Twin Korean Girls Meet UPDATED

“Two years ago, on a chilly, gray, rainy Saturday afternoon in London, Anaïs Bordier received a screenshot, sent by a friend, of a young woman in America who looked exactly like her.

“I was shocked,” Anaïs says today. “I didn’t understand . . . who could that be?” Electrified, her next thought was to find out more about this girl. And just as quickly, she dropped the idea.

Anaïs was adopted as an infant from South Korea and raised as an only child in Paris and Brussels. She knew nothing about her biological mother — only that her adoption papers listed her as a single live birth. That’s why, Anaïs says, “I didn’t think she could be my twin. But the resemblance was so strong that I thought she might be related to me to a lesser degree — like my cousin or something.”

Meanwhile, her friends poked around the Web and found the same young woman — a 25-year-old actress named Samantha Futerman — in an online trailer for a movie called “21 & Over.” This time, Anaïs investigated.

 

“I found her date of birth,” she says. “What are the chances you find someone adopted from the same country, same town, who was born on the same day?”

She thought of “The Parent Trap,” starring Lindsay Lohan as a tweenage girl who discovers her long-lost identical twin.

“So this time, I had no fear,” Anaïs says. “I thought we could be twins, and twins have a very strong bond. So I made the sudden decision to message her.”

It was Feb. 21, 2013. She sent Samantha a friend request on Facebook that read, in part:

“I stalked you a bit and found out you were born on the 19th of November 1987 . . . and discovered you were adopted too. So . . . I don’t want to be too Lindsay Lohan, well . . . but . . . how to put it . . . I was wondering where you were born?”

And then, Anaïs waited.

In their new book, “Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited” (G.P. Putnam’s Sons), Anaïs and Sam tell their stories, in alternating chapters, of life apart and, now, together. It has been only 18 months since they’ve been in contact, and when Sam got Anaïs’ first message, she was unmoored.

“I felt shock and awe,” Sam says. “When I saw where she was born and adopted out of . . . I think I was just taking it all in.”

Sam couldn’t bring herself to respond immediately, but in her bones, she already knew.

“That entire day, I’d just keep randomly turning to my friends, saying, ‘I have a twin! I have a twin!’ ”

It took Sam two or three days to reply. Anaïs was going crazy.

“It was extremely stressful,” she says.

Sam was still absorbing the possibility that this was her twin and was so emotionally overwhelmed that she shut down. “I held off for a little bit,” she says. Her parents, who raised Sam in Verona, NJ, were skeptical. Football player Manti Te’o was all over the news, caught in a scandal over whether he knew his online girlfriend had been a hoax all along. Her father worried Sam might be a similar target of so-called “catfishing.”

 

Eventually, Sam’s curiosity won out, and on Feb. 26, they had their first Skype session: Anaïs in London, where she was studying fashion design at Central St. Martins, and Sam in LA, where she was working as a waitress/actress.

“Seeing Anaïs on Skype was unreal,” Sam writes. “I had never seen anyone who looked even remotely like me, let alone my exact mirror reflection. She had my laugh, my freckles, and that profile. When she turned to the side during that first Skype session, I was blown away. I stopped for a second and freaked out inside.”

For Anaïs, that Skype session was all the proof she needed — especially when they compared baby pictures: They had the same expressions. They learned that throughout their girlhoods, they had had the same series of haircuts in the same order. They both hate cooked vegetables, carrots especially. They both have the same manner of speaking, trailing off mid-sentence. They both brush their teeth multiple times a day, have a fear of being grazed by a shower curtain, freely admit to Napoleon complexes, and require 10 hours of sleep a night, plus daily naps.

They were supposed to talk for 90 minutes and wound up going for three hours.

“I wanted to see her in person right away,” Sam says.

“I wanted to get on a plane immediately,” Anaïs says. They took a DNA test, only to prove to ­others what they already knew.

It would be two months before they were in the same room. Both sets of parents were happy for the girls, but livid that the adoption agency in Seoul had lied, had separated the girls, had robbed them of 25 years they could have had together.

“My parents were angry, for us and for themselves,” Anaïs says. “They would have been so happy — both our parents — to raise twins at the same time.”

Not much is known about adoption practices in South Korea in the ’80s, but single mothers there face a stigma and will disappear for months to “birth houses,” where they hide until they give up their babies for adoption.

Sam immediately got in touch with the agency in New York that brokered her adoption. While she and Anaïs waited for the results of their DNA test, she learned that the equivalent of her birth mother’s Social Security number also appeared on Anaïs’ papers, and that they had both been born at the same clinic in the city of Busan. The clinic had long since closed, and the doctor who delivered them had passed away.

A caseworker contacted the woman listed as the biological mother. She denied ever having given birth to them.

Anaïs doesn’t think about that too much. “I put it aside,” she says. “I wasn’t disappointed, but I wasn’t relieved, either. I have no idea who she is or what she does. I put it aside, and we’ll see what happens in the future. Maybe she’ll contact us. Maybe she never will.”

Sam, however, thinks about her birth mother often. “It’s a bit overwhelming to hear that someone you think you might love wouldn’t be reciprocating,” she says. “I also feel an immense sadness for her. That she would feel so much guilt or sadness or pain that she would have to deny us . . . My sister and I do love our birth mother. She gave us life.”

On May 13, 2013, Sam flew to London to meet her twin sister. She had spent the last two months getting funding together for a documentary about their separation and reunion, and she had timed her visit to Anaïs’ graduating fashion show. She drove to Anaïs’ flat in Shoreditch, the documentary crew, family and friends all acting as buffers.

When she opened the door and entered the room, the two girls stood apart, silent, staring at each other. Someone yelled at them to hug, but neither girl could move.

“It was very strange,” Anaïs says. “Physically, very strange. I would describe it as opposing magnets attracting each other. It’s like seeing a mirror that doesn’t react the way it should.”

She crossed the room and poked Sam in the forehead. Anaïs says she felt like she was in a sci-fi movie or an alternate reality, and literally thought that if they hugged, “an explosion might happen. I felt like we were in two parallel rooms and we shouldn’t be standing in the same place. I needed to make physical contact with her, to check that I wasn’t dreaming. And when I poked her, I knew that she was real.”

Sam burst into laughter; she wasn’t that surprised. In the weeks since she and Anaïs made contact, she had been working with Dr. Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University-Fullerton. “I’ve seen videos of other long-lost twins reunited,” she says, and poking is commonplace. “It’s a safe distance to be away from someone but confirm that they’re real.”

 

After the reunion, the entire group went out to lunch, then left Anaïs and Sam alone. They went back to the Shoreditch flat to take a nap, sleeping side by side. “Maybe this was our way of resuming our story where it started — twins in the womb,” Sam writes. “We were resuming our life together, waking up with no fear of ever being separated again.”

That night, they got the results of their DNA test, and to no one’s surprise, they were, in fact, identical twins. It was Segal who delivered the news, and she was uniquely qualified to help the girls navigate this new reality: She had been a lead researcher in a 20-year study called the “University of Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart.” One hundred thirty sets of such twins had participated, and one of the most groundbreaking findings was the dominance of nature over nurture when it comes to intelligence, athleticism, vices, partner preferences — even hair length.

Anaïs and Sam have each undergone testing by Segal, and even they were stunned by their similarities. “It tells you a lot about human nature,” Sam says. “I thought everything is nurture, but a lot of it is nature. All of our cognitive abilities are exactly the same — when you look at the data, they are parallel.”

In the months after their reunion, Sam and Anaïs have learned of two other sets of twins born in South Korea, separated at birth and reunited later in life. They also met a third pair of South Korean-born siblings who not only found each other but discovered that they are actually triplets, and that their birth parents kept their lost sibling.

And one month after Sam found Anaïs, she got an email from her friend Dan, also a South Korean adoptee. He had just begun his own birth search a few weeks before. “I’m a twin, too,” he wrote. “I’m not even f- -king kidding.”

Anaïs and Sam both hope their story may help other long-lost siblings find each other. Along with “Glee” star Jenna Ushkowitz — herself adopted from South Korea at age 3 and raised in East Meadow, LI — Sam has co-founded Kindred, an organization that aims to give financial and emotional resources to adoptees and orphans worldwide. Their documentary will make the festival rounds in the next few months, and this week they’ll see each other for just the eighth time ever, in New York.

They talk all day, every day about the important and the mundane. A typical text from Anaïs, says Sam: “I want to drink my tea, but I can’t because it’s too hot.”

Today, Anaïs lives in Paris and Sam in LA, but they hope soon, somehow, to live in the same city.

“All I want from my sister is to spend time with her, to call her after work and say, ‘Hey, want to get dinner?’ and to see her weird habits,” says Anaïs. “We are starting our life and going in the same direction. Ours is a love story, but it’s a family love story.””

Twins separated at birth reveal their incredible reunion story[NY Post 10/19/14 y Maureen Callaghan]

One of the Captions reads “The twins outside Holt International Children’s Services.”

REFORM Puzzle Pieces

 

 

 Update:“Anais Bordier and Samantha Futerman have the same laugh and the same freckled cheeks. They wear their hair the same way and have since they were babies. They share a hatred of cooked carrots, a love of the same color nail polish and the need to sleep 10 hours a day.

The pair tease, poke and prod each other like they’ve grown up together, but they didn’t. Neither woman knew she had an identical twin sister until less than two years ago.

That’s where the power of the Internet, a lot of luck and a series of “what ifs” enter the picture.

I sat down with the 26-year-old sisters in Central Park recently to talk about their new book “Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited,” which chronicles their thoroughly modern reunion.

Bordier, who grew up in Paris, is an aspiring fashion designer who was studying in London. On a Saturday in December 2012, while she was on a bus, a friend sent her a screen shot of a YouTube video featuring Futerman, who is an actress.

“I’m automatically thinking, ‘Oh, who posted a video of me on YouTube?’ ” she said with a laugh. The resemblance was uncanny. When she got home, she looked again and realized it wasn’t her but a girl who looked exactly like her who lived in the United States.

She looked for credits on the video to find the woman’s name but couldn’t find anything, so she dropped the matter.

That was until the same friend who sent the screen shot said he saw the girl from the video in a movie trailer, also on YouTube, about a month later.

Bordier’s investigative instincts kicked into overdrive. She learned Futerman’s name and discovered they shared a birthday and were both adopted in South Korea.

“I stalk her a little bit more, learn that she was actually born in the same port city in Korea, and yes, started looking through all her pictures.”

She got up her nerve and decided to contact Futerman via Facebook, sending her a friend request and a message.

A modern day “Parent Trap”

The similarities between her story and the film “The Parent Trap,” featuring Lindsay Lohan in the most recent version, were not lost on Bordier. She wrote in her message to Futerman: “I don’t want to be too Lindsay Lohan, well … but … how to put it … I was wondering where you were born?”

Futerman, who was raised in Verona, New Jersey, and who has two brothers (her parents’ biological sons) and a half-brother from her father’s previous marriage, at first didn’t know what to make of Bordier’s friend request and message.

“It’s pretty strange to get a message from yourself on Facebook,” she said. “It’s a really weird experience.”

It took her a few days to respond.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this could actually be true,’ ” Futerman said.

The first time they talked on Skype, they were supposed to chat for 90 minutes but ended up talking for three hours — a conversation that proved to be life-changing.

“We were 25 at the time, and it’s like that quarter-life crisis thing when you think it’s all downhill,” Futerman said. “I have to buy my health insurance. I’m getting kicked off my parents’ (plan). There’s nothing good any more, and then it teaches you that anything’s possible.”

For Bordier, an only child, discovering she had a sister was amazing, but realizing that she had a twin was “even crazier, because you have so much in common.”

“You have a very strong bond that you can’t actually explain, but we understand each other without even really talking,” Bordier said. “I could see her body language. … We understand each other right away.”

Their first meeting: ‘Really scary’

A DNA test proved what they already knew — that they were, in fact, twins — and now they planned to meet in person for the first time in London.

“The only way to explain it is being the most intense long-distance relationship and talking over months on social media and Skype,” Futerman said.

But connecting on the Internet was one thing; meeting in person was “still really scary,” she said.

Bordier said she found herself at that first meeting needing to keep her distance, because it all felt “very strange,” but at the same time wanting some proof that her identical twin sister was real.

“So I just poked her,” she said during the interview, at which point they both laughed. That same laugh.

Their reunion, which they each chronicle in alternating chapters in the book, is also part of a documentary, which they are producing and hope to release next year.

The support they have received as their story has gotten national attention and the interest they have had from other adoptees and twins have motivated them to try to raise awareness and provide resources for international adoptions.

“It inspired us to become something bigger than just ourselves and to share our story for a reason,” Futerman said.

She and Bordier have teamed up with Futerman’s friend, fellow actress Jenna Ushkowitz, a Korean-American adoptee and cast member on “Glee,” to start a foundation called kindred. The foundation is focused on helping adoptees, both in the U.S. and worldwide, with family reunions and any other issues they might encounter.

“It’s such a joy to find your family,” Bordier said. “I guess when you’re adopted, you’re always looking for somebody that looks like you, that will understand you.”

Both women say their parents are delighted with the news, although they were upset initially, since neither set of parents knew the girls had a twin. Their adoption papers list their births as a single birth, they said.

“Of course, my mom was very protective and said, ‘We would have taken both of you’ when they felt that we were missing out on growing up together,” Futerman said.

They have tried to reach out to their birth mother but reveal in the book that she has not been interested in connecting with them.

“If we’ve learned anything in this story, it’s that things will happen as they should,” Futerman said. “And if one day she wants to reach out to us, then we’re here, and we’re willing, and we’re ready.”

An unbreakable bond

Though they still live halfway around the world from each other, Bordier in Paris and Futerman in Los Angeles, they text multiple times every day.

“Basically, I wake up to 20 text messages, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘I’m on my way to work.’ ‘It’s cold out,’ ” Futerman said. “It’s just completely arbitrary things that happen during the day. And it’s constant.”

Bordier says Futerman is always waking her up in the morning via text because of the time difference. She’ll get messages like, “Wake up, you’re late,” she said.

“It’s amazing to feel that someone is always awake somewhere in the world, and you feel protected,” Bordier said.

They may have been torn apart as babies, but they say they are now forever bonded.

“We’re not worried about being separated again,” Futerman said.”

Real-life ‘Parent Trap’ for twins separated at birth, reunited on Facebook [WGN 11/13/14 by CNN]

Update 2: Now, A movie has been made. Twinsters. See http://live.huffingtonpost.com/r/segment/twinsters-documentary-long-lost-identical-twins/559be82602a760f4bc000063 and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2980626/.

The storyline is “On February 21, 2013, Samantha, an American actor living in Los Angeles, received a message via Facebook that would drastically change her life. It was from Anaïs, a French fashion design student living in London. Anaïs’ friends viewed a video on YouTube featuring Samantha. They were immediately blown away by the identical appearance of Samantha & Anaïs. After a few light Google stalking sessions, Anaïs & her friends discovered that both girls were born on November 19, 1987 and adopted shortly after. Anaïs knew immediately that it was possible for Samantha to be her biological twin sister and reached out to her through Twitter & Facebook. This sparked the beginning of the journey for Samantha and Anaïs. “