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Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family - Diverse Reads

Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family

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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.

ISBN-13: 9781616209124

Media Type: Hardcover

Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Publication Date: 10-11-2022

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 9.10(w) x 6.20(h) x 1.20(d)

Erika Hayasaki is a journalist based in Southern California, the author of The Death Class, and a professor in the literary journalism program at the University of California, Irvine. A former Los Angeles Times national correspondent, her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Wired, and other publications. She has been a Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow and an Alicia Patterson Fellow, and she has received awards and recognition from the Association of Sunday and Feature Editors, the Society for Features Journalism, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019. She is the mother of a daughter and twin boys.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Three Triangles

Part 1

1 1998 9

2 Hà 14

3 Loan and Nhu 21

4 The Baby Lifts 26

5 Liên 33

6 Rô and Tuyet 39

7 Cuckoo Birds 46

8 Isabella 51

9 Cloth Monkeys 59

10 Olivia 64

11 Wonderful Beginnings 70

12 Keely 79

13 Baby Brokers and Viral Adoptions 88

14 "Is the Baby Okay?" 91

Part 2

15 A Twin Who Walks Alone 102

16 Blindly Searching 106

17 Fairy Tales 110

18 The Letters 115

19 Storms 122

20 The Fog 129

21 "I Got Her" 134

22 Strangers in the Village 139

23 "They Love Her" 144

24 They Are Coming 148

25 Motion Sickness 153

26 The Cold 155

27 The Night 163

28 "Harder than This" 167

29 Always Loan 174

30 "Where I Am From" 179

31 "Be with Us" 187

32 Goodbye 191

33 "I Will Come Back" 199

Part 3

34 America 207

35 "We're Still Here" 214

36 Switched 225

37 Powerful Marks 232

38 Similar Scars 237

39 Unspoken 243

40 Grandma 249

41 Where It Feels Safe 254

42 Climb Out 258

Epilogue 263

Notes on Sources 269

Selected Bibliography & Suggested Resources 293

Acknowledgments 301