REBROADCAST: Author Erika Hayasaki on nature vs. nurture

Erika Hayasaki’s book “Somewhere Sisters: a story of adoption, identity, and the meaning of family” explores a very complicated multifamily, multinational story. At the heart of the book are sisters: identical twins born in Vietnam. One was adopted by a wealthy family in the U.S., one was raised in rural Vietnam. We spoke to Hayasaki in 2022 in front of an audience at the Portland Book Festival.

Note: The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. In 2022, the journalist Erika Hayasaki published “Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family.” It’s a sensitive, thorough, beautifully-rendered exploration of a very complicated multifamily, multinational story. At the heart of the book are sisters, identical twins born in Vietnam. One was adopted by a wealthy family in the US. One was raised in rural Vietnam. Eventually they would be reunited. I talked to Hayasaki in front of an audience at the 2022 Portland Book Festival.

[Audience applause]

You started this big project looking into the intersection of genes and the environment, a longstanding question or debate, after you gave birth to twin boys. What were you most interested in learning first before it became this book? What was interesting to you?

Erika Hayasaki: Well, I think I’ve always had an interest in identity, whether it’s my own mixed racial identity and the identity of my kids and how we move through the world. And I’ve often written about science and identity as well. So it was kind of natural for me to have questions after I gave birth, but also even before around nature versus nurture. I think a lot of us wonder how much genes play a role, how much the environment plays a role. As a journalist, I often just sort of have the ability to follow my curiosities and my interests. I had twins and I connected to a twin researcher in California who connected me to many twins around the country and I wrote a story about twin science, but it was the launching point for what became a much more complicated narrative about twins.

Miller: Why were you drawn to the stories of these three sisters? We’ll hear a lot more about their fascinating, complicated connections, but what was it broadly that made you realize there’s more than a magazine piece here? This is going to take years of my life and be a book?

Hayasaki: I didn’t necessarily know how many years of my life it would take, [laughter] but…

Miller: Which is maybe a good thing.

Hayasaki: It was probably a good thing because you jump into these things and I didn’t realize we’d have a pandemic and I was also, of course, raising my children in the pandemic and teaching from home and doing all the things that everybody was doing. So it took a long time. Also, it was very complicated and because I started with this personal interest in twins and science and identity, but I was also interested in the identity of what it means to grow up Asian American in certain communities because of my own experiences. I was also born in Illinois and I had some rough moments growing up as an Asian American child in Illinois. And so the twins lived in Illinois when I met them and are Asian American. Two of the three sisters–we can get to the complicated parts of the family–had similar experiences so I wanted to explore that and that sort of just opened up a much more complicated narrative that involved lots of family members. It involved traveling to Vietnam, it involved interviewing birth families. It involved really digging into the history of transnational, intercountry adoption, transracial adoption, in addition to the research into science, nature nurture and epigenetics, for example. So it became much more than I initially even knew it would ever be.

Miller: That was a really helpful road map for the hour of conversation that is going to follow. So, let’s go back in time about two decades. How did two girls who are not biologically related named Loan and Nhu’? Did I pronounce her name correctly?

Hayasaki: Loan and Nhu’.

Miller: Loan and Nhu’. How did they end up in an orphanage in Vietnam?

Hayasaki: Loan and Nhu’ were not biologically related. So these two girls at the time were living in this orphanage. Their mothers, both of whom I met, were unable to care for them at the time. They continued to struggle financially and it really came down to being able to support children. So Loan had a biological twin though, who ended up being raised by her biological aunt and her aunt’s partner. They’re in a same-sex marriage and they lived in Vietnam in a village. So you had two girls in the orphanage, Nhu’ and Loan and then you had Há who lived in a village and they were all living their lives as children for the first couple of years and then that changed.

Miller: What were Loan and Nhu’s lives like in the orphanage?

Hayasaki: Well, I was able to visit the orphanage and they don’t have a lot of memories. They were two to three years old. So the two of them though Loan and Nhu’ were quite close, according to all accounts. Nhu’ arrived on the day of Isabella’s recorded birthday.

Miller: Isabella, this is one…

Hayasaki: I’m sorry, Loan!

Miller: That’s the name that she would talk to her adopted American parents.

Hayasaki: Yes. So Loan’s birthday.

Miller: Should we just call her Isabella to make it simpler?

Hayasaki: She goes by Isabella now. So that’s her name she goes by. But certainly the name when she was a child was Loan and Nhu’, her non biological sister.

Miller: What was going on in Isabella and her identical twin sister’s mom’s life, that she gave both of these twin daughters up?

Hayasaki: She had a disability and was unable to work and could not feed these children. I talked to her about trying to feed them and nurse them and she was so hungry herself and she talked about not being able to even sustain two lives.

Miller: Literally?

Hayasaki: Yeah and begging on the street for help with her twins .So this was a heartbreaking and incredibly difficult decision, but she made this decision, she brought both sisters, these twins to this orphanage. Loan was healthier and was taken in by this orphanage; the other sister was not as healthy and ended up staying with her birth mother for a bit and then eventually being adopted by her biological aunt and nursed back into health. And she ended up living a very loving life in Vietnam with her adoptive mothers who were not her birth mother.

Miller: You mentioned that you went to this orphanage as part of your reporting. Maybe this is an impossible question to answer, but do you have a sense for the possibilities of the two girls in the orphanages, what their lives might have been like if they hadn’t been adopted?

Hayasaki: I think that is a question that comes up a lot and it’s certainly something that you wonder throughout this narrative. I am also not seeking to answer that because I think it’s an unknown. But it is something that you think about and wonder because certainly, the birth mother loved her children and certainly the adoptive mothers in Vietnam, for example, also loved Há and the adoptive mothers in the US who eventually bring Loan and Nhu’ and give them new names to the US, also love their children. So they have very different lives. They all have love, they all are loved. But how their lives would have turned out is complicated. It’s a hard question. I’ve talked to a lot of adoptees for the research of this book and I’ve been told that adoption doesn’t necessarily give you a better life, but does give you a different life. And I think that sometimes goes against some of the narratives that we’ve been taught to understand or think about when we consider adoption, for example. But you might want to ask yourself what constitutes a good life? And I think that those questions are raised in the book.

Miller: Those are questions that come up over and over in the book, but let’s turn to the American family that ends up adopting the two girls, to whom they give the names Isabella and Olivia. Who are the Solimenes?

Hayasaki: There’s a whole chapter that lays out their love story and they live in a suburb at the time of Chicago in a very wealthy area. Mick, who is the father, was a banker [and] was quite successful. Keely, the mother, had been a homemaker. She had done a lot of philanthropy and raised their own biological children, four of them at the time before they adopted. And they lived this life and one day decided to adopt.

Miller: We mentioned earlier that the Solimenes, the adoptive parents, changed the names of these two girls when they adopted them. Why is that? And how common is it?

They were two years old, three years old. They had had lives at that point. They’d called each other those names, everyone had. It’s a profound thing to change someone’s name.

Hayasaki: There is a moment in the book where the adoptive mother, Keely, told me that she had considered not telling them that they’re in fact Asian American or Vietnamese, which kind of made me pause for sure because the question then becomes, how could you not tell your children that they’re Vietnamese? If they’re being raised in a community that’s all white and they will certainly come to have these questions about their identity that changed for her, but I think it was part of this idea…My father is an immigrant from Japan who never taught us Japanese. And while he holds on to his culture very closely, there was this push to assimilate and I think that that is something that occurred in this situation too.

Miller: What were Olivia and Isabella’s early years like before they got to high school?

Hayasaki: Before they got to high school, they described it as a very fun life with lots of playing, lots of ripping heads off of Barbie dolls, for example. They had a princess bedroom. Their mother dressed them alike, which they did not love and they were not biological twins, they were not biological sisters, they were both adopted from Vietnam, but yet they were raised as if they were twins and they quickly discarded that as soon as they became old enough to have a say in it.

Miller: And they’re very different in so many ways.

Hayasaki: Incredibly different to this day.

Miller: Actually, can you describe their differences?

Hayasaki: The non biological sisters?

Miller: Yes, in terms of personality and inclinations?

Hayasaki: I’ve come to know Isabella as this really self aware, smart young woman who understands all the complexities within her story and is working through them all. Isabella has connected to her birth family and obviously her twin sister and is curious about moving around the world, for example, and interested in politics and studying internationally. Her sister, Olivia, has always been into sports, and is not interested in making these connections to birth family right now and that was what she stated pretty explicitly to me in the book. They just had very different takes on everything and so certainly not twins by any means.

Miller: Let’s go back to Vietnam and hear a little bit more about Isabella’s identical twin sister, Há. You mentioned Isabella and Olivia who had a pretty wealthy, upper middle class, suburban Chicago life. They had Barbies that they could chop the heads off, they had all the toys they could want in an American childhood. What was Há's childhood like?

Hayasaki: Yeah, I also said that they went to a Catholic high school and they were raised Catholic and Há was raised Buddhist. She lived in a village that did not have electricity turned on all the time. They did not necessarily have access to a lot of the things like washing machines, for example, and they would wash their clothes in the river. She didn’t have toys. She played with the dust and she was quite happy playing with the dust. She had a swing that was built hanging from some trees in the woods and she would swing under the moon and she describes it quite beautifully. Actually, she would pretend that the leaves were money and she would have her own play cafes and her family loved her and it was just a totally different life, but also full of love.

Miller: You’ve mentioned a couple of times, but it’s still worth underlining just how happy her childhood was, how different it was, but how full of everything that a young person needed.

Hayasaki: Yeah and she never knew that she was poor. She says that. She never knew that because she never went without food because there was always food from the land and her family would find a way to feed her. There were storms that sometimes wiped away even their house and they had to rebuild and they would learn to rebuild. She knew she had a twin. She didn’t exactly know what that meant.

Miller: How old was she when she learned that?

Hayasaki: So when she was four, her mothers put her on a motorbike and said, we’re going to go meet your twin, we’re going to the orphanage. And she remembered that ride. She remembered getting there and so did her mother and she remembered that her twin was not there. She had recently been adopted to America and that was that. And she did have a moment where she was in her village watching airplanes go over, not really knowing what the airplanes carried or how they carried people and asking an airplane to bring her sister. But other than that, she lived her life happily and didn’t have these desires to go to America. She didn’t know what America was. She didn’t know what that would mean.

She knew that she was happy where she was and she was also happy being an only child. She liked being the center. She said that. This is all quoted in the book, but she talked about that a lot, like I was fine. It wasn’t the twin story where you felt like a part of me is missing my whole life. That was not the way they ever described it. And I appreciated that because that’s often how twins are depicted when they’re apart and then reunited, like half of me was missing and now I’ve found it and life will be perfect after this.

Miller: You mentioned that she was raised by her biological mother’s sister and that sister’s partner. It was a same sex relationship in a rural village in Vietnam. How common was that? And how much animosity did her mothers receive?

Hayasaki: It was not common and certainly Há felt that she was bullied because of her mothers and because she was told that she was a child, that even her own parents gave her away. So she was also adopted in a very different situation in Vietnam and also grappling with the complexities of adoption and how other people perceived her. And the women who raised her, they had a moment in the book, they have a very beautiful love story where they run away together and one had tried to marry a man at one point and it was not for them and deciding that we’re not going to do that again and we’re going to try to adopt a child. And then along came her sister’s child who her sister could not raise and that was how that worked out for them and they loved this child and raised her as their own to this day.

Miller: So let’s go back to Solimenes, Keely Solimene, the mom of Olivia and Isabella. When did she find out that the older girl that she had adopted actually had an identical biological twin back in Vietnam? And what did she do when she learned that?

Hayasaki: In the book, Olivia and Isabella are now in the US and Keely in her mind had said I’m not going back to Vietnam. They’re American citizens. I’m going to raise them no different from my kids. We’re not going back. I won’t even tell them that they’re Asian and then she came across all the paperwork and there was a line in there about twin birth and it piqued her interest and she called the agency, they said that they didn’t know much about it. She just went on this whole journey for the last many years to try to figure out if there is a twin. And if so, then I should bring her back. That was her saying I should bring her here.

Miller: The way I read it, she seems like she’s a kind of force of nature to begin with, but I got the sense that she was obsessed with this, that she went to great lengths over years and at great expense as well to create this reunion. What was driving her?

Hayasaki: The way that she puts it in the book is that she felt, as many of us think about twins being separated, that sounds to be not ok and that twins should be together. So that was the way she puts it is that he felt like they should be together.

Miller: And the way to accomplish that would be to bring the sister that was in Vietnam somehow to her?

Hayasaki: In her mind.

Miller: Yeah.

Hayasaki: Yeah, that was the thinking. And it involved blocking out any acknowledgement of birth mothers, adoptive mothers in Vietnam that could exist, other family members. A lot of even what she had to do to go through with the adoption in her mind, what she says in the book is having a moment of asking, can she do this? What is she doing? And then having to personally block out all these other realities to move forward with this plan that she put into motion.

Miller: Yeah, let’s pause with where these families are before the reunions. A little bit of history that you delve into in the book, which is really important and fascinating about transnational adoptions, more broadly. Starting with the fact that orphanages as we think of them now, they didn’t always exist in Vietnam. When did they appear?

Hayasaki: So oftentimes, orphanages were looked at as feeding centers especially after for example, the war and during the war in Vietnam. There were children who were sometimes endangered or their parents were not able to feed them.

Miller: The war that we in the US called the Vietnam War.

Hayasaki: Yes. I think I call the book, the American War. So trying to show the different perspectives. So parents would sometimes take their children there to be housed temporarily with the feeling that they would come back when they could care for them. And what happened, after the war, the US sent planes there, in the language that was used, to rescue orphans from Vietnam after the war and bring them to the US to be raised by American families. And this became a massive effort known as Operation Babylift. One of those planes crashed and many children died.

Also, I had the chance to interview children who’d grown up who are adults now who had lived through this, who had never been able to trace their biological family members. Paperwork was lost. Some children were not orphans. Some mothers came to the US seeking to find their biological children who had been adopted into American families. It’s a very painful part of history. It shapes I think also though the way adoption has been perceived, I think transnationally, often as a kind of rescue effort.

Miller: Saviors coming in.

Hayasaki: Right.

Miller: If we add in Korea to this, what do you see as the connections between wars, and in particular that the US fights in, and transnational adoptions?

Hayasaki: The theme that runs through the history with many of the adoption projects launched again, is this sense of maybe guilt, guilt over involvement in the war on behalf of people who are in the US, for example. Also there is the savior mentality, this kind of altruistic idea that we will put kids in a better life.

Miller: They’re playing in dust there and we have Barbies. Not to simplify it. And we have love. But the poverty that we see from American eyes is something that we can fix.

Hayasaki: Yeah. And when I’ve talked to adoptees, for example, who have grown up after the war, and were adopted by Western families, they talked also about growing up and being terrified of the very idea of Vietnam, of thinking of women and their mothers as prostitutes or just in a certain light that’s very typical of a war-torn place. That was just a really awful place and that was the way they thought because they didn’t know any other narrative and had to unlearn that as adults.

Miller: What did you hear from experts about the psychological effects of getting that message, of being taught or told that the place you’d come from was a scary bad place, that it’s a good thing we’ve taken you out of there?

Hayasaki: I also interviewed adoptees who are now psychologists, transracial transnational adoptees and people who specialize in this. There is a moment that many told me about which is the language within the adoptee community is coming out of the fog. But it’s this idea of one day kind of waking up to these realities when you’ve lived your life with a fairy tale narrative ingrained, but always understanding it’s not quite that at all, maybe, because of the painful issues around identity formation, separation trauma, all the different complications that come into adoption and growing up as an adoptee.

Then, as you start to learn these different realities or meet other people who travel, understand the history of an adoption, for example, you start to look at it and it’s all of its multi dimensionality and clarity. And for some, the way they described it as being able to breathe a bit, especially when they’re connecting to other adoptees who have gone through this and like, oh, like no wonder I’m encountering these contradictions within my story and my experience and myself and having to find a way to embrace those contradictions. And to move forward and be ok and not live in this sort of black or white reality because it’s not that.

Miller: What was it like for Isabella to meet her biological family and twin sister back in Vietnam?

Hayasaki: I will say it was not the reunion you’ve seen on “Good Morning America.” It was incredibly anxiety-inducing. It was just this moment that they’re sort of thrown into and it opens up, again, an introduction to all these other family members. And so it was not, here’s my other half. And now my life is finally given this meaning because I’ve been missing this piece of me. It was not this instant bond because we’re twins, we understand each other. We have 100 of the same genes we’re identical twins. Now, we know each other. It’s not any of that. They didn’t speak the same language.They couldn’t communicate. They grew up incredibly different and so it was in many ways difficult to read that reunion and certainly it was difficult to reconstruct because people might be rooting for the reunion they see on TV and it turned out to be different.

Miller: As tough as that one was challenging, in some ways, Olivia’s which was virtual is shorter and even more painful to read, at least. Can you describe the circumstances of when she saw her biological family for the first time?

Hayasaki: So Isabella had been brought to Vietnam at 13 to reunite with her twin. That was the whole plan. Olivia’s family got word that this family was coming and they thought Olivia would be there too. And so is her birth mom who cannot speak and cannot hear, showed up with all the family and they were devastated because Olivia was not there. And it’s a really hard moment in the book because also you’ll come to find through the book that Olivia’s grandmother had been going to the orphanage regularly to visit her granddaughter. And one day she showed up and she wasn’t there and she found the address for the mini family and wrote letters asking to see her granddaughter again. When Keely got there with Isabella and Há and this whole reunion was happening, the other family showed up and she was looking for the grandmother and the grandmother had died. She never got to see her again.

So then they felt incredibly guilty and said we need to get Olivia on the phone now. We need to get her on FaceTime and they FaceTimed and that was her reunion. In the middle of the night, she was awakened at 13 years old and told, “Here’s your family in Vietnam.” Again, I think this is not a fairy tale and there’s nothing easy about that.

Miller: Eventually Há does come. She starts to learn English lessons paid for by her identical sister and adopts a family in the US and eventually through their efforts, she’s able to get a student visa and to come to live with Solimenes and to study in the US.

What was it like for Isabella and Há to forge a relationship?

Hayasaki: It did not come naturally. I think that in the book, Há comes in a time when Isabella is struggling with a lot of bullying. She had actually decided to homeschool. It was that hard for her and she wasn’t ready to have a whole new person in her life and taking care of her in America. The language and everything was new, food, everything and she was with her. I think that it took a long time for them to connect, but when they finally did, it was over these experiences, they began to talk about. Look, my life has not always been so easy. There have been these moments of bullying that have been really hard and in certain moments. I think they spent one night really talking honestly about these things and after that their relationship started to change.

Miller: It’s really dramatic that what draws them together is their willingness to talk about something they share which is not at all tied to being twins. It’s not tied to having the same genes. It’s tied to the fact that they were separated and made to feel bad in various ways by their adoptions or their different kinds of adoptions. It’s a striking realization.

Hayasaki: Yeah.

Miller: This is after you outlined various twin studies that find these extraordinary convergences in people’s lives who are raised separately, but this is not because they’re twins.

Hayasaki: Right. No. And they share the same genes but they’re incredibly unique. They are their own, distinct individuals just as my own twins are.

Miller: As you mentioned at the beginning, it was after you gave birth to twins that you spent some time looking into the latest iterations of the nature versus nurture debate. As you were working on this book and reporting, how much being a mother of twins yourself impacted the way you thought about this story?

Hayasaki: I think it impacted me because my twins have been in the same environment forever. They haven’t really gone a day apart. And these twins have been raised on opposite sides of the world and they share identical genes and throughout history, scientists have studied genes to try to understand how much of our intellect and our behavior and our traits come from our genetics and that has led us down some really ugly route like eugenics, for example. So there’s been some ugly twin studies through Nazi Germany, twins separated and experimented on and tortured. It’s not pretty and so there has been this push to genes mattering so much.

And then there have also been some disturbing experiments throughout history with behaviorism and environment, this idea that the environment matters more than anything else. Take any child and I will shave them to be whoever I want them to be.

Miller: With deprivation or whatever?

Hayasaki: Yes. Both of these polar extremes are too far. They’re not correct because what I understand now is that there’s this interplay between the environment and genes. And in the whole field of epigenetics there’s many studies around how much your environment can impact your genes, turn on certain genes, switch off certain genes. And there’s also the randomness of chance that happens within your own genes, mutations, differences within identical twin genes. All of these things are at play. It’s so much more complicated than black or white.So the reality of identity, even with the identity of twins living together is they have different environments even within that home that they’ve carved out over time within the womb and that shapes who they become.

So it just really hit home for me–through all of this research–how much that complexity is like this dance between your environment and your genes and nature and nurture and how sometimes we are so forced to think about one or the other. But again, it’s like embracing these contradictions that are harder, but actually, there’s more truth in them.

Miller: What was it like for Olivia, Isabella’s younger sister, when her sister and her sister’s identical twin started actually forging a relationship?

Hayasaki: For Olivia?

Miller: For Olivia.

Hayasaki: Yeah, I think that that was hard. Not “I think.” I reported that in the book, everything I’m saying is reported in the book. It was hard. They had been raised like twins, they were close, they went through rough patches and it was not just hard. according to her in the book, because she felt like here’s this other person who’s come in. And also Olivia had to take care of Há she felt because she had to take her to the schools and help her get around. But it was a reminder to her as well that she also had this biological family in Vietnam and that was something that she did not feel she wanted to engage with at that time. So it also became kind of hard in that area for her.

Miller: This inescapable reminder of this other family?

Hayasaki: Yeah, that she had been introduced to originally over FaceTime and then in person. And she said to me very clearly, I have one family. I cannot handle two.

Miller: I want to end with your very first page, your dedication, because it’s unusual. It’s not just dedicated to people but to an idea. You write this, “To my grandmothers who survived within me, to my mother and daughters, who sustained me and to understanding that we all try to do right with what we have and know.” What’s behind that dedication?

Hayasaki: I think that’s obviously a dedication to my family, but also to the mothers and the grandmothers in the book who were, as a mother myself, we’re all trying to do the best we can with what we have and know. We grow up in certain areas. We have blind spots, all of us. And we also have different situations where we might not have access to the knowledge of somebody else. And so the reason this book, for example, is written from different points of view, I dive into different points of view, is because one person on this side of the world is not necessarily living their life, seeing it the way the other person on the other side of the world is seeing it. They’re living it the way that they can with what they have and know.

Nobody here is necessarily a villain or a hero. They’re just mothers trying to do their best and sometimes maybe you look back and you think, oh, well, things could have been done differently or I could have done this differently. I didn’t know this until now. I know this now, but I didn’t know this then and I think that’s important to acknowledge.

Miller: Erika Hayasaki, thank you very much.

Hayasaki: Thank you.

Miller: That’s Erika Hayasaki in conversation about her book, “Somewhere Sisters” at the 2022 Portland Book Festival.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.