Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (3 page)

waiting for first contact

The role of social networking in the world today cannot be appreciated enough. By the networks and their available applications, we communicate our ideas, stay informed, market our merchandise, share our photos, present our opinions, and absorb enormous amounts of knowledge, some so trifling we are confused as to why we ever needed it. We stay connected with friends, and we find friends we have lost touch with by way of a few key word searches. Without social networking, I would never have found Samantha Futerman.

There is an upside and a downside to the connectedness on the Internet. As great as it is to communicate with people all over the world, we get overly accustomed to instant gratification. We become used to the immediacy of it all. Write a blog and get instant feedback. Post a tweet and watch it get retweeted again and again. Post something on Facebook and see how many friends “like” it in a matter of minutes. After I sent my message to Samantha saying we might be twins, the most important message I had ever sent in my life,
I expected an instant response. Instead, I found myself waiting . . . and waiting . . . and waiting.

In anxious anticipation of Samantha’s reply, I knew I wanted the moral support of my friends. Kelsang offered to have a “waiting for contact” pizza party at his flat, and I gladly accepted his invitation. Kelsang and his flat mates, and our friends Rafa, Angel, and Marta were the ideal distractions. Takeaway pizzas from Pizza Hut sounded good to me. Everybody in the room was almost as excited as I was. We all kept refreshing our Twitters and Facebooks, making sure we didn’t miss anything that might come in, even for a minute. To keep the waiting fun, we drank lots of wine, ate our pizza, and spent the time laughing and joking. But the levity didn’t calm me down. I was a bundle of nerves.

The more time that passed without any response from Samantha, the more my doubts and insecurities started to surface. Everybody else was still hyped up, but my focus was on what could be going wrong. I had already factored in the time zone differences, and as it was seven o’clock in the evening here in London, it was about eleven in the morning for Samantha in California. If she was anything like me, and I assumed she was, she would have gotten up fairly recently, and she would be checking all of her social media. So, why wasn’t she writing back? I was suddenly alarmed that she wouldn’t see my message, or worse, she would but wouldn’t answer. On Facebook, you could see if somebody had read your message, so I was watching my computer screen, waiting for the pernicious “seen at blah blah time,” but it never appeared.

I waited at Kelsang’s until well after midnight, but no reply from Samantha. By now, it would be late afternoon in California, so it would be almost impossible for her not to have logged on. It crossed my mind that she could have a
Facebook privacy setting that would allow her to see my friend request without my knowing. If that was the case, and she wasn’t responding, there was nothing I could do about it. There was also the possibility that it had gone to her spam box, so my request would be equally doomed.

I was exhausted, emotionally and physically. Waiting was only adding to my anxiety, and although I knew what I was waiting for, Samantha lived in another world. Having expectations about what she would do with my friend request was getting me nowhere. All I could do was go home and get into bed. I still couldn’t stop obsessing about her—I watched Samantha’s videos a thousand times before falling asleep.

Where was she? What was she doing at this moment? Those were my first thoughts when I woke up on Wednesday, February 20, 2013. My probable twin was out there somewhere, over there in America, and I was feeling energized. When I talked to my parents, I promised to send them some of the amazing pictures of Samantha I had found on Instagram. Mum seemed to be getting really excited about the idea of what she could discover from the photos. Dad was not as enthusiastic, although he encouraged me to send on what I had found.

Obviously, if I had a long-lost twin, this was going to impact more than just me. The dynamics of our entire family would change. Theoretically, my parents would suddenly have another daughter. Wait a minute . . . that would mean I had two sets of parents. Would I have to explain to four people that I wanted a tattoo? Who would Samantha’s parents be to me? Who would everybody be to one another? I adored the set of parents I had. Would I have to share them with Samantha now?

I generally don’t give away my feelings for others, but
my parents are incredible people, and I cannot imagine life without them. They are my real parents, the ones I argue with and admire at the same time. They are loving, thoughtful, and kind. What if I didn’t like Samantha’s parents? What if Samantha didn’t like my parents? What would our parents be to one another? Would everybody get along? What would we do about holidays and birthdays? Spend them all together, or alternate houses, like married couples do with in-laws?

I was probably getting ahead of myself, but slowly the idea of having a twin started to really weigh on me. I lay in my bed paralyzed, contemplating all the possible relationships and scenarios, and as of yet, the Futermans were only strangers. They didn’t even know about the Bordiers. Bringing myself back to the present, I looked at Sam’s Twitter again, hoping to find something I may have missed the day before. I called Mum to let her know I was still doing okay, and she suggested I send Samantha a message asking if she had been born in Busan, like me. Samantha had not yet answered my Facebook request, so my biggest fear remained that she might never answer me, no matter how many messages I sent her.

I was glad I had revisited Samantha’s Twitter. This time I looked at older tweets she had been posting during her trip to Korea the previous year. She had written that her biological mum was from Busan! There was one more clue that we were twins. I called Mum back to tell her, followed by Dad, followed by everyone else I know.

There was still the problem of Samantha not having seen my message, so I spent a little longer trying to find out what she had been doing over the past twenty-five years. Social media like Facebook and WhatsApp have made it so amazingly easy to spy on people through the cables and plugs
that interconnect us all. Technology brings voyeurism to a whole new level, and I was so happy to have this tool at my disposal. In her photos, I could see that she liked to wear amazing costumes and her boyfriend was really, really tall. She seemed to be a very happy, fun, and playful person, except in one photo, when she was about seven or eight, where she seemed a little lost. She was with her two older brothers, and she was holding a baby in her arms. But she wasn’t looking directly at the camera and smiling, like her brothers. I don’t know why that picture struck me, but it did.

I was really indulging myself in Samantha’s childhood when my fears returned. She was never going to accept my friend request, because now I was convinced it had gone to her spam mailbox. I didn’t want to send her a message in any public forum, because Samantha was an actress and therefore vulnerable to stalkers, people like me. I didn’t want to post just anywhere for the whole world to see. Already, my friends and I had added her everywhere we could—Instagram, Twitter, WhatsApp, etc. We even became followers of her YouTube channel.

It was two p.m. by the time I could finally get myself out of bed. I didn’t go to school. I was exhausted and hugely disappointed that I hadn’t heard back from Samantha. I felt really bad about skipping. “Waiting to hear from your potential twin” did not make the list of excusable absences, but I didn’t care anymore. I only wanted to discover more things about Samantha and who she was. I would have flown to Los Angeles to locate her, doing the best I could with the hints I was picking up from her Instagram. I felt like I was a detective, slowly putting pieces of her story together.

Kelsang could sense my trauma and despair. He was sweet enough to invite me to a movie, even though he had a
lot of work to do. We went to see
Beautiful Creatures
, perfectly cheesy for the occasion. After the movie, I checked my phone to see if there was anything new. Samantha still hadn’t answered, so, dragging Kelsang with me, I went to French Connection UK to buy my mum a silk top for her birthday. Then we went back to my flat for burgers. In the hour and a half of shopping, and the trip back to my place, there was still nothing. The long, emotional day had left me with more questions, no answers. The things running through my head were wild. What if she is not interested? What if she doesn’t want to know about me? What if she thinks I’m a crazy teenage fan obsessed with her? What if she never discovers the message? I was going insane. Kelsang and I talked about if we should tweet her, but again we decided against it. After Kelsang left, I got back into bed, ignoring my exhaustion in favor of watching the videos of my “twin” again. I fell asleep with the image of Samantha fading into my dreams.

•   •   •

By morning, I was feeling downright schizophrenic. I’d watched the videos so many times, I couldn’t even tell the difference between Samantha and me anymore. Everything was merging and mixing. The videos seemed real and time was distorted. It was crazy. I had learned so much about Samantha’s life in the past few days that she was no longer just an image to me, but a real breathing person who was walking somewhere on Earth at this very moment. She was moving about, making decisions about what to have for dinner, maybe reading lines for a part, but she was right there with me. The trouble was, I was the only one who knew it. It was like reading a book and slowly unraveling a character, bringing him to life in your imagination. However, I could see photographs of her, and she was made of flesh and bones.

When Kelsang came over for breakfast the following morning, we got right on my computer only to see that Samantha was tweeting. Knowing she was online, Kelsang used the opportunity to post a personal tweet with a mention of her and her handle, which would automatically go to her “Mentions” tab. My heart was pounding as he tweeted instructions for her to go to her spam box on Facebook, where she would find my message. I panicked as soon as he did it. Worried that it could look too spam-like, I asked him to remove it immediately, which he did. I came up with another idea, to send her a message on her YouTube channel. Kelsang shot me down when he told me he had already tried this tactic. But I did it anyway. Next, I composed a message to her that I was determined to deliver somehow. “Oh, good morning, I am your twin sister, Cheers.” Never mind. It was a little too bold, and there was no way I could think of to get it to her and be taken seriously.

It was time for me to go back to classes. I was right in the middle of the final collection, and missing the previous school day was catastrophic enough. Technically, this was the year you rarely slept, ate, or had any fun, except for discovering a novel sewing technique that could save you three hours of work, or should I say, gain you three hours of much-needed sleep. Even if all my focus was on Samantha, I had obligations in London and I had to get back to work. Only three days had passed since I had sent my Facebook friend request, but it felt like twenty-five years. Nothing else mattered but hearing from Samantha. I wanted to know that she had received my message, but even more I wanted for her to answer it. I was feeling so vulnerable that I wanted to be home in Paris being comforted by my mum and dad. They would have supported me in a way that only parents could.

Right now, I was feeling overwhelmed with frustration and uncertainty. It was like I was imprisoned somewhere, trying to yell at someone who couldn’t hear me, and had never heard of me, and wouldn’t know if I were dead or not. It was almost unbearable, knowing about Samantha and knowing that she had absolutely no clue of my existence. I just wanted her to see me, to see my message and to react. Whatever the reaction was, I just wanted her to know I existed. All I could do was wait.

My friends were waiting, too, feeling my stress. Everybody wanted a resolution, and some took matters into their own hands. Without me knowing it, my friend Maxence tweeted Samantha from Paris, telling her to look for a message from Anaïs on her Facebook, and then open it and read it. Lucas posted an Instagram photo of me with a handwritten note on the bottom—“Check your spam box.” He thought something handwritten would look friendlier than a computerized message, and he was thinking Samantha might not even know there was such a thing as a Facebook spam box.

And then it happened! In a life-changing instant, two notifications from Facebook popped up on my phone that Samantha had accepted my friend request and read my message! I was at school in the studio with my friends when I found out. “YAY! YAY! YAY! YAY!” I shouted, crazily jumping around the studio. “She read it! She read it! She read it!” Everyone erupted in cheers. I didn’t know it yet, but the winning communication had been Maxence’s tweet from Paris. That was the one that had gotten Samantha’s attention. What I knew was that contact had been established, and I couldn’t have been more elated.

right in the palm of my hand

Now that I had confirmed Anaïs’s friend request, I was really at a loss for what to do next. There was no way I could say the photos I had seen in her albums didn’t look like me and dismiss her as delusional. I didn’t simply agree that we looked alike. I thought she could be my reflection in a mirror. It was beyond comprehension. My birth records said I was a singleton, and I had never felt otherwise in my heart or spirit, yet the photos of Anaïs were saying something else. We were born on the exact same day, so she couldn’t be a younger sister, or a half sister. Well, I guess technically we could be half sisters, if we shared one father, who had made babies with both our mothers in Busan about the same time. . . . Never mind. It was not worth going there. But how could I respond to a message that read, “Hey, we might be twins?”

I know it might sound strange, but I didn’t want to get too personal, and I was very short on time with the hour of the premiere closing in. For some reason, I decided to send Anaïs my birth records, what I thought was a good first step. I already had a separate photo of each page saved on my
phone from my trip to Seoul, so it would be really easy to just forward them to her. At 12:03 p.m. precisely, I sent a photo of one page via Facebook messenger. This way, she could see if it matched hers without us having to make personal contact. If it didn’t match, no harm done—we’d both go our separate ways, two Korean adoptees who once crossed paths with each other in a Facebook message, in the throngs of people who inhabit the Internet.

•   •   •

“Thank you,” came a reply from Anaïs exactly ten minutes later. Wow, she was really on it. “I’ve just looked through the document, so it says 1st of 2?!?!?!?!” She had misunderstood. “1st of 2” referred to our birth mother having a younger sister, not that I was the first of two children. I felt too uncomfortable to correct her, so I just sent the second page right away, hoping she would understand.

My birth records seemed to only encourage her. “I just had a heart attack,” she wrote, followed by some emphatic HA HA HAs. “I will send you my documents, too.” Apparently, seeing my birth records had supported the possibility that we could be twins, although she didn’t mention anything specific. I really wanted to communicate more, but I just didn’t have the time at that moment. “I’m actually getting ready for the 21 & Over premiere,” I wrote back. “Sorry I haven’t been super-responsive. CRAZY. I will talk more I swear. We are totally twins.”

There. We had both called each other our twin. Anaïs was a complete stranger living five thousand miles away from me, and yet we might be identical twins? I sent her the final page of my record, which had information on my birth parents, although none of it was confirmed.

According to the document, my birth parents had met
each other through their relatives and had been married since 1985. My birth father was twenty-nine when I was born. He was from Kyo˘ngsang-bukdo, a province halfway between Seoul and Busan. After high school, he moved to Busan to find employment. He did military service and then returned to Busan. When he married my birth mother, he promised to support her family as well, which put them in “needy condition.” When my birth mother conceived her second child—me—she and my birth father decided that adoption would be the best choice for my sake. It was their hope that I would be adopted by a good family. My Korean name was listed on the top left corner of this page—Ra-Hee Chung.

I waited for Anaïs’s reply. She wished me luck at the premiere and said that she would send me her records when she got home. “I guess we’ll have a lot more to talk about,” she finished. Now I had to focus more on my primping, although it was hard. Everyone was coming to my house at four p.m., and it was already one thirty. Lauren was doing a great job on my nails, using tiny brushes to make them a matte floral print. I was feeling confident enough to put on four-inch heels—which would make me five two—for my walk on the red carpet. During most of the primping, though, I was imagining what it would be like to be a twin.

At 1:57 p.m., Anaïs sent me a collage of photos of her from when she was young. Her resemblance to me when I was that age was even more startling than our current similarities, although we were still very alike. We briefly discussed being short. Anaïs told me she was 1.53 meters, so I had to have her convert that into feet. When the conversion was complete, we both came in at around four ten, short in either measurement system. I’ve been petite all my life! Maybe this was why! Twins are tiny! And squished! And like to hold hands!

Anaïs also sent photos of her birth records from her adoption agency, Holt International, which, oddly, was not the same as the one that had handled my case. It didn’t make sense that twins would be sent to different agencies. We also had different surnames. Anaïs’s surname at birth was “Kim,” and mine was “Chung.” Maybe our birth mother thought it would be easier for us to be adopted as singletons? If it were me giving up my children, I’d want them to stay together.

A lot of the information in Anaïs’s records didn’t match mine, but I had discovered during my roots tour that Korean birth information for adoptees was unreliable. For starters, unwed birth mothers might not provide truthful information because of their shame. In Korea, the stigma of being an unwed mother is so enormous that it is nearly impossible to raise her children alone. There is little government support, and the disgrace blankets the entire extended family. The children, as well as the mothers, are basically outcasts, forced from the family and ostracized by family, peers, employers, and anyone who knows their situation. Being a single mother can cause permanent loss of employment, housing, and social status. Ninety percent of infants relinquished for adoption are born to single mothers.

Many unwed mothers make it to birth homes where they can stay during the later stages of their pregnancies. After they have given birth and their babies are safely surrendered to foster care, they can escape the stigma and return to their lives because nobody knows their secret. When they are interviewed for the birth record, they can say anything they want, as there is no corroboration required. They could even choose not to register the birth at all, if they were giving the child up for adoption. Many don’t want to be found—with the way society shames them, the price is too
high. The more untruths they tell, the less likely they are to be tracked and accountable. Sadly, it is a really dire situation for these women. But I am aware that South Korea is making progress—painfully slow progress, but progress—to accept and support single mothers.

Besides the problem of untruths, another problem with the birth records is accurate translation. Translating from Korean into English or French is not straightforward, especially because of the different alphabets. Anaïs’s record had inconsistencies from one page to the next. First, it stated that she had been born “full-term, natural delivery.” One page later, it said she had been born “premature.”

Our mothers’ first names were different. As for our birth fathers, there was a surname on my form, but it had been filled in at a later date by an intake worker, claiming that my mother had come back after some time to provide more information about my father. The space for Anaïs’s father was blank. My form mentioned an older sister, same father. Anaïs’s form said that she was her mother’s first delivery.

According to Anaïs’s birth record, her birth mother had graduated from high school, was twenty-one years old, and worked in a plant. Her marital status was “unwed.” Her birth father had also graduated from high school and also worked in a plant. He was twenty-eight and “unwed.” The history of the pregnancy was quite detailed. When the natural mother went to a movie, she met the natural father. She was involved with him for about three months and became unintentionally pregnant. The natural father transferred to another job, and then the communication between the natural parents was cut off. The natural mother did not learn of her pregnancy until she was six months pregnant due to her irregular menstruation. She continued to work, but hid her pregnancy by
binding her abdomen tightly. She left the plant fifteen days before she gave birth to the baby. As she could not bring up the baby adequately by herself “due to her unfavorable circumstances,” she referred the baby to Holt, an international adoption agency, for adoption in view of the baby’s “optimum future.”

Other things on our birth records were also different. I weighed 5.3 pounds at birth, and Anaïs was 4.85 pounds. If we were full-term singletons, these would be considered low birth weights, but not extraordinary. Term Asian newborns were typically smaller than term Caucasian babies, and how “full-term” we were had not been established with any accuracy. One thing both records agreed on—we were single births. There was no indication of a twin birth on either record. Still, we had to be twins. We might have sounded like we were teasing when we said to each other, “Dude, we are so twins,” but I think we both felt it without a shadow of a doubt.

I couldn’t do much about this incredible situation at the moment. But, in these first two hours of contact, everything was beginning to fall into place. It’s funny. In the thick of life, I sometimes think nothing will ever work out for me. Maybe it’s the self-indulgent, feeling-bad-for-myself routine, but finding out I might be a twin changed everything. Maybe everything I had gone through in life so far was leading up to this very moment. If I had gotten bigger acting roles earlier in my career, maybe Anaïs might have spotted me sooner and this moment might have gone down already. But what if I hadn’t been ready and able to handle having a twin? I had to assume timing was part of a master plan. Anaïs and I agreed that we would talk more in the next few days, and that we should
definitely
Skype!

Once in the car, I did what every person in L.A. does:
started calling people. I called my dad first. “Dad, I’m a twin!” I blurted out when he answered.

“What?” he asked in dismay, thinking I was probably pranking him on his birthday, something I never fail to do. To convince him I wasn’t kidding about a possible twin, I told him I had pictures of Anaïs to show him my evidence.

Next, I called my mom, who I knew would be on her way home from work. I shouted into the phone, “I’M A TWIN!”

“Hold on, I’m pulling over,” she told me.

I told her not to worry, I’d talk to her more when we each got home.

Once at my apartment, I sent the profile picture of Anaïs to my family and friends even before I started on hair and makeup. My dad called me minutes later. He was initially pretty skeptical, especially as he is also a huge football fan and the Manti Te’o catfishing scandal was the hot sports story in the news. My father was worried that the Anaïs person might be an impostor. “Well, Sam,” he said, “you don’t look exactly alike.” But after I sent him the pictures of Anaïs as a baby, he became more convinced. In fact, being an accountant, he came up with a statistic. “Okay, there’s a ninety-one percent probability you are twins,” he decided.

My mother was supportive, as always, although despite her excitement, her maternal instinct made her want to protect me. She told me not to get my hopes up prematurely, because she didn’t want me to have them smashed if it turned out not to be true. I also sensed sadness in her, but I wasn’t quite sure what it meant.

My friends were mind-blown by the news, as were my agents. My talent manager, Eileen, went nuts when she saw the screenshot of Anaïs. She had been my manager since I
was ten, and she was like a second mother to me. Another of my agents at the time, Domina, didn’t think it was true. When she finally believed me, she told me she knew a producer at
The Ellen DeGeneres Show
. “Do you want me to contact her?” she asked me. Agents, always working the angles!

The meeting point for those going to the premiere with me was my place. I lived in an inexpensive, three-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bathroom apartment in midcity. The half bath was nasty. It had no natural ventilation, and when the vent fan was on, it smelled of mold. Black dust covered the walls of the laundry room. The woman who lived upstairs had a dog that barked every time it heard keys jingle. We never saw her walk it, but the carpet on the stairs going up to her apartment smelled of piss. The stove was greasy, and there were dead silverfish all over the walls. Our landlord was an adorable little old man, like liver-spots old. He liked to tell us romantic stories of traveling around the world to win his wife’s heart. Because of his advanced age, getting him to fix things wasn’t the easiest, so our apartment had a lot of maintenance issues, but we tried not to complain and made it as nice as it could be via Ikea.

My roommate was named Lisa. We knew each other briefly in New Jersey. We balanced each other very well. She couldn’t cook, so I’d make dinner, and she’d clean up (she was obsessively neat). It was the perfect arrangement.

By four o’clock, everyone was in my living room—Kanoa, Justin Chon, Kevin Wu, Eileen, and a producer named James Yi. They had all been on the thread of text messages that had been going back and forth all day about the French girl. By the time they got to my apartment, everyone was in a weird state about it, and we couldn’t stop discussing it. “I’m a twin . . . twin . . . I’m a twin,” was all I could say.

How did I focus? Strangely, walking down the red carpet took my mind off the intensity of maybe having a twin. The thought of Anaïs relieved me of feeling self-conscious in front of the cameras. The awkward feeling I always got on the carpet, that I didn’t belong, was trumped by knowing that across the world, there was someone just like me. Even in all the excitement of the entire evening, I kept checking my phone for messages. I was supposed to be charming and schmoozing, but all I could do was think about this girl, this French entity on my iPhone.

At some point in the evening, I posted a picture of me with Kevin on the red carpet. My brother Matt was the first to send a comment, “No, everyone can clearly see that’s not you, that’s @Anaïsfb.” Anaïs commented next. “Oh, wow! I look fantastic in that dress!” I was feeling pressured. It was too soon for a comment like that. For the first time, I felt this was moving too fast. Anaïs’s comment, certainly meant harmlessly, made me feel weird. You’re invading my personal public space! I’m not ready to take this relationship to that level yet. What next? Are we going to confirm it on Facebook? Of course, I didn’t respond. I just held on to my feelings to process them.