Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption Identity and the Meaning of Family Book Review

On its surface, adoption is a wonderful thing. It gives children without a home a family and it allows adults to become parents or to add to their brood. But for all the good it does, it can have unforeseen side effects.

Somewhere Sisters: A Story of Adoption, Identity, and the Meaning of Family, by Erika Sachiko was published in October. The memoir is the story of two young ladies who were born in Vietnam at the end of the 1990s. Hà and Loan are twins. Born to a mother who could not take care of them, they were put in an orphanage. Hà was taken in and raised by a maternal aunt and her long-time partner. Loan was renamed Isabella and adopted by an American couple along with another girl they renamed Olivia.

Their lives were as different as night and day. Hà’s early years were happy., but without the material advantages of Isabella’s suburban upbringing. When Isabella’s adoptive mother found out that her daughter had a twin, she set out to reunite the girls.

I wanted to like this book. It was a compelling narrative. I liked how the author sketched the journey of her subjects. But it was a little slow and it took longer than expected to finish it.

Do I recommend it? Maybe.

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Thoughts On the Former Guy’s Tax Returns

The only thing that is guaranteed in life (as we all know) is death and taxes. Everything else is up in the air.

Last week, after multiple years of BS, the former guy’s tax returns were finally made public. In a nutshell, he lied. He cheated and told numerous untruths. This, as expected, was for his benefit, and not for the voters. For more details, I highly recommend a recent episode of the MeidasTouch podcast.

What gets me angry is that there are millions of Americans who pay their taxes on time and whose income is far beneath what he claimed it was. Who does he think he is that he does not have to pay his taxes?

This money that we all pay in is not for nothing. It pays for schools, libraries, hospitals, the upkeep of infrastructure, and other important public works. I can only imagine how much better this nation would be if we all paid our fair share.

P.S. Did you hear that Kevin McCarthy was not voted in as Speaker of the House earlier today? I saw that coming a mile away. The way the Republicans are acting these days, it’s no wonder that they are infighting. Let them, the Democrats will actually do the job the voters hired them to do.