Science- Keely Solimene adopted a Vietnamese girl, and then her best friend.
- Then she discovered that one had an identical twin.
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."
Our four biological children — Alexandra, Arianna, Victoria, and Will, who were between 5 and 9 at the time — were excited by the idea of a younger sister. It felt natural to expand our family that way.
We'd only intended to adopt Isabella. Then I heard about her best friend, Olivia, who was 3. The older kids at the orphanage looked after the younger ones. Isabella, even as a 4-year-old, was paired with Olivia. They were close, but the orphanage decided to move Olivia to another part of the complex. They thought it would be easier for them to separate sooner rather than later.
"It hasn't gone well," the person from the adoption agency told me one day. "We think it'd be better if they were adopted together."
So we decided to adopt Olivia, who became our sixth child.
There was a revelation to come in the form of Isabella's identical twin
We met the girls in April 2002 on our first trip to Vietnam. I couldn't wait to see them. I'd never really traveled before, and it was overwhelming and eye-opening.
I remember scooping up Isabella and Olivia at the orphanage and looking out the window at rice paddies. The sounds and smells were so different. But because it was the home of my girls, it felt like my home, too. It was a beautiful bonding moment.
We were invited to return to Vietnam three months later with the whole family. The formal adoption ceremony took place in July of 2002.
When we got back to Chicago, it felt similar to when you bring kids home from the hospital as babies. We had a 3-year-old and a 4-year-old who didn't speak English. We didn't speak Vietnamese. We had to figure out a lot of things, but we got along happily as a family of eight.
Then I found out about Ha. The document said that the girls' birth mother had wanted to relinquish both twins. They were malnourished and she couldn't raise them herself. The orphanage took Isabella, but not Ha. I later discovered that Ha was very weak. They didn't think she was going to make it. The birth mom left with Ha.
The revelation felt a bit like the time I'd heard about Olivia. In fact, we looked at Isabella and Olivia, only 10 months apart in age, almost as twins themselves.
I recruited a Vietnamese woman to help track down Isabella's twin sister
"You're not going to believe this, but we're going back to Vietnam," I told Mick, who was as shocked as me to learn about Ha. I never intended to adopt Ha, but I wanted them to get to know each other.
I needed to locate Ha as quickly as possible. Trails go cold, and I knew that if I didn't act fast, I might never find her. I went back to Vietnam within the year and recruited a local woman to help me. She was part of the community grapevine — my eyes and ears on the ground.
She finally tracked down Ha in 2008. She was being raised in a rural village by her biological aunt and her partner. The two women clearly loved her, my contact said. "She's safe and happy," she told me.
I met Ha in 2008 on my fifth trip to Vietnam. She and Isabella were ten years old. Ha looked so much like Isabella, I felt a connection and closeness to her. But Ha and her moms were skeptical. Like Isabella, Ha knew she had a twin, but here was this white woman saying that her sister was part of a family in America.
I showed them videos of Isabella and they obviously noticed the resemblance.
Soon after, Ha's moms agreed to involve Mick and me in her future. We bought her a bike. She wanted to go to private school in a city that was relatively nearby. Mick and I paid for an apartment for her to live with her moms while she was there.
The twins finally met at an airport in Vietnam when they were 14. They were middle schoolers by then. We didn't feel they were quite mature enough to meet each other before that time. I'm a bit of a Pollyanna so I was a little disappointed that it was awkward at first. But as Ha introduced Isabella to Vietname culture, food, and traditions, they became much closer.
In the summer of 2015, Ha told us that she wanted to come to the US for the rest of her education. It was entirely her decision. She became a junior at Olivia's high school a year later, while Isabella was homeschooled. Ha has a special bond with all six of the other kids in the family. The twins went on to attend the same college. I'm now the CEO of a luxury-goods company called Bella/Ha, named for them.
Ha, who is constantly in touch with her moms, is now 24, six years older than the maximum age for adoption. But I always introduce Ha to people as my third adoptive daughter.
The 9 points of the 3 triangles represent the 9 people in our immediate family
Isabella, Olivia, and Ha got matching tattoos near their rib cages — close to their hearts. The three intertwined triangles represent the twins and their best friend. The points of the three triangles represent the nine people in the immediate Solimene family.
I feel that Isabella and Ha's reunion was meant to be after all those years living so far apart. I think their beautiful life with Olivia and the rest of us here in Chicago shows that we did the right thing by all three.
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