'I originally thought it could be a magazine article about twins reunited. Then I started to learn, over the years, that there was a lot more there.'
When a 13-year-old girl in Illinois set off to meet her identical twin in Vietnam in 2011, she was confronted with the truth of her past., journalist Erika Hayasaki illustrates how complex adoption can be. The richly reported narrative follows the lives of identical twins, born in Vietnam, who were separated at birth. One twin, Hà, was raised by her extended family in Vietnam, and the other, Loan, was sent to an orphanage, adopted by a white family from Illinois, and renamed Isabella.
I originally thought it could be a magazine article about twins reunited. Then I started to learn, over the years, that there was a lot more there. I spent part of my childhood in Illinois as well — not too far from where the sisters who were adopted grew up. I have a white mother, so I’m mixed-race, but I present as Asian. The area didn’t have a lot of Asian Americans, and I was often bullied for that.
By the time the twins were born in 1998, an estimated 10,000 Vietnamese children had been adopted by foreigners since the 1970s. Some of these were from adoption campaigns such as 1975’s Operation Babylift, a U.S.-government attempt to evacuate Vietnamese orphans before the fall of Saigon. Even though the sisters in my book were from a more recent wave of adoptees from Vietnam, that legacy is still part of the history of transnational adoption from Vietnam and worldwide.Hà and Isabella’s story begins with the birth mother, Liên. While this book centers adoptee voices, it’s a story about many generations of women. I wanted to make sure that Liên’s story was represented, because birth mothers and extended birth families are often erased from adoption narratives.
What’s the current state of intercountry adoption in the U.S.? Are many people still adopting children from abroad or has that changed?
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