Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (4 page)

I headed into the theater to watch the premiere, but I kept thinking about Anaïs. I didn’t socialize much the rest of the night. At the premiere party, I tossed back a whiskey on the rocks, my social aid to calm the nerves. Anaïs’s picture, her Facebook message, and the reactions of my family and friends kept playing in my head.

•   •   •

The next morning, I woke up facedown on my bed opening one eye at a time, pretty groggy, slight headache, but that was to be expected after a few drinks. By the time I got my
second eye opened, I remembered I had a long-lost twin! I was barely conscious, and she was already on my mind. I reached over and grabbed my cell phone to make sure it wasn’t a dream. It opened up to Anaïs’s Facebook profile. There she was, staring right at me. Her eyes . . . my eyes. Yup, it’s true. She’s my twin.

I jumped into the shower with just enough time to get ready for my first audition of the day. It was a dramatic part, and I had to be prepared to shed some tears in the third scene. After everything that had happened the day before, my emotions were free-flowing, so that wouldn’t be a problem. Besides, I had a lot of energy that needed to be released. Sometimes, as an actor, you just have to take all the crazy energy and use it.

I truly was an aspiring actress in L.A. Part of me was really uncomfortable and annoyed with how seriously other actors took their “craft” and lifestyle. But the other part of me secretly enjoyed it, even if it was just because I got to make fun of it. People in L.A. could be so insanely pretentious—hiking in the hills around the city with full makeup and short monologues tucked into their yoga pants; green juice refrigerators in organic clothing stores; vegan/gluten-free substitutes available at every restaurant; and community tables at Starbucks packed with skinny vanilla latte–drinkers reading screenplays on their open laptops. These were not stereotypes, they were fact. I didn’t mind it, because I had made some great friends in Los Angeles, and I was pursuing my dream. And for the record, I have never hiked with full makeup and audition lines tucked into my yoga pants, and if I ever do, punch me in the face.

I climbed into my car and headed for the audition, alternating my memorized lines and my twin’s face/my face/my
twin’s face in my head. When I got to the casting office, I ran up the stairs to the audition waiting area and took a seat. No sooner was the audition over than I headed home to prepare for my next audition. For this one, I had to change my hair, makeup, and wardrobe to look older. When I was ready, I drove toward Santa Monica, again mixing the lines I had memorized with thoughts of the French girl and what I would say the next time we communicated. Should I “poke” her? Is there a three-day rule, like with boys? The ball was in my court. The audition in Santa Monica went well, but I wouldn’t hear for a few days.

I wasn’t obsessing over the auditions. I just wanted to sit behind the wheel, listen to music, get home, get into bed, and stalk Anaïs on Facebook. No sooner had I turned on my phone when up popped a message from Anaïs. Weird, she was already reading my mind.

“Hey Sam, how are you?” it read. “Hope everything is fine! I’ve seen some pictures of your premiere, you were super pretty! Can’t wait to see the film now, haha! I’m going back to Paris tomorrow for the weekend for my mum’s birthday. I’ll try and find a few more documents, but my mum scanned pretty much everything already of what I’ve sent you.” A few seconds later another message that included her Skype name popped up. “Whenever you want a little Skype session HAHAHA.”

Ha ha ha, ugh! I wasn’t sure I was ready to Skype yet. Time to drive home in traffic, which was the perfect excuse not to message her back immediately. I had to think this all through. I called Eileen to talk about how the audition had gone, but we talked about Anaïs instead. When I told her that Anaïs and I might Skype, she told me to hold off, to give it the weekend. She wanted to talk to some people first. I
could tell she was already angling to control the story, with my best interest in mind, of course.

I actually felt a little relieved that I could postpone the Skype session with Anaïs, not sure if I was ready. Back home, my friends had all sorts of opinions about the inevitable Skype call. The consensus was that I should do it, and I should tape it. At first, it sounded like a great idea. But the more I thought about, the more I felt as though it would be exploitive for both Anaïs and me. This was very private, and it was really only about the two of us. Why was I waiting to talk to her? Why was I letting other people weigh in? She was my twin! Not anybody else’s! This was my life. On the other hand, it might be good to have it documented for posterity’s sake. We would have it forever.

Conflicted, I called Kanoa to talk it through. When I told him that a lot of people had business suggestions for me about this story, he told me to think it through and do what I thought was right. He was spot-on, and I really needed to hear someone I trusted say it. Yes, the story could be a great business opportunity, but I had to make my own choices. I decided I was going to Skype Anaïs. I just couldn’t do it tonight. My life had me working a full shift at the restaurant after a full day of auditions.

When I finally got home from the restaurant, I sat down at my computer to compose a message to Anaïs.

Anaïs! I am doing well (kind of true). Still processing all this crazy information (yeah, that’s true). The premiere was great! It was definitely a crazy day [smile] (input smiley face because you’re uncomfortable and don’t know what else to say) it’ll be weird when you see the movie . . . cause it
will be you . . . but not . . . cause it’s me . . . but you . . . (input humor because you’re uncomfortable, and it makes it better.)

Ok! Great! I’ll have my mom and dad take pictures of my baby stuff. They live in New Jersey and I’m in Los Angeles, so it’s a bit far . . . but I’ll get it to you! (well . . . you made the effort. I should, too.) Yes, please! Let’s Skype! We will have to figure out a time because of the time difference.

How are you? How is your family processing this information? Are you doing okay?

Love Sam

After I sent the message, I plopped onto my bed, curled up under the covers, and logged on to Facebook. I looked at Anaïs’s pictures again and again, going back into her past as recorded by her and her closest friends. It was literally a timeline of all these years apart, up until the very moment she made first contact. I could see the moments right there in the palm of my hand.

nothing is like family

Growing up, I wanted for nothing. I attended some of the best schools in Paris, traveled around the world, summered in the South of France, learned to play the piano, and had years of classical dance and horseback riding lessons, as many other kids from the wealthy suburbs of Paris do. But there was always a curiosity, a secret longing, to find another person who looked like me.

I can’t say I didn’t struggle with being of Korean heritage in a community as déconnectée, “disconnected,” as Neuilly-sur-Seine. When I was a baby, a doctor who lived in our apartment building asked my mother what language I would be speaking when I started talking. My mother was appalled at his ignorance. “French, of course!” she told him, asking him what language he thought I would be speaking. Even though he was a doctor, he assumed I would miraculously know Korean just because I was born in Korea. My mother was right to think he was awfully narrow-minded.

When I was in kindergarten, my family was living in Belgium. I would go to friends’ houses for playdates, where I
would find myself being served white rice by mothers proud that they were “accommodating” me. This was well-meaning but insulting at the same time. Even now, people in my town who don’t know me assume I must be a maid or house cleaner when they see me in the elevator of my parents’ apartment building, where they have lived only a couple of years. In Neuilly, a lot of the household help comes from South Asia, and there are not so many Asian-looking people in the area. But I am not foreign. I speak French, I eat French, and I dress French. France is my homeland, and I am as French as my parents.

February 22 was my mum’s birthday. I really wanted to see her and my dad. I just wanted to be with them. Sam had posted a few more images on Twitter and Facebook, and it was all becoming real. She was there. She was tangible, and we had exchanged messages. Some of her Facebook postings were mentioning her father’s birthday, so even he was becoming real. How cool was it that her dad and my mum had almost the same birthday! Just one day apart.

During my first call to them since the discovery, I had been almost crying, because I had finally made contact with Samantha. During the second call, I had been shouting at Mum to send my birth records as fast as she could, so I could send them to Samantha. Sam had sent me hers, and I wanted to send her mine. By the third phone call, I was out of my mind with glee. I told Mum to send me some of my baby pictures, so I could share them with Sam. My father was becoming quite moved by the whole thing, even though he had been the last holdout. I was his little girl and his only child, so he was having a hard time imagining two identical “me”s.

My father had come from a large family. He grew up on
a small farm in the central Loire Valley in a tiny village between the cities of Orléans and Chartres. My grandfather, Gaston Bordier, was a wheat farmer. With his wife, Madeleine, they had five children, my father being the oldest boy. He had an older sister, two younger sisters, and a younger brother. He loved growing up on the farm, and he worked alongside his father wherever he needed help. He wanted to go to university, travel, learn languages, and maybe become an academic. He was a bit of a perfectionist. Everything he undertook, he wanted to do well. His first job was with Air France, but he went to school at the same time. When he finished his studies and passed all his university exams, he held various executive positions, which later gave him the idea of having his own business. He finally took over a leather goods company, which he positioned in the luxury segment.

My mother was hardworking, too. She was the perfect right-hand woman when my parents purchased the business. She grew up in Troyes, a beautiful medieval city in the Champagne region southeast of Paris by one hundred kilometers. Her father, Jacques Wach, was a successful accountant. My grandfather and my grandmother, Simone, had two children. My mother was five and a half years older than her brother, Gilles.

Gilles is now a monsignor in the Catholic Church and runs a seminary that he established himself outside of Florence. My mum has a great story about how young my uncle had been when he knew he had a calling from God. The family used to go to church occasionally, although they weren’t particularly devout. They had a country house near Troyes where they went in the summers, and one day after mass, my mother saw Uncle Gilles in the garden near the house. He was five years old at the time. He had taken all my mother’s
dolls and arranged them so they were all looking toward him. He was wearing my grandmother’s black skirt like a robe and was performing Mass for the dolls. My mother ran to get my grandmother, who asked him what he was playing.

“
Non
, Maman, I’m not playing,” he said. “I will be priest one day.”

As he predicted, my uncle was ordained into the Roman Catholic Church. John Paul II performed his ordination in 1979, when my uncle was twenty-three years old. When I was baptized, it was Uncle Gilles who did the honor.

My mother enjoyed a pampered girlhood. She rode and jumped horses, beginning at age twelve. She even had her own horse. When I began riding at age eight, she would often ride with me. Every summer in her youth, my mother’s family went to the South of France, either to the Mediterranean or the Atlantic Coast. Mum was really smart and well educated, and attended university in England. She met my dad at a party in Paris. It was love at first sight. They had many things in common, and they knew right away they had found their partner for life.

My parents were married in 1976 in Troyes. They wanted to start a family, but not right away, not before they had a good financial standing. When they tried to conceive a baby several years later, they were unsuccessful. They immediately turned to adoption, as they decided not to go through infertility treatments, my mum knowing she would be just as happy with an adopted child, and wanting a family more than anything. She and my father decided they wanted a child from Korea, and Korea only. My mother said it was in her heart. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt very, very strongly about it. My father felt the same way. He even started to teach himself Korean in anticipation.

My parents didn’t realize that being this particular about a country was going to be problematic. In France, there is a specific process for adoption. First, social services needs to agree that the applicants are suitable to be parents of an adopted child. When they are approved, a couple must decide if they want to adopt domestically or internationally. My parents chose to go through a specific association, Amis des Enfants du Monde (AEM), Friends of the Children of the World. When my parents said they were only interested in a baby from Korea, the agency was upset, saying a child is a child wherever he or she is from.

My mother was not dissuaded. She told the representative if the application didn’t go to Korea, she and my father would find another adoption agency that would accommodate them, so Korea or nothing. It was very important to her that she feel a connection with her child’s birth country, and for no explainable reason, her connection was with Korea.

My mum had put a lot of thought into her decision. She was making a choice not just for the baby in infancy, but for that child’s entire lifetime. In her opinion, parents adopting internationally hadn’t always prepared themselves for the added hardship involved in raising a child from another country here in France.

In slightly less than two years, my parents got their authorization. Just before Christmas in 1987, my parents got word from AEM that their baby girl had been born, weighing in at 2.2 kilos (about four pounds, thirteen ounces), and measuring forty-four centimeters long (about seventeen inches). The first physical exam report said I was “cute and tiny,” although I wouldn’t be arriving in France for six months. Their first photo of me was sent to them when I was four days old, newly transferred from the private clinic in Busan to the Holt
Institute in Seoul, the adoption agency in Korea that worked with AEM in France. A few days later, my parents got a second, more official photo of me, with a matriculation number, and my Korean name, Kim Eun Hwa. In Korean, Eun means “silver,” and Hwa means “flower.”

A few weeks later, the agency sent a picture that showed a sizable strawberry-colored vascular birthmark on my head. These unsightly growths, called hemangiomas, are fairly common on newborns and are usually cosmetic. My mum, wanting to make sure it wasn’t something of great concern, took my photo to my future pediatrician, and he reassured her that it would disappear completely by the time I was nine years old.

Now, it was time to pick a name. There were a lot of little girls named Anaïs in the South of France, where they spent a lot of time, and the name worked for them for very special reasons. For one, “Anaïs” was popular in the South of France, and I was from the southern part of Korea. For another, “Anaïs” was a near homonym to “Hanae” (pronounced Hana-e), the word for “flower” in Japanese. That would complement the fact that my Korean name used “flower.” Yes, “Anaïs” had a lot of meaningful interpretations that made it the perfect choice.

The initial information given to my parents by the agency in Seoul was that I would be arriving sometime in May, six months after my birth. Therefore, my mother felt no need to rush to furnish my nursery and stock my drawers. Suddenly, on the last Monday in February, a woman called and said I would be arriving on a flight that very Saturday. My mother was in a panic, as she hadn’t prepared my nursery yet. All her friends came forward to help her find a crib, clothing, diapers, formula, toys, blankets, and everything else
that the new baby would need. My crib, which was shipped to the house, arrived in fifteen complicated pieces, so there was another scramble to find someone to help my father build it. Thanks to their friends, everything was done in five short days.

On March 5, 1988, I made my grand arrival. I was one of four children from Korea who were landing at Charles de Gaulle Airport that day. Two of us were infants, myself and another little girl the same age. The other two were older, a two-year-old girl and a seven-year-old boy. We were accompanied by one employee of the Holt Agency, who had been assigned to deliver us.

I was sleeping soundly when I was taken off the plane. My mum said that when she took me in her arms for the first time, she bonded with me immediately. In that second, she knew she was holding her own child, born from her own heart. According to Mum, I suddenly opened my eyes and looked at her, then smiled before closing them again. She said that I was sleeping so deeply during the car ride home, she had to pinch me to see if I was still breathing. As for my dad, he was nothing but really happy!

I love the story my mum tells about when we first arrived at the apartment as a family of three. We had a six-year-old apricot poodle named Twist, who wasn’t sure if he was thrilled to meet me or not. My parents didn’t want him to get too close to me, fearing germs. In fact, Mum and Dad were so nervous that I would contract some weird germ that they put white lab coats over their clothes to give me my first bottle. My mum’s covered her festive red turtleneck and stylish black-and-white slacks, and Dad’s hid his snappy casual blue button-down shirt, black sweater, and jeans. Every moment was captured in photos.

From the stories, I apparently opened my eyes with a little bit of panic. My mum said I had that worried
Where am I?
look. She tried to give me my bottle but when I didn’t drink, my dad took over. He was quite proud that he had been successful until I started crying, as the formula didn’t agree with me. My parents called a neighbor, who was a pediatrician, and he told them about a special milk that was available. I was about to grow up in France being lactose intolerant. Talk about a difficult road ahead.

My mum remembers every one of my “firsts.” I took my first steps on my first birthday. On my first Christmas, we had a white tree decorated with white bulbs, Santa ornaments, and a red bow tied to the top. I wore a red dress and a white blouse and received my first doll from Santa, a boy doll in a blue pajama. I named him Baby Gilles in honor of my uncle. Of all my dolls, he was my favorite, and I carried him in a backpack everywhere I went. He is still in my room today.

For the first three years of my life, my parents and I lived in Neuilly-sur-Seine, ranked as one of the wealthiest communities in France. Nicolas Sarkozy, the future president of France, was the mayor of Neuilly at the time of my arrival. He often had breakfast at the little Café du Parc bistro on Rue de Chézy right near my school. My mother would sometimes see him there when she stopped in for coffee after dropping me off in the mornings.

Partly because it was so beautiful, Neuilly was home to a lot of well-known people—actors, writers, athletes, politicians, and diplomats, all living there in relative privacy. The wide boulevards that Neuilly is known for were once part of the grounds of the Château de Neuilly, home to King Louis Phillip I. Neuilly also had the Bois de Boulogne, the
second-largest park in Paris; the American Hospital of Paris, renowned as one of the best hospitals in France; and the headquarters of the
International Herald Tribune
, now the
International New York Times
. It was a fantastic place to live, because it was so close to the heart of Paris, yet far enough to be a refuge of peace and quiet.

Exactly one day after my third birthday, we moved to Brussels. My father had taken a job as a general manager at a cosmetics company, with a territory covering Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. My mother threw me a small celebration with a cake at school, but the next day, we were in the car, heading to Belgium. Dad had found us an amazing, beautiful duplex in the center of the city, fifteen minutes from his office. It was two hundred square meters, more than two thousand square feet. The open staircase to the upstairs level scared me, but I loved the terrace that overlooked Cinquantenaire Park. I made my first snowman on that terrace.

My mother loved the apartment, although she hated the move. We didn’t know anybody, and the weather was dreadful. Things got better the following Easter, when all the parents of my preschool friends were renting houses on the North Sea. My mother found a rental for us, too, figuring it was our one chance to make some friends. She was right. We all had a great time in Knokke, a seaside resort about seventy miles northwest of Brussels. She liked our new home better after that.