Free Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited by Anais Bordier, Samantha Futerman

happy for all my life, even if I couldn’t make a living from it.
    I am happy I went to design school. I got to meet a lot of people from all over the world, and it was from there that I found Samantha. It was my destiny. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been in London, so I wouldn’t have met Kelsang, so he wouldn’t have known to show me KevJumba’s video, and I might have lived the rest of my life never knowing Samantha existed.

6
SAM
    we. are. family. get up, everybody, and sing!
    When I was a kid, I always wanted my parents to get another child. I wanted a younger sibling, someone to take care of, despite the fact that I loved the attention and glory of being the one and only baby girl. And let’s be honest, Asian babies are cute. Naturally, as a baby and little girl, I got a lot of attention, not only from my family, but from friends of the family and strangers as well. I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy it. Still, a sister would be cool. I was always envious of the girls who could wear their big sister’s clothes to school and then get into a fight with them about it at recess. I certainly wasn’t going to wear my brothers’ cut-off shirts and smelly sneakers. They didn’t even fit!
    I really wanted a little sister, so I could paint her nails and do her hair. I wanted someone to look up to me, and I wanted to give her all my wise knowledge. Being a little girl myself, I’m pretty sure I didn’t have much knowledge, except for how to tie my dance shoes properly and how many times in a row I should brush my hair to make it shiny, something Ilearned on the many sleepovers I attended, where my friends and I watched the movie
Now and Then
.
    Of course, if I were going to get a little sister, my parents would have to “buy” her, too. At times during my childhood, I joked to my parents that they had “bought” me, although I never resented that I was “at cost” to them, and I was never angry that they wanted me because I was a girl. In fact, I actually didn’t find out that they specifically wanted a girl until I was much older. But, if they hadn’t wanted a girl, I wouldn’t be here today, so how could I be mad at them for that? I never felt like I was a purchase. But, I guess in some sense, joking is a passive-aggressive form of confrontation. Sometimes you need to laugh at a situation and call it out for what it really is. But the truth is that my parents wanted another child to love for the rest of their lives, and that was that.
    I don’t think I ever imagined having a twin. I mean, as I got older, I wanted to find someone who looked like me. Yes, a lot of Asians look alike. There, I said it. But I had yet to find someone in the world who I thought looked just like me. I’m incredibly short and have a really strange profile, freckles, boobs, and a butt. These aren’t the typical Korean attributes. Not that my brothers have a striking resemblance to my parents, either, but I never even had the option to look like someone. How would I know what to expect? What wrinkles am I going to get? At what age will I start to get fat? Will I have spider veins? I had no model on which to base my theoretical “aging” scenario.
    As a kid, I remember thinking about my reflection. When I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see a small Asian girl. I saw a small white girl. I aspired to have the blue eyes and blond hair like seemingly everyone else in Verona, NewJersey. Yet I wasn’t disappointed when I looked in the mirror. I guess my image of beauty came from my family. When I imagined myself being beautiful, it was looking like my parents and my brothers. But my reflection brought me back to reality. I never imagined being able to stand across from someone, look directly into her eyes, and see myself.
    I have always known that I was adopted. It is like knowing that the grass is green and the sky is blue. Some parents choose a particular time or an “appropriate” age to tell their children that they