by Misa Sugiura
But this beach teems with life in a way that I never saw on the shores of Lake Michigan. Sea stars and sea anemones cling to rocks in the tide pools, which they share with scuttling hermit crabs and darting sculpins. Huge colonies of mussels cover stretches of exposed rock, and limpets and periwinkles cleave to cracks and crags exposed by the receding tide. The hidden ocean kingdom I used to long for is much closer than I’d ever imagined.
So much of what lives here makes it through life by closing itself off from intruders—poke a sea anemone and it tightens like a fist; reach for a hermit crab and it scoots behind a rock and tucks itself into its borrowed shell. Sea stars protect their tender bellies with brightly colored hides as hard and gravelly as asphalt. Sit and wait a few minutes, though, and the anemones bloom green and pink and blue, the crabs venture out, and even the sea stars stir occasionally.
I don’t know which I like better—the serene and startling beauty of the sea glass on the sand, or the tenacious survivors I’ve found here, who reveal their secret, dreamlike lives to anyone who cares enough to wait for them.
“Sana! Hurry up!”
I take another look at the surf—the waves are surging around the arch and lapping at the bottom of the cliff on the other side of the channel. Yeah, better get moving. I stand up and jog to catch up to everyone, and we make our way back up the beach together.
A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR
what in fact I keep choosing
are these words, these whispers, these conversations
from which the truth breaks moist and green.
—Adrienne Rich, “Cartographies of Silence”
When I began writing It’s Not Like It’s a Secret, I had in mind a book about two girls in love that reflected the reality of the high school where I used to teach. That high school is roughly one third Asian/Pacific Islander, one third Latinx, one third white, and pretty LGBTQ+ friendly. My students and I didn’t talk about race, ethnicity, and sexuality every day, but those issues were with us in the classroom every day. When I wrote the book, they automatically wove themselves into the narrative.
Please remember, however, that there is no one Asian American story, no one Latinx story, and no one LGBTQ+ story. There is no one love story. No one family story. Many kind and generous people trusted me with their stories and their wisdom, and I hope that I was able to convey the truth of their experiences. But I am still growing and learning. The characters in this book cannot speak for populations. They can only speak for themselves—the same as any real person—and through my imperfect words.
To me, this book is about open secrets: things that everyone knows are in the room with us, but that no one wants to talk about, like race and sexuality; ethnic pride and assimilation; and jealousy and infidelity. We avoid having conversations about these things because they’re awkward and emotionally risky. We’re afraid of saying the wrong thing and hurting someone, and of being judged or hurt ourselves. But if we want to move forward, if we want to make real connections, we must keep having these awkward conversations and taking these emotional risks. We have to keep opening ourselves to one another.
It’s not easy. So much prevents Sana from trusting people enough to reveal her true, secret self. So much prevents her from looking and listening hard enough to recognize the true selves of others. All those open secrets, all those things that no one knows how to talk about cause Sana to make mistake after mistake after painful mistake. But she keeps learning. She keeps trying to stand up and speak out, keeps seeking connection. She never gives up. And neither should we.
xoxo,
Misa
A WORD ABOUT POETRY
I’ve been a poetry nerd pretty much from birth, and I just couldn’t pass up the opportunity to spread the love. Here are six reasons why I think poetry is one of humanity’s greatest inventions:
1.Poetry feeds the soul. Sometimes I read something so beautiful—or terrifying, or true, or sad, or glorious—that it makes my heart ache.
2.Poetry is multilayered. You can love poems for the first lightning-strike impressions they leave with you, and you can read them again and again and love them for their complexity and depth. And both ways are right.
3.Poetry is diverse. Because it’s so connected to individual experience and emotion, because there are no hard-and-fast rules about form, grammar, and all of that, there’s a lot of it out there, by all different kinds of people, for all different kinds of people. It can be about a flea, or it can be about the fate of humanity. It can be casual, formal, funny, tragic, epically long, or blink-of-an-eye short. Speaking of short,
4.Poetry is (often) short. I love novels, but they take hours to read. They’re like five-course gourmet meals. Sometimes you want something light and crispy—or rich and juicy—that you can consume in a few minutes.
5.Poetry lifts the veil. Sometimes I find a poem that expresses something deep inside me that I never knew existed. Or it challenges me to examine, maybe from a new angle or through a new lens, the things I thought I knew.
6.Poetry connects us to each other. Just as it does with the characters in this book, poetry creates bridges between people who might not otherwise understand each other, and between people who already understand each other perfectly. It opens doors. It opens eyes. It opens hearts.
There is a poem out there for every person in the world. There is a poem waiting to make you think, to touch your heart, to show you the heart of another human being. There is a poem out there for you. Go. Find your poem.
xoxo,
Misa
POEMS IN ORDER OF APPEARANCE
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?” by Emily Dickinson, here, here, here, here
“Loose Woman” by Sandra Cisneros, here, here, here
“My Garden—like the Beach—” by Emily Dickinson, here
“In the Morning in Morocco” by Mary K. Stillwell, here, here
“Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” by Emily Dickinson, here
“Wellfleet, Midsummer” by Kimiko Hahn, here
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—” by Emily Dickinson, here
“One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop, here
“Still Start” by Kay Ryan, here
“Elliptical” by Harryette Mullen, here, here, here, here
“Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, here
“Missing you” by Izumi Shikibu, here, here, here
“When You See Water” by Alice Walker, here
“Poem” by Lucy Ives, here, here
“Scientists Find Universe Awash in Tiny Diamonds” by Mayne Ellis, here, here
“I Ask the Impossible” by Ana Castillo, here, here, here
“Cartographies of Silence” by Adrienne Rich, here, here
“Her breast is fit for pearls” by Emily Dickinson, here
A FEW ONLINE RESOURCES
www.poetryfoundation.org
www.writersalmanac.org
www.poetryarchive.org
www.favoritepoem.org
www.poets.org
www.poemhunter.com
www.loc.gov/poetry/180
www.poetryslam.com
www.theliterarylink.com/yapoetry.html
SOURCES
I’ve listed collections in which the poems appear, but you can find any of them online.
Elizabeth Bishop. “One Art.” The Complete Poems 1926–1979. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983)
Ana Castillo. “I Ask the Impossible.” I Ask the Impossible. (Anchor Books, 2001)
Sandra Cisneros. “Loose Woman.” Loose Woman. (Alfred A. Knopf, 1994)
Emily Dickinson. “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). “My Garden—like the Beach—.” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, Alfred Leete Hampson, eds. (Little, Brown, and Co., 1932). “Wild Nights—Wild Nights!” The Poems of Emily Dickinson, Ralph W. Franklin ed. (The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998). Tell all the Truth but tel
l it slant.” ibid. “Her breast is fit for pearls.” The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, Thomas Johnson, ed. (Little, Brown, and Co., 1961)
Mayne Ellis. “Scientists Find Universe Awash in Tiny Diamonds.” Cries of the Spirit, Marilyn Sewell, ed. (Beacon Press, 2000)
Kimiko Hahn. “Wellfleet, Midsummer.” The Narrow Road to the Interior. (W.W. Norton, 2006)
Kay Ryan. “Still Start.” (Poetry, May 2013)
Lucy Ives. “Poem.” (PoetryNow, 2015)
Harryette Mullen. “Elliptical.” Sleeping With the Dictionary. (University of California Press, 2002)
Mary Oliver. “Wild Geese.” Dream Work. (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986)
Adrienne Rich. “Cartographies of Silence.” The Dream of a Common Language. (W.W. Norton & Co., 2013)
Izumi Shikibu. “Missing you.” Misa Sugiura, trans. The Ink Dark Moon: Love Poems by Ono no Komachi and Izumi Shikibu. (Vintage, 1990) Mariko Aratani and Jane Hirshfield, trans.
Mary K. Stillwell. “In the Morning in Morocco.” Maps and Destinations. (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014)
Alice Walker. “When You See Water.” The World Will Follow Joy. (The New Press, 2013)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
They say that writing a novel is a solitary occupation, but as I wrote mine, I was blessed with a supremely talented, dedicated, and loving support crew. Here they are:
My stalwart editor, Jen Klonsky, captained my book expertly and patiently through the process of making it into the best version of itself. Her unflagging enthusiasm kept my spirits up during my neurotic author moments, and when the waters got rough, she was right there at my side. These exclamation marks are for her: !!!!!!
Leigh Feldman, agent par excellence, literally flew in and offered to champion this book for me, and then did exactly that like a boss. Leigh is forthright, unafraid, and utterly amazing, and I couldn’t ask for a better advocate and advisor. Working with her has been a dream come true.
Leigh’s intrepid assistant, Ilana Masad, plucked me out of the slush, keeps me company on Twitter, and makes me feel like a rock star.
Catherine Wallace provided additional editorial support, and Christina MacDonald weaned me from my tendency to over-hyphenate, among other copyediting feats. I owe my beautiful cover to designers Sarah Creech and Michelle Taormina, and to artist Grace Lee. Elizabeth Ward, Sabrina Abballe, Molly Motch, and Stephanie Hoover gave this book its final push into the wide world.
Sandra Feder, Prudence Breitrose, Louise Henricksen, Viji Chary, and Alicia Grunow gave me crucial input on plot ideas, and asked all the right questions to help me develop Sana’s character. Andrea Ellickson, Vicky Guyon, Ashley Walker, and Denise Stanford pushed for more information about Sana’s childhood relationship with her father, which led me to the myth at the center of this book.
Treasured friends and gifted educators Kim Vinh and Kristin Kapasi generously opened up their classrooms and recruited some amazing students to answer my questions, review a couple of key scenes, and generally keep me honest. Deepest gratitude to Benicia Chang, Denisse Velasquez, Amelia Wheaton, Abby Wheaton, Eddie Barrera, Sabrina Villanueva Avalos, Samantha Ayala, and Lily Moncayo.
A few wise and witty young women from Mountain View High School’s Queer Straight Alliance gave up their lunch periods to sit with me and tell me about their lives and their perspectives on being lesbian teenagers in Silicon Valley.
Meredith Dodd, Chau Ho, Carrie Holmberg, and Roseann Rasul, my beloved and brilliant friends, took time out of their very busy lives to read and give me feedback on the manuscript before I sent it out to strangers.
My brother-from-another, Ophny Escalante, and my kid-mom BFF, Dina Barrios, were my Spanish language gurus. Math teacher extraordinaire Jeff Muralt designed the trigonometry problems. My niece Ellie Alberg fine-tuned my texting grammar and a few key plot details. Kumiko Morimoto and Kazuko Eames helped me dial in Sana’s parents’ Kansai dialect. Jennifer Torres and Claudia Guadalupe Martinez offered me gracious, honest feedback about Jamie and her friends; I can’t imagine this book in the world without their work. Any mistakes or culturally insensitive passages that remain are mine and mine alone.
The aforementioned reader friends were joined on the sidelines by my Princeton dad, legendary real estate investor Larry Owen (I love you more); and my Princeton uncle, the ever-gracious Michael Hudnall, and his lovely wife, Mamm.
My mother taught me how to chop vegetables and peel apples, and she poured herself into raising a stubborn American daughter; my father followed a dream to the United States, worked tirelessly to achieve it, and modeled the importance of hard work and a principled life. I owe them everything.
My brother and sister have been enthusiastic cheerleaders of my writing, but more important, they were my companions in the trenches when we were Asian kids growing up in an Anglo suburb and my role models as they each pursued atypical career paths.
My two sons endured missed exits, late pickups, and burned meals on days when the book hijacked my brain. They would have preferred stories about animals, or about gun-toting steampunk renegades, but they let me write this one. Thank you, boys. I love you.
And Tad, my sounding board, proofreader, and partner; picker-upper of my messes and shutter of my half-open drawers; finder and folder of lost loads of laundry; love of my life, thank you most of all.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Pamela Garfield
MISA SUGIURA’s ancestors include a poet, a priestess, a samurai, and a stowaway. She grew up in Northfield, Illinois (which is less rural than it sounds), and went to college on the East Coast. She lived in Japan for three years before moving to Silicon Valley and becoming a high school English teacher. During her years in the classroom, she met the many wonderful Asian, Latinx, and LGBTQ students who inspired her to write It’s Not Like It’s a Secret.
Misa lives under a giant oak tree with her husband, two sons, two cats, and a gray-banded king snake.
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BOOKS BY MISA SUGIURA
It’s Not Like It’s a Secret
CREDITS
Cover art © 2017 by Grace Lee
Cover design by Sarah Creech
COPYRIGHT
HarperTeen is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
IT’S NOT LIKE IT’S A SECRET. Copyright © 2017 by Misa Sugiura. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2016961849
ISBN 978-0-06-247341-7
EPub Edition © April 2017 ISBN 9780062473431
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FIRST EDITION
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