Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited Read Online Free PDF Page B

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 myphone 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.
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    “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 meteach 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.