California, moved to Hawaii with her family after
their release from internment during World War
II. After attending Wellesley College in Massachu-
setts, Rizzuto transferred to Columbia University
to become the first woman to graduate with a
degree in astrophysics. Her writings appeared in
the Asian Pacific American Journal and The Nuy-
orAsian Anthology: Asian American Writings about
New York City.
In her debut novel, Why She Left Us—the win-
ner of the 1999 American Book Award for fiction
from the Before Columbus Foundation—Rizzuto
depicts a Japanese-American family dealing with
life after World War II. Being part Japanese, Riz-
zuto found firsthand inspiration for the novel
when she accompanied her mother and grand-
mother to a reunion of the Japanese-American
internees held at the Amachi internment camp in
Colorado. At the reunion, she learned the stories of
innocent people who were stripped of their homes,
lives, and civil rights. She learned the story of her
grandmother and her family, who were evicted
from their homes and given short notice to sell ev-
erything because they could not take anything of
value into the camp. Everything they had worked
for and every reason why they left Japan for a bet-
ter life in America was taken from them and never
given back. This was a story that she never heard
as a young girl, a chapter in history that the family
wanted forgotten.
The story she chose to tell is that of the Okada
family as it is torn apart by its experiences during
the war. The novel itself is told in a unique way.
With the exception of Kaori, who speaks in the
first person, Rizzuto uses a third-person narrator
to allow individual family members to tell their
own versions of the family history. In a nonse-
quential order, each of the four main characters,
Kaori (Emi’s mother), Mariko (Emi’s daughter),
Eric (Emi’s son), and Jack (Emi’s brother), retells
the tale of how the family came together and fell
apart, including vivid descriptions of Emi, the
only main character who is not given a voice. The
main characters explore possible reasons why
Emi, whose values were drastically different from
those of other Japanese Americans, left her family.
The absence of Emi’s perspective in the narrative
makes the questions that surround Emi’s leav-
ing unanswerable, reflecting the reality of life for
most of us.
Anne BahringerRno, Sung (1967– )
Sung Rno (pronounced No) is a playwright and
poet best known for his plays Cleveland Raining
(1995) and wAve (2004). Born in Minneapolis,
Minnesota, Rno is the son of Jung Sik Rno, a phys-
ics professor at the University of Cincinnati, and
Taewon H. Rno, a university administrator. Rno
grew up in Maryland and Cincinnati, Ohio, where
he attended the magnet school Walnut Hills High
School. During his last two years in high school,
Rno began reading the work of Tennessee Williams
and Ernest Hemingway and, with the encourage-
ment of his teachers, began to write poetry and
plays. Rno went on to attend Harvard University,
where he graduated with a degree in physics. At
Harvard, Rno took a poetry course with the noted
poet Seamus Heaney, which led him to take his
own work as a poet more seriously. Upon gradu-
ation, Rno spent a year in Japan teaching English.
That experience allowed him to travel to Korea
and other parts of Asia, making him more aware
of his own ethnicity as an American of Korean de-
scent. When he returned to the United States, Rno
enrolled in Brown University, where he earned
an M.F.A. in poetry in 1991 with a thesis entitled
“This Light So Quiet.” At Brown, Rno studied with
playwright Paula Vogel and wrote his first play,
Cleveland Raining.
Cleveland Raining had its world premiere at
Grinnell College in Ohio (1994) and was also pro-
duced by East West Players a year later in Los Ange-
les. The play is about two young Korean Americans
who are siblings. Mari, a reluctant medical student,
is haunted by memories of her parents, and her
brother Jimmy, a former grocery bagger, spends
his time outfitting a Volkswagen Beetle in expecta-
tion of a flood of biblical proportions. The other
two characters include a mechanic and an injured
motorcyclist who may or may not have broken her
ankle in an accident involving Mari and Jimmy’s252 Rno, Sung