Good news for these Asian girls 9000 miles away and their White mom

[theking]

I adopted my daughter and her best friend. Then my daughter reunited with her identical twin — separated at birth and raised 9,000 miles apart.


Keely Solimene adopted a Vietnamese girl, and then her best friend.

Then she discovered that one had an identical twin.

She vowed to reunite the sisters who'd been separated at birth and grew up 9,000 miles apart.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Keely Solimene. It has been edited for length and clarity.

A few months after I adopted my two daughters from Vietnam, I found a seemingly innocuous document buried in a pile of paperwork that I planned to sort and put in a cabinet with the other records.

Most of the forms were written in Vietnamese, and they were hard to decipher. But the one I saw that day — a letter about Isabella, the oldest of the girls — made me gasp out loud. It said that she had a sister the exact same age. They'd been separated at birth.

The trajectory of my life had already been altered by the adoptions from overseas. But this latest discovery took it to whole new level. The moment that I saw that Isabella, then 4, had a twin, I thought, "That's it, full stop! I need to find her."

My husband and I originally decided to adopt just one girl, Isabella, in 2001
I didn't know that the girls were identical at the time. But my intuition told me that they had to reunite. I felt like it was the best thing to do to honor Isabella.

It took around five years to find her sister, whose name was Ha Nguyen, and the girls didn't get to meet until they were 14. Meanwhile, they were raised on opposite sides of the world — Isabella grew up in the US and Ha in Vietnam — around 9,000 miles apart.

My husband, Mick, and I decided to adopt Isabella in the fall of 2001. One of my friends had recently adopted a child from Vietnam. The friend knew about a little girl in an orphanage there who was waiting for a family. She showed me her adorable photograph, and I thought, "This is my fifth child."