Town Hall Seattle Arts & Culture Series

Imagine having an identical twin on the other side of the world — one you had no idea existed. That was the reality for sisters Isabella and Hà, born in Việt Nam but adopted and raised separately across the globe. One sister remained in a rural Vietnamese village that often went without electricity; the other grew up with a wealthy white family in the American suburbs. Their respective upbringings were worlds apart, both geographically and otherwise. The pair were reunited in their teenage years in a highly anticipated, but fraught meeting. After learning about Isabella and Hà, award-winning journalist and UC Irvine professor Erika Hayasaki began interviewing the sisters, as well as their biological and adoptive families, in 2016. Hayasaki traced the girls’ diverging childhoods all the way to their reunion and the complicated years that followed. Hayasaki’s qualitative research now culminates in a richly textured story, Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family. The book pres