It's All Relative by A. J. Jacobs

Author:A. J. Jacobs
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 30

Five Mothers

Back in New York, I’m still in the twins frame of mind, so I pursue a twin-themed idea for the Global Family Reunion. At a party recently, I’d met the producer of a documentary about twins who suggested I screen her movie at the reunion. “It’d fit right in,” she says.

The movie is called Twinsters. And as soon as I start watching it on my laptop, I see what she means. At the beginning of the movie, we meet a twenty-five-year-old actress named Samantha who was born in South Korea and adopted by a white family in New Jersey. She now lives in Los Angeles. One day in 2012 Samantha helped make a silly video about the pitfalls of dating; her scene features her kicking a suitor in the crotch.

Soon after uploading the video to YouTube, Samantha got a weird Facebook message from a French woman living in London. The woman was named Anaïs. She didn’t know Samantha but had been forwarded the video and found it eerie that they looked so much alike: same nose, same cheeks, same freckles. Anaïs had also been adopted from South Korea and had been born on the same day as Samantha—November 19.

“I don’t want to be too Lindsay Lohan,” Anaïs wrote. “But . . . how to put it . . . I was wondering where you were born.”

I later talk to Samantha about the moment she read Anaïs’s message, and she tells me, “I was trying to be rational. I was saying, ‘Calm down, Samantha. The odds of me having a twin I’ve never met are too crazy.’ But another part of me was like, ‘This has to be true.’ ”

Anaïs had grown up in Paris and was now studying design in London. Samantha and Anaïs started videochatting and texting every day. They compared tastes. They both have fingernails painted aquamarine. They both love pickles. They clicked. They coined a nickname for each other, “Fish,” and developed a private greeting, “Pop!”

“You’re already annoying,” a friend said, lovingly, after watching them make faces and weird sounds to each other on videochat.

They took the DNA test and yes, they are officially identical twins, born of the same biological mother.

Neither Samantha nor Anaïs had ever been able to get in touch with their biological mom. They didn’t even know her name. But now, through the adoption agency, they sent a note to Samantha and Anaïs’s biological mom. The woman denied she’d had twins. She said they had the wrong person. When they heard the result, Samantha cried. “Maybe it’s better,” Samantha says now. “It leaves so much hope and possibility, like maybe she’s a superhero and that’s why she can’t tell us who she is.”

A few months after Anaïs’s initial message, Samantha flew to London for their first in-person meeting.

The video of this meeting is both adorable and awkward. When Anaïs arrives in the apartment, they can barely talk. They both giggle for what seems like ten minutes straight. They don’t hug or even touch for a long time.

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