Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited (17 page)

I loved the transparency of Sam’s double life. It was great to follow her throughout the day to discover her routine. She wakes up and goes to an early morning yoga class. Afterward, she does a lot of work on the documentary. Then it’s lunchtime, and at least while I was there, she eats something very healthy. After lunch into the early afternoon, she prepares for auditions. If she has them scheduled, she heads out to do her thing, hoping to land a role. Otherwise, she works ambitiously on her two projects—organizing the documentary and putting her thoughts on the computer for the book. Then, if she has a shift at work, she heads to her job at a restaurant in Beverly Hills. It’s a very attractive French-themed brasserie with a lot of framed posters of old French advertisements. The menu has a few traditional French dishes interspersed with Japanese cuisine—very delicious. Sam is such a hard worker. It was quite a crazy schedule to follow, and it was inspiring to see her running around like that. This book
and the documentary mean so much to her. She is like a superhero, living a double life to achieve good things for others. I could see Sam’s eyes glowing when she talked about sharing our story on film and in print.

While I was in Los Angeles, I had lots to do to get my own career going, now that I had finished my studies. From Sam’s flat, I was sending CVs and looking for job ads on the Internet. Even though I had the interview in place with Gerard Darel, I had to keep searching and submitting CVs until I had something secured. Getting a good job in fashion was really tough, and I was looking at everything. My hope was to stay in London, or even go abroad, but I certainly wouldn’t object to Paris. Trying to find a match for myself was really hard, but job-hunting in the company of Sam gave me the most amazing feeling. It was like we were sharing our experiences and things that really mattered together. We were really connected. We could branch away from each other, too, and it would still not break our bond. Every day, being together was more and more normal, not in a boring way, but in the best way possible. We were living together and acknowledging that our lives were now intertwined. We would grow old and share memories together. We were starting to build our own stories now, too. I no longer had to check my phone or her Facebook every morning to make sure she was real. We were living things together now, be they touristy fun things or everyday errands. It was not only about discovering each other anymore—it was sharing.

I enjoyed watching Sam prepare lines for auditions. It was fun to see her rehearse and watch her build her characters. Now, every time I look at her tapes and sketches on the Internet and see her in films, I see her very differently. She is the character. I know it’s called “being an actor,” but I am still
amazed how she acts and how she has to move differently, being someone else suddenly. It was funny to discover what was happening behind the cameras of the TV shows I usually watched from my laptop in Europe. One day, we watched Sam’s friend Kanoa on a set. He was part of the production team, and I could see how long it took to make even a small scene. So much patience was required, as even the shortest skit had to be done and redone up to four or five times. The actors had to be prepared to repeat and repeat, until there was satisfaction that the take was the best possible.

This is also very similar to the fashion industry in a way. Everyone has to work very hard under enormous pressure on a short run. You prepare for such a long time for a very short artistic appearance; then your product is unleashed and becomes property of the industry. It was great that Sam and I could understand each other in the stress of our work. Both of our pursuits are very intense and exhausting, but we do them with passion, and we both take it personally when our efforts are rejected.

I spent a lot of quality time with Sam’s friends. When she was working, I would spend time with them on my own. It was strange how quickly I bonded with them. I guess Sam’s and my physically identical resemblance was reassuring, even though it could also be disturbing. Past that awkwardness, I felt like I had known these people for ages. The similarity of our friends was a reflection of our own similarities, of course. We thought similarly, and therefore we developed friendships with like-minded people who shared our personalities.

Now that I was in Los Angeles, I could also do my testing with Dr. Nancy Segal at the Cal State–Fullerton campus. The whole twins-separated-at-birth experience was so interesting, especially the whole nurture vs. nature question.
When I was a kid, I felt everything about my personality was shaped more from my education and my environment than my genetics. Now my perspective was changing. I was amazed to discover so many common points with Sam, from our body language to our personalities. I am not saying that everything is genetic, but I was very surprised to see how much of who we are is anchored deep within our genetic makeup.

Sam and I had a few hours of tests, which were quite humorous to do. Many of my tests were in French, so as not to give me a disadvantage. There were life history interviews, IQ tests, special cognitive ability tests, personality inventories, self-esteem scales, job satisfaction questionnaires, and medical life histories. I could not wait to see what our studies showed, although we hadn’t finished all of the testing. It felt amazing to know that Sam and I were part of something that could help people understand more about the development of human personalities.

While I was in Los Angeles, Sam and I discussed going to Korea together. Sam was interested in attending a gathering sponsored by the International Korean Adoptees Association (IKAA) that would take place in Seoul from July 29 to August 4. She had heard about it from a friend of hers who was going, Dan Matthews. Dan was a Korean adoptee who had been raised in Southern California. He was very involved in the adoption community, and when Sam had met him for the first time a few months earlier, he had mentioned the IKAA gathering in Seoul. He strongly encouraged my sister to look into it, saying it would be a great experience. He said that the two of us would have the chance to bond with other adoptees and just hang out in Korea. Although there were other, smaller gatherings in other cities with Korean adoptee populations on an annual basis, Seoul only happened every
three years. It was a special opportunity to bring adoptees back to their homeland. Sam was very keen on the idea, but I was a little more hesitant. It was all a little rushed, and it was a huge decision.

Also, Sam was so stressed about the gathering and all the details, I was not sure I wanted to go. I may have been scared about going and finding things I did not want unveiled. Some things are better hidden, as long as you are happy. Sam had been to Korea the year before, and she had an idea of what I would probably go through emotionally. I liked the idea of hearing the stories of other Korean adoptees, but I didn’t necessarily want to discover things about myself, too. It wasn’t the past that worried me; it was the feelings buried deeper inside.

We were also writing to our birth mother, as had been suggested by Ben Sommers, Sam’s social worker at Spence-Chapin. I felt very anxious about this. Sam and I were sitting on the couch in her living room and trying to say something to a woman who we didn’t know. We guessed she knew who we were, but it was so scary to choose what to say. We were constantly changing the subject or writing things that were not connected, as we had trouble focusing on the main point at the same time. When one of us finally focused, the other one would make a joke, and vice versa. Suddenly, I got very emotional. It was weird how out of the blue this can happen, a rush of feelings surfacing when you don’t want them to, but not being able to do anything about it. It was so comforting to be near Sam, because I knew I could weep or shout or anything, and she would understand. I trusted her, and her alone, to reason with me about my emotions and validate them.

That letter took ages to get written. Sam’s mum had
sent us some photos of our trip to London and a published book filled with letters from birth mothers to their biological children. The letters had been sent with the kids when they were adopted and had been assembled for a book,
I Wish You a Beautiful Life: Letters from the Korean Mothers of Ae Ran Won to Their Children
. Some of the letters were so touching. I never thought or imagined there could be so many reasons for a kid to be adopted, and I guess it had been easier for me to simplify my own story by saying, “I am angry, you abandoned me, end of the story.”

Still, writing to that woman was strange. I felt like I was cheating on my parents. My parents are the people who raised me and helped me grow up. Some kids don’t look like their parents even when they are their biological children. I am speaking of them physically, but I am also speaking of their personalities. We have so many genes of our ancestors within us, and there are so many different combinations possible within all this lottery of genes and alleles.

I had watched a documentary on twins from the National Geographic channel where they were showing how some characteristics that were within you could also be deactivated or activated by your environment, which explained why Sam and I were half so identical and half two very distinct persons. In finishing our letter to the woman who gave us our genes, our structure, we let her know that whoever she was and whatever the reasons were, we were thankful she gave birth to us. That was all that mattered. Sam and I had found each other, and we had our lives to spend together now. We were not angry. When she felt ready, we could meet her, and we would still like to know what happened someday. I felt relieved once we wrote that letter. It was best to do it with Sam. Writing to her and marking her as the starting point of
our life was like going back together to the moment we were conceived. I was slowly getting used to our story becoming more and more real and taking shape.

Finally, Sam and I made our decision to book a trip to Korea for the conference. I felt so happy with Sam, and was thankful she convinced me to make the IKAA trip. I felt like she was being the older sister this time, even though I usually thought it was me. It felt good for someone else to lead the way and even better to know we would see each other again soon. The L.A. trip had helped us discover more about each other, including the differences in our lives, which made everything that much more exciting. We still had so much to learn from each other. Our story was still going on, and I never wanted it to stop. I was leaving L.A., but I missed Sam already.

korea

I hate losing time. Already there isn’t enough of it in the day, which is why traveling can be daunting. The hours and hours on the plane getting to the destination seem wasted, especially when you are waiting to see your sister.

July 26 was going to be a huge travel day, about thirteen hours in the air to get from Los Angeles International Airport to Incheon International Airport in Seoul. I was meeting Anaïs in Korea, the place where we had first been stripped from our birth family, the common factor for all internationally adopted Koreans. This was the last place I had contact with my sister before our separation. Anaïs and I were coming back to explore our history and experience it alongside the five hundred other adoptees who were attending the IKAA conference.

Before leaving my apartment, I did what I always do—I woke everyone in my family, wherever in the country they might be, and told them that I was going somewhere. My brother Andrew especially hates it. I always call him enough times to wake him from his deep, bearlike slumber and say,
“I’m going to _____.” He usually replies, “That’s cool, Stinky,” in a groggy, half-impressed, half-cavalier voice. After Andrew, I call my grandmother and my parents. You never know what might happen when you get on a flight, so you have to make sure to tell your loved ones that you love them.

James, Ryan, and I were traveling together. At the airport, we found out we were on the same flight as Dan Matthews, the friend who had turned me on to this trip. He was a musician, and he worked for an Asian-American entertainment company that had a huge YouTube presence. His musical talents were even going to be on display at the Hybrid Club Vera in Seoul, as he had been selected to take part in the closing concert, which, in his words, was the most epic and fun night of the conference.

Dan and I had met for the first time over brunch a few months earlier, right before I met my sister for the first time. He hadn’t known it when we first met, but unbelievably, he was also an identical twin separated at birth. He discovered it right after my trip to London to meet Anaïs. When I got back, I hung out with him a second time and showed him the pictures of Anaïs and me together. They totally blew him away. He said he had started a birth search of his own to put together the pieces of his own bloodline. He hoped to be finding out a few details quite soon.

A few weeks later, at the very moment Anaïs and I were picking out souvenirs from a shop on the Venice Beach boardwalk, Dan sent me an e-mail with the subject line, “Sam . . . I think I have a twin, too.” His message read: “Hey, Sam, read below. I’m not even fucking kidding, but I was just told that I might have a twin as well. We need to chat soon. Dan.”

Wwwwhhhhhhatttt?! The person who had told me about the conference, my Korean adoptee confidant, was a
twin, too?! It was insane, like a Dr. Phil–worthy coincidence. According to what Dan had learned, his birth parents hadn’t been able to afford to take care of both him and his twin brother, so he had been given up for adoption. His twin still lived with the birth family, and Dan was going to meet all of them for the first time when we were in Korea.

I was so honored that Dan was able to share such intimate information with me that I was literally moved to tears. But I also tried to imagine his twin brother’s position. How do you process that information when your mother gives it to you? Guess what?! You have a twin brother who I gave away, and he will be here in two weeks to meet you for the very first time! Yay! Although I had been through something strikingly similar just a few months earlier, both Anaïs and I had been given away, so we were more on equal ground. I was stunned by Dan’s story.

In the airport, Dan was filming, too, which made for a subtle battle of the film crews. Luckily for Dan and me, their territorial issues were very much secondary to the events unfolding in our lives. I had already met my twin, so I had my experience to share with him if it could be of any comfort. “This is crazy, Dan,” I cautioned him. “Once you step foot on the plane, it becomes real. After this trip, your life will never be the same.” Anaïs and I had been lucky to learn quickly how to just breathe and let life take us where it would. I wanted Dan to feel the happiness and joy in his new adventure in life, not dwell on all the potentially negative aspects of his situation. For a second, I saw myself in him. “Don’t be scared,” I told him. “Life will never present challenges to you that you cannot handle.” He started to smile as he heard my advice, and by the time he was rocking back and forth and
spastically scratching his chin with a nervous energy, I knew he’d be just fine.

Incheon International Airport, Seoul’s gateway to the world, is unbelievably organized and very high-tech. Anaïs had landed before us, but Oliver, a friend of a friend, had picked her up and was taking her around Seoul, and she was meeting us at the hotel. My friend Sue was picking me up. She had been my homeland tour guide the year before, and with her motherly energy, my mom, she, and I had established a very strong bond. She made me proud to be Korean by showing me the strength and determination of the Korean people, the people whose blood runs through my veins. Although Korea may not have meant much to me in my childhood, it did now. After seeing how large a role nature plays in our lives, as per my ever-growing relationship with my sister, it meant even more to stand proud and say, I am Korean. Plus, Sue always fed me the most AMAZING Korean food, and everyone knows food is the way to my Seoul—I mean soul.

I had truly never imagined that I would be back in Korea so soon. Yet here I was, and there was Sue, emerging from the crowd of Koreans in the terminal. Sue isn’t a genetic relation, of course, but I consider her family.

On our trip from the airport to the hotel, Sue and I talked about the entire past year. She had seen Anaïs’s and my story on the news and had even showed me the video clip from a Korean national news program. It had pulled some of the footage on our Kickstarter trailer and pictures on our social media platforms. It was really both bizarre and thrilling to see that so much care and effort had been taken to tell our story, especially by people who had never met us, let alone talked to us. In fact, my lack of privacy was terrifying, but I
quickly got over it, since I had made the choice to publicize the private part of my life. Press is a funny thing. Although it is quite invasive, it allows us to reach many people in what is a very positive way for us. In return for going public, we received messages via all our social media outlets—Kickstarter, Facebook, Twitter, and more—from adoptees who had been moved by our story. Some have decided to start their own birth searches just because of us. Sue even begrudgingly granted Ryan permission to film the two of us together, for the sake of the story.

Sue was no ordinary tour guide. She gave tours throughout the year, but the roots tours, like the one I had been on the year before, were the most dear to her. In fact, she specifically requested to be the Korean leader of that tour group every year. She took so much pride in showing adoptees their homeland. Besides being a guide, she also served as a translator for reunions between adoptees and their birth family and/or foster family. It took an incredibly strong human being to loan herself as the main support in such intense situations. Without her, the families would never be able to communicate. She devoted her life to making others happy. Of course, she is a twin, too. Sue’s identical twin sister lives in Oregon. They hadn’t been separated, but her sister had met a man from the States and moved there to be with him. Incredible how my life kept putting me in touch with twins.

Sue took us to our hotel right near Myeong-dong, the busy, hip shopping district in Seoul. It was not exactly the Times Square of the city, but sometimes it felt like it. Our hotel was Hotel Biz and was most definitely not the Ritz. We reached it only after turning down three or four alleys off the main road. Right outside the entrance was a heaping pile of cat poo. Believe me, in the Korean summer heat, it wasn’t
pleasant. The concierge inside was remarkably hospitable, telling us where our rooms were and what hours breakfast was served. We put our bags in our tiny rooms with rock-hard beds. The wallpaper in the room was patterned with landmarks of London. How funny is that? Of the thousands of hotels in Korea, we stay in one with London-themed wallpaper. My eye was immediately drawn to the image of the London Eye, reminding me how much I had experienced in just the past five months.

Korea in the summer is brutally hot and humid, with temperatures climbing to what feels like a billion degrees. By the end of the day, you are salty, sticky, and sitting in a pool of your own sweat. I was already drenched by the time we got the bags to the room, so I took a quick shower and waited for Anaïs. When she finally got there, we hugged and jumped up and down a hundred times. I loved seeing her. She felt like . . . my sister. Even though we were in touch daily online, that wasn’t even close to being with her in person.

Being apart didn’t feel wrong, per se. But when we were together, it was like a fairy tale, a honeymoon, so right that it was almost too good to be true. Our bond has been hard to explain. There were so many things in the past that we still didn’t know about each other, yet there was almost no need to discuss them. We had a much deeper understanding of each other that completely surpassed having experienced everyday communication for a consistent twenty-five years. In life, there exists sympathy and empathy. I have both of those with Anaïs, as I am certainly able to relate to, identify with, and have compassion for the feelings she is going through. But what I have with her is beyond that. I have literally felt in my body what she is feeling. I know exactly where in her throat she gets choked up when she gets upset and the blood
rushes to her face. I know how hot it actually feels. It’s not telekinesis that we share, but the ability to recognize and fully experience what the other is going through. Don’t get me wrong—it’s not all the time and obviously the situations differ, but the raw feelings of emotion that are evoked inside my twin can be felt in the exact same places in my own body.

Our hug fest ended when I said I was starving, so we headed to the Myeong-dong market, where the prevailing population of shoppers seemed to be young Korean couples. Everything seemed brand-new, colorful, and vibrant, with street vendors selling every kind of merchandise and food in the world. We met Sue at a Korean BBQ that she recommended, where we indulged in steak and beer while she got to know my sister.

The next morning, we headed over to the Lotte Hotel, the venue hosting the conference. It was a beautiful, upscale hotel staffed by exceptionally beautiful and hospitable people. It was only a ten-minute walk from the Hotel Biz, but in the Korean heat, I felt like I was trekking across the Gobi Desert. On the way, it started pouring and in no time, my shoes were ruined, Anaïs’s shoes were ruined, the equipment was in danger, and the rain kept coming. We stopped into a convenience store to grab some inexpensive umbrellas, rain boots, and ponchos. Some advice to those who might find themselves in this kind of predicament in the future—don’t wear a poncho in the sweltering heat of Korea when it rains, because your own stench gets caught under the plastic and you smell for the rest of the day. We could all smell Ryan mixed with plastic for days afterward, and we didn’t let him live it down, and thus we coined him as the smelly friend. (There is always one.)

After we had registered and signed up for a few
seminars, we took one of Seoul’s inexpensive cabs to Gyeongbokgung Palace, a massive tourist attraction that gets extremely crowded, especially on Sunday afternoons. The beauty of the place was that when you were facing it, you could see only the mountains in the background, so you had no human artifacts to detract from what it must have been like hundreds of years earlier. Then, when you turned around to face the city, you see an ancient palace wall backlit by massive Samsung buildings and water fountains in Gwanghwamun Square. It is a lovely reminder of how far and how quickly the country and city has built itself up, a true representation of old and new. I had been to the palace the year before, but I wanted to show it to my sister. I wanted to imagine us running around the grounds in a past life together. I guess a girl’s dream of being a princess never goes away.

That night, Kanoa and Tomas arrived in Seoul. Tomas had seen my stress over the documentary production, and he offered to pay for Kanoa and him to join us and help out. His support was so incredible that my gratitude was beyond words. Kanoa was not only my best friend, but my sister had a teenager-like crush on him, with his handsome hapa face, so his presence made her all the happier, too. The four of us were quite hangry, our way of saying angry from being hungry, so we found a random Korean restaurant, the only one that seemed to be open. No one in the establishment spoke English, and the food was so spicy that Anaïs and I, who have a pretty high tolerance to spicy, couldn’t even finish. The only way we could communicate with our server was by playing charades.

The next day, the IKAA conference got under way. It was sponsored by Samsung, so we could expect a highly professional, very carefully planned agenda beginning with the
opening ceremonies. When we arrived at the Hotel Lotte, there in the lobby was Dan being followed by his film crew. We had a pretty good laugh about how both Korean adoptees from L.A. had film crews following them around. I was like a living stereotype—I was an actor, which meant I was a waitress; I was Asian, which meant I was a terrible driver; and I was from L.A., which meant that my life was a reality show. At least I broke the stereotype by being bad at math (and I would soon have the IQ test to prove it).

The conference’s opening ceremonies included a pre-recorded speech by the president of Korea, Park Geun-hye. So much care had been taken to make this conference special, and to have someone as important as the president of Korea welcoming us home was so moving. It reinforced the thought of how much love went into the process of adoption, even though at many times, the conversation was about the negative. All the important people from the adoption community were there, too, including representatives from all the adoption agencies. I was so engulfed in the ceremony that I had no idea Anaïs had begun to cry until I glanced over at her.