and that he knows that I've contacted her, and I was like what. I was completely shocked by that. And then she said, yeah, he thought about you. He reminded me of you. This also completely floored me because first she had said that she hadn't thought about me, and then she said that he actually had thought about me. And I had this immediate feeling
of I want to know this person. I want to know this person who tried to remember me to her, and she just said no, and I wanted to know more. But that was all that was going to happen at that moment. It took me the entire day to work up the courage to ask about him. It was, of course one of the first things on my mind, but it was the very end of the day. And that was a big bombshell that came when she said that he thought about me.
And it also seems that she did more than evade. It was a real mood changer, like she really didn't want to have that conversation with you, right, or certainly not create some sort of introduction or path towards that.
Yeah, things have been getting very friendly up until that point, and then the mood definitely changed.
A few months pass and on Mother's Day, Susan arranges for her parents and grandmother to meet Umi. They all go out for sushi. No one is talking about the gravity of the situation, the importance of this meeting. Instead, everyone is just on their best behavior, having a light, friendly lunch.
I wasn't quite sure what to do with myself. It was surreal. At one point, she goes to the restroom and my grandmother's like, oh, your mother's very pretty, and I'm like, wait, what And the fact that she's calling you me my mother and my mother is sitting right there. They were just all really friendly to each other. I think they felt a bond because they're all second generation
Japanese American, so they had that in common. It was a real connector, and I think that if either they hadn't been Japanese or she hadn't been Japanese, it would not been as comfortable.
At one point during lunch, u Mei turns to Susan and tells her how extremely lucky she's been to have grown up in this family. The word lucky is tricky for an adopted child to hear. When lunch ends and Susan goes off on her own, she weeps.
Angela Tucker she's an amazing adoptee writer and she just wrote a book called You Should be Grateful. And I think that's a message that adopted people here all the time, You're so lucky, you could have been languishing in an orphanage. So I think it's a message that feels mixed. It's like, well, you can't be lucky unless you've been unlucky. First adoption is born out of crisis. Somebody does not get adopted
unless there's a crisis that happens that necessitates that. So I think there's that and the fact that she said that I didn't know what to do with that. And as much as I would agree, as much as I felt lucky and I love my family and I loved my parents, it was like, wait a second, what are you saying here? I mean, I think it gave her a sense of relief that her choice for me had turned out well. I think she was feeling glad that things had turned out the way that they had, But
it was also really hard to hear. And then also the fact that it was Mother's Day and she said, I have to get back to my family. So all of these things combined, my head and my heart were just swirling and breaking, and it was a hard thing to put it all together. There were just so many things happening at once, and.
To go back to the microcosm that began with that very first encounter with Yumi, there was this constant kind of giving and then taking away, and then giving and then taking away, very likely not conscious, but always there, so that the minute you start feeling like warm or cozy or comfortable or familiar, then something reminds you that, oh, it's not like that at all. The world keeps turning for Susan. She has a career and she's in a relationship.
She's in sporadic touch with Yumi. They correspond and see one another occasionally. She exchanges gifts with her and her parents during the holidays. One day, Yumi writes to Susan and says she's coming to New York on business and would like to see her. Susan starts cleaning her apartment right away, preparing for Yumi's visit, but a few days go by, and she doesn't hear from Yumi again to make plans. Maybe she's changed her mind, maybe she's not
going to come at all or even reach out. But just as Susan's thinking this, she sees a message from Yumi. I'm at the Plaza Hotel. The message says, come over. Naturally, that's what Susan does.
I see that she's brought a stack of books. She's a reader, she loves to read. And we have room service and we have ice cream, and it all feels so cozy and just fun. And we're talking about things that I don't talk with my adoptive mother about. We don't really have this comfortable way of talking about, like if I have a boyfriend or if I'm interested in someone. My adoptive mother was just really uncomfortable with those kinds
of topics. But Umi was just easy to talk to, and I felt like we had things in common, and she was like, you should read this book and what about this? And have you seen this movie? And it just was It was just really comfortable and fun to be with her, and also very confusing. What is this my friend? Is she my mother? Who is this person? But I was enjoying it while we were there. It was this cost of waiting for that moment, you know, just waiting to hear from her and not knowing if
it was going to happen. And then of course the moment she calls and she's so happy and she's like, come on down, come on down at the plaza that I would forgive anything, do you know? It wasn't even about forgiving. It was like, of course I would do anything. I would meet you anywhere, I wouldn't meet you anywhere, I would go anywhere. I would do anything. For five minutes and.
You stay over, and what happens the next morning.
The next morning, it's just all business and very much Okay, we're done here, We're done here. I'm going home, and we're done, and it's over. The kind of the moment has disappeared, and I just I got to leave.
You describe it as reminiscent of what behavior would be like after an ill advised one stand.
It felt so much like that. And I think a lot of the secrecy of it, feeling like I'm meeting somebody in secret. I can't tell anybody, They're not going to tell anybody, and it's like, oh, is this what people do when they're having an affair or having a one night stand or something. Is this what that's like? It felt like that.
Five years later, Yumi calls Susan to tell her she's in the hospital with complications from a hysterectomy. Susan buys a last minute plane ticket and gets to the hospital as fast as she can. In the lobby, she's asked if she's immediate family, and she has the jarring realization that Umi would probably say no to this and would want Susan to say no to this too. So Susan says no, as she asks herself, what is my role here?
Who am I here? She calls you me from the lobby to tell her she's downstairs, and Yumi tells her to come up.
So I go to her room and he's very weak. I bring up some gifts and she says, look out the window. Do you see that JC Penny out there? And I'm like yes, And she tells me to go to the j C. Penny for an hour and then to come back. And I'm completely confused. And she says, Nika is coming and I'm going to tell her. I'm going to tell her about you and I'm just flabbergasted, like completely unprepared for that, and she says, I'm going to do it now. It's the right time to do it,
because you're here and she's coming. And so I go to the j. C. Penny and I'm pacing like a mad person. And I come back and my half sister is standing in the hospital room looking completely shocked as well. And then my birth mother gives us some money and says, go have dinner. She's too tired to continue to visit. So we leave and we go or a restaurant, and I think neither of us had been prepared for that moment.
At dinner with Mika, she asks Susan if she knows who her birth father is, and I say.
It, well, I know a few things about him, and I tell her a few details, and Mika says, oh, maybe it's this guy. Maybe it's this person, And I just of course grab onto that, Oh you think it's that person, And then I hold that in my mind and believe that. But she said unfortunately he died, So in the moment, I'm like, oh, my gosh, I'm going to know who my birth father is. And then but
he's not here. Anymore. And that was another one of those mini roller coasters that just happens in a moment, and then we start to get to know each other as people, and then I have a sister for a little while.
You may recovers and Susan goes back home, but there's another visit to see her soon after. You may tell Susan that there's someone she wants her to meet, Barry, a very old friend of hers, so flies out again to go have dinner with them. This is the evening in which the story of Susan's first hundred odd days of her life unfold. Barry, this man she's never met until tonight, tells her things she's never known.
So I learned that she had actually been visiting Barry and his wife while she was pregnant with me, but they hadn't known that she was pregnant. In fact, she had said that nobody knew, which I found so hard to fathom when I was pregnant, because I was enormous, and I was like, how could you even keep this
a secret? But she said, well, I didn't eat, and I wore a really tight girdle and really loose clothes, and nobody knew as far as she could tell, nobody knew, and so she was visiting them, and she went into labor when she was in a park near their house, and a police officer took her to the hospital and either he or someone at the hospital called Barry and said, your house guest, your friend is in the hospital, and she had instructed them to say she was getting her
she had had appendicitis attack and she was getting her appendix out. So of course you're horrified when you think your house guest is in the hospital with emergency surgery. So they rushed to see her, and a nurse who had not been told the appendix story said, oh, mother and baby, you're doing just fine, and they were stunned. They had no idea, and she swore them to secrecy, and they promised that they would never tell anybody, and they didn't. She had been under anesthesia when I was delivered.
They call it twilight sleep. It was a kind of drug that they did back in the day, so she hadn't really been conscious when I was born and she hadn't seen me. I had to stay in the hospital for a couple months because I was really underweight.
Barry and his wife went to see baby Susan then Mika in the NICU, but Umi did not. As soon as Umi was cleared to leave, she did without seeing her baby at all.
And then when I was able to be discharged, she was the one who had to take me out of the hospital and bring me physically to the agency. So she did that and that was the first time she had seen me. I was like two and a half three months old, and so she took me in a taxi and that was like the first time she had really seen me. She described giving me a bottle and I just had no idea about any of this. I
didn't really know that story. You know. It's one of those things that it's so profound to like just not know how you came into the world. And it's one of the things I called not adopted privilege. It's like a kind of privilege to just take for granted that you know what time you were born, or you know the circumstances, or you know about when your mother went
into labor, or you hear about things. There's all this lore about when someone's born and people talk about it, and it's something you just internalize as part of your life story. And I didn't have any of that. I didn't have any idea about any of it, So hearing it as an adult was really stunning. And that this guy, Barry had been the only person who had known that I even existed and.
Who had met you. He was part of the first day of your life.
Yeah, he was even more than she was. I mean, she burst me, but she hadn't seen me until I was two and a half months old, and he had and he had carried this, he had kept this, and he had kept her confidence this whole time.
In the ensuing years, Susan and her partner John get married. You Mei and Mika both come to the wedding. Of course, Susan's parents and family she grew up with are all there too, and for a brief shining moment, there's the sense that there's a kind of extended family, even though not everybody is privy to the nature of it. It seems to Susan like maybe this is how it's going to be moving forward, this big extended family. It seems like maybe she can have it all. Susan and John
decide to start a family. Susan becomes pregnant but suffers from preoclamsia and loses the baby, who she's already named and already loves. Susan lets Umi know at the beginning of her pregnancy that things are rocky and that it's looking like it's not going to be okay, but Yumi says, oh no, don't worry, it's going to be fine. I know it's all going to be fine. But it's not fine. And adding to the pain of the loss is the pain of Yumi not following up with Susan to see
how things are. A week goes by and she does not check in. Susan's parents are there being parents, and her husband John is there being a husband, but her birth mother doesn't think to reach out and support her during this week of crisis. Invariably, this calls into question what is a parent. It's a noun, but it is also a verb to parent.
You know, when I think about it now, I don't know if it was cold or harsh, or thinking or unfeeling, But I think the whole time I've known her, she's really wanted to firmly defer that role to my parents. She didn't want that role, She never wanted that role, and she made her decision. She made her choice. I am not her mother. I'm not going to be her mother, and I was really surprised and really hurt that she didn't check on me. Maybe as a friend, I mean,
like a friend might have checked in. I don't know, but I think I was thinking of her at that time as my mother, and my mother is not checking to see how I've gone through this experience, and I think she really had relinquished that role from the beginning.
Did you feel at that time, up until that time that you had two mothers?
I really wanted that. I think I really wanted two mothers, and I wanted what they both were to me in their own ways. I wanted them both to be my mother, and I think it wasn't until much later that I accepted that wasn't going to happen.
Susan and Umi continue to have a relationship akin to a very slow tennis match. Every once in a great while the ball bounces. There's a bounce when Susan receives an invitation to Mika's graduation party, but she's invited to attend as a quote unquote family friend that will be her cover. Secrets upon secrets upon secrets Susan was u Mei's secret, but now Yumi makes it Mika's secret. Mika
becomes the secret of you Mei's secret. Because Kaz, Susan's half brother and Mika's full brother, still doesn't know about the truths of Susan's existence, Umi wants to tell him when Susan is there in person at the graduation party. So Susan attends and prepares for this big reveal, but then it now happens. Yumi has apparently decided to keep the secret contained. As Kaz is heading out for the evening, Yumi asks to get a photograph of the three of them, Mika, Kaz,
and their family friend Susan. It's unclear why Yumy's doing this. Is it to make Susan feel better somehow? Is it for you Mei herself? Whatever the case, Susan is completely taken aback. She dissociates and wonders why exactly she came to this party and what exactly just happened. There's yet another bounce about five years after this incident, when Susan is invited to Kaz's wedding again. She's invited and attends as a family friend. By this time, Susan has had
her first child, Molly, so she brings her along. At one point, Umi is carrying Molly around and then something happens which leaves Susan in a state of profound disappointment and sadness.
Kaz also has a baby at that point, and they're just a few months apart, and somebody assumes that Mollie is the baby of him, and she says, no, this is not my grandchild. This is my house guest daughter. And it was the moment. It was like a turning point where I think, up until that point, I had felt like I would do anything to have this relationship, Like I don't care how much I have to lie. I don't care how much I have to pretend I'm someone else. I don't care. I'm not carrying this on
to the next generation. I'm not going to tell her that she has to lie about who she is. I was suddenly so protective of my child and seeing that if we had to keep going like this, like I would have endured anything on my own behalf, but not for her. And that was the first time where I was like, Okay, I can't do this.
So did you cut off contact with you me at that point, No.
I didn't enough contact, but I felt myself withdrawing.
We'll be back in a moment with more family secrets. A few years pass and Susan has her second child, another daughter, Emma. Around this time, she joins a group that becomes very important to her, a group of Asian American adoptees. In the group, she learns a lot about the mental health of adoptees and the suicide rate among adoptees. The data is just staggering. She also in this group connects with a man named Mark. He too is biracial Asian and adopted, so he and Susan find familiarity and
connect with one another. And then Mark dies by suicide. This is another turning point for Susan, a breaking point. Not only is she dealing with the loss of her good friend, but also the need to know as much as she can about her birth father resurfaces. Yumi is the only one carrying this information and she has never given it to Susan for all these years. Susan's in
her mid thirties now. It's been fifteen or sixteen years since she first met Yumi, and in all that time, she's learned nothing else about her birth father, so she writes a note to Yumi, asking her again for more information and positing the possibility that it's this person that Mika had mentioned to her those years earlier. When she speaks to Yumi about this, she says, point blank, I need to know this.
She cut me off. She was like, how dare you imply such a thing? How dare you ask? Fifteen years of trying to be very patient in hoping that we would get close enough or that are relationship would get to a point where she felt like she could tell me, and I was just like, I haven't brought it up. In fifteen years since that first meeting, I have not brought it up, and I've been just patient, and I just want to let you know I'm still interested. I still want to know. And she was just like, I
don't think we should be in contact anymore. I had this feeling that if the person who brought me into this world didn't want contact with me, that maybe I shouldn't be in this world. I think I was very confused and very distraught, and I felt like I had done it. I had brought this on myself. If I had just kept quiet and not asked, we would still be in somewhat of a relationship. You know, I just felt like I had destroyed it. It was really devastating.
And I think there's something about the concept of the primal wound or being relinquished as a baby, and that's a hard thing to deal with. It is what it is. I don't know about my private one. I don't even know. But there's something else about knowing someone for fifteen years, knowing your mother for fifteen years, and then having her turn her back. That to me was like more devastating than being left as a baby, because I feel like
I understand why people do that. I understand why she did that, But this other thing of like having known her for over a decade and then having her say I don't want anything to do with you anymore, I couldn't really deal.
Yeah, and you got pretty much the same correspondence from Mika, who also said I don't want to have anything to do with you. So the feeling seems to be like the world and your place in it sort of trembled a little bit right then, like a little bit of a fault line that opened up, And I was really fascinated by something that pulled you back, which was that you learned about this drumming circle.
Tycho. Drumming was something that I didn't even think about it until recently that my dad had taken me to in New York City and Brooklyn when I was in high school, and I was completely captivated by and then forgot about until I heard that there was a group near me, and so I decided to go, and it really pulled me out of my depression grief. It was very physical, and the drums are really huge, and the drum sticks are also really big and very heavy, and
you just have to you use your whole body. There's like dance involved. You're shouting while you're doing it, and it brought me back into my body in a very physical way. And the teacher described it as these drums are supposed to replicate the sound of heartbeat, mother's heartbeat, and it spoke to me and I just felt like I was reclaiming my body and reclaiming myself in certain ways, aiming being Japanese American. It was extremely healing.
The years churn by with no information about Susan's birth father. In the meantime, her adoptive father passes away, after which her mother moves in with Susan and her family. Susan is at a juncture in her life where she feels she needs to take the mystery of her biological paternity into her own hands. She hires a private investigator to
find out more, to find out anything. What's so interesting about the timing of you're hiring the private investigator in the year after your father died is that it's almost like, maybe now it was okay to search an earnest in some way because you were so close with your father.
Yeah. I also felt like my birth mother and I were not in contact at that time, and I was like, there's nothing left to lose, and also felt like she's clearly not going to tell me, and I have to take this into my own hands if I'm still interested in doing this.
The private investigator, however, HiT's a dead end. He even calls Yumi at one point and has a conversation with her. He comes back to Susan telling her that Umi has absolutely no interest in this and there's nothing else for him to do. Susan's defeated, and another long stretch of
time passes nearly fifteen years. It's twenty seventeen and now DNA tests exists and they cost under one hundred dollars, so she sends away for one, which leads her to make a series of discoveries, some larger than others.
So it was three years where not much happened because I think with every year that goes by, more people enter the database. And so at first there was like hardly anything, and I gave up on it. And then I have a friend who's a genetic genealogist, and I was like, I can't make heads or tails of this.
I'm getting all these seventh cousins or whatever. And she said, well, let me take a look, let me look at your DNA situation, and so I gave her access to my ancestry and then I got a call from her, you know, twenty seventeen, and she said, you've got a close match and I'm going to look into this. And I think I had going to have something for you. And then a couple hours later, she's like, I think we nailed it. We found him. And then she told me that he
had died in twenty fourteen, just three years before. But she said he's got a sister, and his sister looks awesome. I found her social media presence and it looks like she's a progressive, wonderful person, and I think you and she would really get along. And I was like, okay, So she had found a phone number for this person, and I called her up and I said, I think that your brother might be my father, and she said what, And then in the next breath she said, well, welcome
to the family. And I almost can't even I can't even talk about without crying because it's just it was so not my experience for this thirty five years. She wanted to know everything about me. She was so ecstatic, so happy to know me, and I didn't even know what to do with it. It was so the opposite of everything I had experienced.
And with Auntie Liz, there were no secrets. It was the opposite of secrecy, right suddenly, Yeah, she wanted to introduce you to everyone. And welcome to the family wasn't just a phrase, it was she enacted it.
Yeah, it was big. I went there to meet her and it was I don't know, I can't even describe. It was such a warm and complete welcome. I had to let you, may know, I didn't have to but I decided to let her know by the way, I've made this discovery through DNA, and I just want to let you know that it's been confirmed. And that was the next breaking off of this is terrible news. And it was another period of I don't want to talk to you again. We need to not be in contact anymore.
And you finally got what you wanted. Go good for you, and I got this feeling of I've lost her irrevocably, this is it, she'd done, and I'm getting this other family. But I couldn't really focus on that because it was like, at what cost was this that this just happened? What was the cost? I've got this family, They're so wonderful to me, they're so welcoming, and it cost her and I just had to deal with that again.
Today. Susan is in her sixties. She's a grandmother, a mother, a wife, a niece, an author, and an activist. She has a very full life, but the secrets that followed her for so long still leave their mark. Many elements of her story have been clarified over time, but her story is not over.
It's not over. There are still things that I'm living through right now.
What strikes me is that after a lifetime of being a secret, of being compelled and forced to keep a secret to be the secret, that the impetus to shape the story, tell the story, own the story. Is why you didn't own your own story. You didn't have the narrative. You didn't have those first hundred days. There was so
much that you didn't know. I love what you said about non adopted privilege because there are things that people walk around just assuming are a certain way and don't know, oh, any other possibility.
It's a knowledge that you take for granted, and unless you don't have that knowledge, you don't even think about it. Ever, you don't even think about it until you don't have something, you don't realize what it's like not to have it, because it's just something. It's like oxygen. You just breathe it part of your life.
Here's Susan sharing one more passage from her memoir. Here she comes as close as she ever will to her genetic father, but at least now she knows.
It traced his name with my fingers. It stabbed at me that his death date was no longer than an arm's length into the past, had come so close to knowing him thirty seven years of searching, only to miss him by thirty six months. What would he have done with the news of my existence. Maybe it was just as well. It could have been a crushing disappointment. Maybe it was best this way to be embraced by my enthusiastic aunt, a relative who had no secret past, no
shame or regret. Still, I felt a swirl of overwhelmed emotion and numbness as I knelt in the damp grass. I unwrapped the cellophane from the chrysanthemums and laid them down next to his name. The harsh wind bit through my fleece coat. I didn't say anything out loud, but inside my head I said hello and goodbye.
Family Secrets is a production of iHeartRadio. Molly's Accur is the story editor and Dylan Fagan is the executive producer. If you have a family secret you'd like to share, please leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight eight Secret zero. That's the number zero. You can also find me on Instagram at Danny Ryder and if you'd like to know more about the story that inspired this podcast, check out my memoir Inheritance.
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