Somewhere Sisters

July 11, 2022
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.

September 1, 2022
Twins, raised apart, recover their bonds. Journalist Hayasaki, the daughter of a Japanese father and White American mother and herself the mother of identical twin boys, examines questions about biological and cultural identity, nature versus nurture, and the complexities of transracial adoption, focusing on the lives of three adopted Vietnamese girls: identical twins Ha and Loan, born in 1998, and Khanh Nhu, born in 1999, not related to the twins. Given up by an unwed mother who lived in poverty, Ha was raised by an aunt and her partner in a rural village in Vietnam; Loan was left in an orphanage, where Khanh Nhu soon arrived. In 2002, Loan and Khanh Nhu were adopted by a wealthy White couple who believed that by removing the girls from poverty, they were offering them a chance at a better life. The adoptive parents renamed the girls Isabella and Olivia and raised them, along with their four biological children, in an affluent Chicago suburb. Discovering that Loan had a twin, the family worked tirelessly to connect the sisters to each other and their birth families, involving many trips to Vietnam. Hayasaki places the girls' experiences in the context of decades of transracial and transnational adoptions, beginning after World War II, when couples began "seeking out children whom they believed had been cast aside, impoverished, or born to families fragmented by war and upheaval." Adoption, writes the author, became "increasingly embraced as a political act, and a humanitarian one." But America's racist attitudes marginalized and victimized many Black, Asian, and biracial children, including Isabella and Olivia, who were often bullied. Hayasaki weaves their reflections about belonging, heritage, and identity--gleaned from hundreds of hours of interviews with the girls and their birth and adoptive families--with a broad consideration of adoption and twin studies that aim to shed light on the extent to which genes and environment shape human behavior, personality, and development. An engaging portrait of intersected lives.

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September 15, 2022
In her second book, journalist and writing instructor Hayasaki (The Death Class, 2014) interweaves the stories of three sisters born in Vietnam with a larger study of adoption. Adopted as toddlers from an orphanage in 2002, nonbiological sisters Loan and Nhu', renamed Isabella and Olivia, grew up in Illinois as the youngest of six children in a wealthy and loving white family. When their mother, Keely, learned that Isabella had a twin sister still in Vietnam, H�, she embarked on a years-long search to find her, expanding their family's web to include the twins' first mother, H�'s adoptive parents, and others in the process. Hayasaki, mother to twin sons, centers Isabella's, H�'s, and Olivia's experiences and feelings, often conveyed in their own words. Diving into studies of transnational and transracial adoption, she shares many interviews with scholars, adoptee advocates, and other experts. Fascinating and moving on its own, the sisters' complex story of growing up, both together and apart, is complemented by Hayasaki's illumination of the personal, psychological, and sociocultural realities of adoption.

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