Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (5 page)

I liked Brussels from the start. My favorite thing to do was to dress up in costumes, my interest in style manifesting itself early. I especially loved my sequined Harlequin getup, and I would walk around town wearing it as I hauled Baby Gilles on my back in his baby backpack.

My school was friendly and warm. When I learned one of my teachers was having a baby, I was so impressed that I needed to share the news with my mother. “Maman, you will never guess what is in the belly of Madame!” I exclaimed when I got home.

“I guess it’s a baby,” my mum answered.

“Was I in your belly, too?” I asked her in curiosity.

Mum’s answer confused me. “Anaïs, you were always in my heart, but there was another woman who gave birth to you. You were made in another woman.”

“What other woman?” I demanded. How on earth would that work?

“This woman couldn’t be your mother, so she gave you to us,” my mother continued.

I didn’t have any more questions. The concept was too strange, and there was nothing else I could ask.

Not long after that I started to realize what my schoolmates meant when they said, “You don’t look anything like your mother.” They were saying, “She can’t be your mother. She is blond with blue eyes, and you are Chinese.” I still didn’t know what to make of it. One afternoon, I came home from school totally distraught. “Was I abandoned? Did you find me in the garbage?” I asked my mother. I had seen a news story about a baby being found in the garbage in the Philippines on TV, and a boy at school, who had probably seen the same story, said that this is what probably happened to me—I was abandoned in the garbage, and my mother found me there.

“No, Anaïs, you were never abandoned,” my mother assured me. “The woman who gave birth to you, she immediately gave you to us. You were never abandoned. Look, we have a picture of you at four days, right after you were born.”

I didn’t ask any more questions, but this abandonment thing didn’t go away just because my mother shared a picture. This boy had really riled up feelings in me, and I didn’t know what to do or think. I loved my mother more than anybody, but who was this other mother she was talking about? And why wasn’t I with her?

For the first time, I felt really lonely inside. I tried to appear like I was taking the information in stride, but I had a pain that was hard to describe. It still stays with me to this day. No matter how I looked at it, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had gone wrong at the very start of my life. My birth mother couldn’t keep me, so I must have been a problem for her. My parents really wanted me, but had they been able to conceive a child of their own, they wouldn’t have needed to adopt me. The feelings were difficult and complicated, and nothing I wanted to share. I loved my parents, but voicing my loneliness was impossible. Instead, I worked on burying it.

•   •   •

Most of the time, I didn’t worry about what my birth mother meant, as I was completely happy with my real mother. I did have a temper, and I could be in a bad mood if I had a night of strange dreams. I also had strong anxiety and sad moments for no reason. Sometimes I sensed that I had been ripped off from something, but the feeling was so bizarre, there was no way I could have put it into words. There is a picture of me I posted on Instagram, a young me playing with my two dolls, Baby Gilles and another one. It is hard to find a childhood picture of me without Baby Gilles. It went well beyond that he was my favorite. I never left him behind. I had to carry him everywhere, and if by chance I forgot him, I was panicked that he might disappear forever. He was my constant
wherever I went, and we needed each other. Nobody was going to rip me away from Baby Gilles.

My family stayed in Brussels for three and a half years. When my father was promoted, we had to return to Neuilly, which made me very unhappy. Although he left for Paris in February 1994, my mum and I stayed in Brussels until the school year ended in April. I was learning to read, and Mum felt I needed all my lessons, so I would be at my grade level when I got back to Saint Dominique. There, I was one of the best readers in my class, which, of course, made my parents proud.

Returning to school in France was like being the new kid. I didn’t really have any friends, and my classmates were all bonded and not really looking for anybody else. I missed my schoolmates in Brussels and the system we had of entering the classroom in twos holding hands, kind of like in the Madeleine books. At Saint Dominque, it was every kid for himself. The good news was that I was not the shortest child in my grade, as I had been in Brussels. There were two girls who were both two centimeters (almost an inch) shorter than I was, and we became instant friends.

Starting at a young age, my mum had me enrolled in a lot of extracurricular activities, which I loved. I tried piano, ballet, and horseback riding, and I wanted to do everything to the best of my ability, sharing the same kind of drive with my dad in that respect. If I wasn’t motivated, I lost interest fast. In piano, I needed the challenge of a competitive recital. My father bought me an upright early on in my playing, and with lots of practice, I advanced nicely. But once I reached a level where there were no more recitals, I was done. The same thing happened in ballet. The dance school was right next to my school, and I loved going. I was at ballet class practically
every day, steadily advancing my level. But one day my ballet instructor appointed another girl to a competition I wanted to be in, and I quit.

Horseback riding was good as long as I was improving and striving for a goal. My mum and I took advantage of the horses for hire in the huge park with a state-of-the-art equestrian center near our apartment, so if I wasn’t at a lesson, we were trail riding or practicing in the ring. I rode from the ages of eight to fifteen, but when I fell off a horse and broke my arm, I had to take a leave. When I was healed, I was only willing to ride again if I could be on the competitive team, and as that required too many hours away from my studies, I gave up horses, too. If it wasn’t competitive, I wasn’t interested.

When I was seven and a half, my parents took me to Korea for two weeks during the Easter holiday. The objective of the trip wasn’t to reconnect with anybody—it was for pure pleasure, visiting the country, eating the food, speaking the language, seeing the people, and touring the sites. The flight was endless, more than twenty hours in transit, but I made friends with a small Korean boy seated in front of me. One of the stewardesses gave me the Korean Air logo pin with the tiny wings, which my mother keeps stored in a treasure box of mementos in the apartment. My parents were excited to show me the country of my birth. They had never been there, either, and my dad was really looking forward to practicing his Korean.

In Seoul, we stayed at the Hotel Grand Ambassador. The hotel had a huge buffet with food from different countries. Some of my memories are from the journal I kept in a tiny little spiral notebook, which I called “Voyage en Corée.” I wrote in it faithfully throughout the trip, even though the
entries were very short. I was also the illustrator, drawing everything that struck me as worthy, from the plane’s window to the kind of cars people were driving. My entries briefly touched on my viewings of a palace, a prison, a temple, Korean dances, and some beautiful moons. It was a Korean travel guide on a shoestring. I even practiced my script handwriting.

I was too young to fully appreciate the idea that this was the country of my heritage. The trip was more emotional for my parents than it was for me. The Korean people were fabulous and welcoming. Some people in the adoption agency in Paris had told my parents that it might not be a good idea to bring me there, because the people feel humiliated that they cannot take care of their own. We found that they couldn’t have been more hospitable toward all of us.

Upon our return, my teacher invited my parents to make a presentation about Korea to the class. Mum and Dad created a slide show and brought all the trinkets and souvenirs we had bought, including a
hanbok
, the national costume. I modeled it for the presentation. It was gorgeous, with beautiful vibrant colors, a great big skirt, a tiny jacket, big sleeves, and embellishments of ribbons. The presentation turned Korea into a real place for my classmates, who had been prone to think everything Asian was either Chinese or Japanese. Many of them hadn’t even heard of Korea. They asked my parents a lot of questions, confirming their curiosity.

A few days later, someone who wasn’t in my class said on the playground that I was Chinese. One of the boys in my class corrected him. “Anaïs isn’t Chinese,” he said. “She is coming from Korea.” I finally had an identity that other people could now understand and they would not lump me in with all Asians anymore. I know that they didn’t mean any
harm by it, but they didn’t really know or care about what country you might come from. Some French kids were snobby, too, especially at my school, which was almost exclusively French. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what made me uncomfortable, but Neuilly was filled with rather conservative families who could trace their ancestries back for generations. Some of the teachers had been at the school so long, they had instructed the mothers and grandmothers of my classmates. French schools were strict and competitive with rigid, old-fashioned ways. In Belgium, we wrote with pencils, but here we had to use quill pens. Although I was ambidextrous, I tended to use my left hand, but the French educators were trained to encourage us to be right-handed. Parents were really invested in having their kids be the best at everything and applied lots of pressure. I was a good student because I had a lot of pressure on me, but it was a lot of stress.

In sixth grade, I had to choose between English and German for my second language. I knew a little English, as I had spent three weeks in London when I was eleven. I had stayed with my Japanese-American friend Miku and her family. Miku had a Japanese mother and an American father. We had known them in Belgium, but they were now living in the Wimbledon area, southwest of London, which had a thriving expat Korean community. It was my first time living in a neighborhood with people who looked something like me, and it was great. We ate lots of Korean food and went to lots of places that had Korean takeaway, something we didn’t have in Paris. The children had folders of tiny Korean stickers, another novelty for me. The stickers were colorful, glittery, weirdly shaped animals or Korean characters that we did not have in France. Besides the thrill of being in a Korean community, I also learned a little English.

•   •   •

When the time came to choose between German and English, I wanted to study German, despite my previous exposure to English. But then
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
happened. I had read the first three installments in French, but I wanted to read the fourth one the moment it came out, which meant it would only be available in English. At eight thirty a.m. it went on sale for the midnight release in New York, and I went to WH Smith booksellers at Place de la Concorde to wait. WH Smith was the one English-language bookstore that I knew would be carrying it, and one half hour later, promptly at nine, when the doors opened, I headed straight to the stack of books, grabbed my copy, and made my purchase. I spent the summer reading it in English with the help of a French/English dictionary. By the end of the summer, my English was pretty good, and I opted to take English as my second language. There were going to be other Harry Potter books coming, and I had to be prepared.

When I was fifteen, I wanted to change my birth date from November 19, 1987, to March 5, 1988, the day that I first arrived in France and my life started. We called it my “Arrival Day,” and it was far more important to me than my actual birthday. On March 5, we’d always go to Samo, our favorite Korean restaurant on Rue du Champ de Mars. We loved to order the bulgogi, Korean BBQ. We’d eat out on my real birthday, too, but not necessarily at a Korean restaurant. I just liked my Arrival Day, the day I became part of my real family, better.

In Saint Dominique’s secondary school, which is equivalent to American high school, the academic pressure was insane. Classes were from eight a.m. to six p.m., and we
had a four-hour test every Wednesday to train us for the baccalaureate, on top of our schoolwork and tests from our regular classes. Besides the academics, there was also the annual theatrical production. In my baccalaureate year, the equivalent of a senior year in high school, I designed the whole set, from conceiving how it would look to doing the drawings we would work from. It was so fun, I considered doing something with theater professionally. However, my parents were not very enthusiastic about that. They thought child actors and models were exploited and advised me to wait until I was eighteen if I wanted to pursue anything with theater. I also liked acting and being onstage, but I was entering art school and didn’t see the point. I always thought that I would catch up with cinema at some time, either in costume design, set design, or acting. I loved going to the movies and the theater, but there weren’t many roles available for Asian-looking people.

Right until I graduated from Saint Dominque, I was vacillating between medical school and art school. When my biology teacher heard I was considering art, he tried to talk me out of it, convinced I was meant to study biology. My test scores were so high, he hated to see me pursue anything else. There was a feeling that for good students, the better career choices were engineer, politician, doctor, or attorney, so why would you go to art school?

My mother wanted me to become a doctor. She thought it would be a good profession for me, and it would offer me a steady and secure income. She also knew it would allow me great flexibility to choose where I wanted to work. Surprisingly, it was my father who helped her accept that I was going to art school. He thought I would be disappointed with medicine, either doing research with very little money for my lab
or being a general practitioner and finding it boring. He knew I was passionate about art, even if I had to be a starving artist. He believed it would make me happy for all my life, even if I couldn’t make a living from it.