Susan Ito is a struggling college student, a young adult on the cusp of parental independence, when she meets her birth mother for the first time. Instead of launching into adulthood, she finds herself entangled in longing for this new kind of mother love where she sees her own self, mirrored in mysterious and tantalizing ways. At the same time that she explores the genetic threads that bind her to this stranger, she works as the “mouse girl,” caring for hundreds of experimental mice in a medical research laboratory. The relationship with her birth mother is as tormented as any partially requited love story: waiting by the phone, haunting the mailbox, and pacing the floor wondering about a promised visit that may or may not happen. Meanwhile, she tracks the intricate family trees of the hordes of squeaky rodents in her care. Memoirist, fiction writer, and solo performer Susan Ito explores themes of family, identity, DNA, and love in this unique and poignant story. Susan Ito coedited the literary anthology A Ghost at Heart’s Edge: Stories and Poems of Adoption (North Atlantic Books). She is a columnist and creative nonfiction editor at the online literary journal Literary Mama. Her work has appeared in Growing Up Asian American, Choice, the Bellevue Literary Review, Making More Waves, and elsewhere. She has studied with the San Francisco Solo Performance Workshop and performed her solo show, The Ice Cream Gene, around the United States. She writes and teaches at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. This is a short e-book published by Shebooks-high quality fiction, memoir, and journalism for women, by women. For more information, visit http://shebooks.net.
