Somewhere Sisters
A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An NPR Best Book of 2022
An incredible, deeply reported story of identical twins Isabella and Hà, born in Viêt Nam and raised on opposite sides of the world, each knowing little about the other’s existence until they were reunited as teenagers, against all odds.
“Stirring and unforgettable—a breathtaking adoption saga like no other.” —Robert Kolker
It was 1998 in Nha Trang, Việt Nam, and Liên struggled to care for her newborn twin girls. Hà was taken in by Liên’s sister, and she grew up in a rural village with her aunt, going to school and playing outside with the neighbors. They had sporadic electricity and frequent monsoons. Hà’s twin sister, Loan, was adopted by a wealthy, white American family who renamed her Isabella. Isabella grew up in the suburbs of Chicago with a nonbiological sister, Olivia, also adopted from Việt Nam. Isabella and Olivia attended a predominantly white Catholic school, played soccer, and prepared for college.
But when Isabella’s adoptive mother learned of her biological twin back in Việt Nam, all of their lives changed forever. Award-winning journalist Erika Hayasaki spent years and hundreds of hours interviewing each of the birth and adoptive family members. She brings the girls’ experiences to life on the page, told from their own perspectives, challenging conceptions about adoption and what it means to give a child a good life. Hayasaki contextualizes the sisters’ experiences with the fascinating and often sinister history of twin studies, intercountry and transracial adoption, and the nature-versus-nurture debate, as well as the latest scholarship and conversation surrounding adoption today, especially among adoptees.
For readers of All You Can Ever Know and American Baby, Somewhere Sisters is a richly textured, moving story of sisterhood and coming of age, told through the remarkable lives of young women who have redefined the meaning of family for themselves.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Hayasaki (The Death Class) explores "identity, poverty, privilege, and the painful and complex truths of adoption" in this empathetic study of identical twin girls born in Vietnam in 1998. The twins' unmarried mother left Loan, the healthier of the two, at an orphanage, while the other girl, Ha, went to live with her aunt in a mountain village. In the orphanage, Loan befriended a younger girl, Nhu, and in 2002 a white American couple from Illinois, Keely and Mick Solimene, adopted them and renamed them Isabella and Olivia, respectively. Keely spent several years trying to locate Isabella's twin sister Ha, and in 2011, they met in Vietnam; five years later, Ha moved in with the Solimenes. Hayasaki alternates chapters about the girls' lives with illuminating synopses of sociological and psychological studies about twins and adoption. She also documents the U.S. government's Operation Babylift in 1975 to evacuate Vietnamese children before the fall of Saigon and the early 2000s Christian adoption movement to "save" orphans from "poor and developing" countries, including Vietnam. Throughout, Hayasaki reveals the racial and class prejudices at the root of such adoptions without losing sight of the complexities of human emotions and family ties. This is a clear-eyed and well-grounded take on a thorny social issue.