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An NPR Best Book of 2022 and Winner of a Nautilus Silver Book Award “Stirring and unforgettable—a breathtaking adoption saga like no other.”
—Robert Kolker,
New York Times-bestselling author of
Hidden Valley Road and
Lost Girls 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.
About the author
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. Her writing has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Atlantic, Wired, Slate, and others. She has been a 2021-22 Knight-Wallace Reporting Fellow and a 2018 Alicia Patterson Fellow and received awards and recognition from the Association of Sunday Feature Editors, the Society for Features Journalism, and the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2019. She is the mother of a daughter and twin boys.
Summary
An NPR Best Book of 2022 and Winner of a Nautilus Silver Book Award
“Stirring and unforgettable—a breathtaking adoption saga like no other.” —Robert Kolker, New York Times-bestselling author of Hidden Valley Road and Lost Girls
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.
Foreword
Isabella and Ha, identical twin girls born in Vietnam, were raised on opposite sides of the world, each having no idea that the other existed. Erika Hayasaki's deeply reported, intimate story of their journey back to one another upends common conceptions of adoption, family, and identity.
