I was too young to fully appreciate the idea that this was the country of my heritage. The trip was more emotional for my parents than it was for me. The Korean people were fabulous and welcoming. Some people in the adoption agency in Paris had told my parents that it might not be a good idea to bring me there, because the people feel humiliated that they cannot take care of their own. We found that they couldn’t have been more hospitable toward all of us.
Upon our return, my teacher invited my parents to make a presentation about Korea to the class. Mum and Dad created a slide show and brought all the trinkets and souvenirs we had bought, including a hanbok, the national costume. I modeled it for the presentation. It was gorgeous, with beautiful vibrant colors, a great big skirt, a tiny jacket, big sleeves, and embellishments of ribbons. The presentation turned Korea into a real place for my classmates, who had been prone to think everything Asian was either Chinese or Japanese. Many of them hadn’t even heard of Korea. They asked my parents a lot of questions, confirming their curiosity.
A few days later, someone who wasn’t in my class said on the playground that I was Chinese. One of the boys in my class corrected him. “Anaïs isn’t Chinese,” he said. “She is coming from Korea.” I finally had an identity that other people could now understand and they would not lump me in with all Asians anymore. I know that they didn’t mean any harm by it, but they didn’t really know or care about what country you might come from. Some French kids were snobby, too, especially at my school, which was almost exclusively French. It was hard to pinpoint exactly what made me uncomfortable, but Neuilly was filled with rather conservative families who could trace their ancestries back for generations. Some of the teachers had been at the school so long, they had instructed the mothers and grandmothers of my classmates. French schools were strict and competitive with rigid, old-fashioned ways. In Belgium, we wrote with pencils, but here we had to use quill pens. Although I was ambidextrous, I tended to use my left hand, but the French educators were trained to encourage us to be right-handed. Parents were really invested in having their kids be the best at everything and applied lots of pressure. I was a good student because I had a lot of pressure on me, but it was a lot of stress.
In sixth grade, I had to choose between English and German for my second language. I knew a little English, as I had spent three weeks in London when I was eleven. I had stayed with my Japanese-American friend Miku and her family. Miku had a Japanese mother and an American father. We had known them in Belgium, but they were now living in the Wimbledon area, southwest of London, which had a thriving expat Korean community. It was my first time living in a neighborhood with people who looked something like me, and it was great. We ate lots of Korean food and went to lots of places that had Korean takeaway, something we didn’t have in Paris. The children had folders of tiny Korean stickers, another novelty for me. The stickers were colorful, glittery, weirdly shaped animals or Korean characters that we did not have in France. Besides the thrill of being in a Korean community, I also learned a little English.
• • •
When the time came to choose between German and English, I wanted to study German, despite my previous exposure to English. But then Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire happened. I had read the first three installments in French, but I wanted to read the fourth one the moment it came out, which meant it would only be available in English. At eight thirty a.m. it went on sale for the midnight release in New York, and I went to WH Smith booksellers at Place de la Concorde to wait. WH Smith was the one English-language bookstore that I knew would be carrying it, and one half hour later, promptly at nine, when the doors opened, I headed straight to the stack of books, grabbed my copy, and made my purchase. I spent the summer reading it in English with the help of a French/English dictionary. By the end of the summer, my English was pretty good, and I opted to take English as my second language. There were going to be other Harry Potter books coming, and I had to be prepared.
When I was fifteen, I wanted to change my birth date from November 19, 1987, to March 5, 1988, the day that I first arrived in France and my life started. We called it my “Arrival Day,” and it was far more important to me than my actual birthday. On March 5, we’d always go to Samo, our favorite Korean restaurant on Rue du Champ de Mars. We loved to order the bulgogi, Korean BBQ. We’d eat out on my real birthday, too, but not necessarily at a Korean restaurant. I just liked my Arrival Day, the day I became part of my real family, better.
In Saint Dominique’s secondary school, which is equivalent to American high school, the academic pressure was insane. Classes were from eight a.m. to six p.m., and we had a four-hour test every Wednesday to train us for the baccalaureate, on top of our schoolwork and tests from our regular classes. Besides the academics, there was also the annual theatrical production. In my baccalaureate year, the equivalent of a senior year in high school, I designed the whole set, from conceiving how it would look to doing the drawings we would work from. It was so fun, I considered doing something with theater professionally. However, my parents were not very enthusiastic about that. They thought child actors and models were exploited and advised me to wait until I was eighteen if I wanted to pursue anything with theater. I also liked acting and being onstage, but I was entering art school and didn’t see the point. I always thought that I would catch up with cinema at some time, either in costume design, set design, or acting. I loved going to the movies and the theater, but there weren’t many roles available for Asian-looking people.
Right until I graduated from Saint Dominque, I was vacillating between medical school and art school. When my biology teacher heard I was considering art, he tried to talk me out of it, convinced I was meant to study biology. My test scores were so high, he hated to see me pursue anything else. There was a feeling that for good students, the better career choices were engineer, politician, doctor, or attorney, so why would you go to art school?
My mother wanted me to become a doctor. She thought it would be a good profession for me, and it would offer me a steady and secure income. She also knew it would allow me great flexibility to choose where I wanted to work. Surprisingly, it was my father who helped her accept that I was going to art school. He thought I would be disappointed with medicine, either doing research with very little money for my lab or being a general practitioner and finding it boring. He knew I was passionate about art, even if I had to be a starving artist. He believed it would make me 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 I
learned 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, New Jersey. 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 are adopted. But, for me, there really wasn’t a chance that I wasn’t adopted—my parents are a different race. It was never a problem for me, because it wasn’t presented as such. My mom was my mom, my dad was my dad, and my brothers were my brothers.
Adoption was always part of the Futerman family plan. My parents discussed it early on in their relationship. The idea appealed to both of them. They say it wasn’t for any altruistic reason. They weren’t looking to help a “poor orphan” somewhere. They just wanted to have one or two biological children and adopt one or two more. Little did they know, they would end up with bratty me—and maybe a French “plus one.”
And so the plan went. They already had two biological sons, my brothers, Matthew and Andrew, when they started the process to adopt a third child. Apparently my mom had been putting Andrew’s baby clothes into storage boxes when the feeling hit her that she wasn’t done. Either that or she was manifesting the beginning of her mild hoarding syndrome—not legit, just diagnosed by a couple of perceptive individuals, myself included. My parents began with a domestic adoption agency, Catholic Charities, but they were told the wait could be eight to ten years, and they didn’t want to wait that long. Their sons were both under the age of six, and they wanted their next child to be relatively close in age to them. As this was going on, Matt made a new friend at preschool, an adopted Korean girl. My parents liked the idea of adopting a child from Korea and asked the girl’s parents how they had gone about it.
My parents were told about Spence-Chapin Adoption Services, and they took the recommendation. At the agency, the intake person explained the adoption procedures, paperwork, and parental age requirements so clearly that my mother was scared that she and my father might not qualify. Next came the discussion regarding fees and expenses. Now my parents were not only scared but shocked. The costs were very high, between New York agency fees, Korea agency fees, foster care fees, airfare for the baby, and airfare and fees for the baby’s escort. At the time, babies were “escorted” to the parents’ home country. Few, if any, parents actually picked up their child in the country of birth. My parents weren’t poor, but they weren’t rich, either, and they wondered if they could really afford it. There were also the eighteen years of costs to raise me, and college tuition . . . but, hey, I think it was a safe business investment. My parents did, too. They took a second mortgage on their home in Verona, to pay the expenses.
Spence-Chapin was extremely thorough. The social workers not only talked to our family pediatrician, but they investigated our neighborhood to be sure that a Korean child would not have trouble living there. There was a family meeting at the agency with my parents, Matt, and Andrew. My parents also attended one or two group meetings with other potential adoptive parents, which, they said, felt like group analysis. All of this, of course, was to prepare them for how the arrival of a Korean baby would change, and add to, their family dynamics.
My parents filled out mountains of paperwork. Because they already had two sons, it was mentioned that they could request a daughter, and although there was no promise, every possible effort would be made to see this happen. It was also mentioned that considering their ages—my dad was in his early forties, my mom was in her late thirties—Korea would not approve another adoption later down the road. So, my parents’ initial plan of “one or two biological children and one or two adopted” turned into “one adopted.” They requested a daughter and began the wait.
Less than a year after starting to work with Spence-Chapin, my father received a phone call that their baby had been born. He ecstatically located my mother to tell her it was a girl. Although I had been born in November 1987, my parents first heard about my birth in January 1988.
To announce my arrival, my father sent bouquets of pink flowers to both my grandmothers with a card that read, “It’s a girl!” My maternal grandmother was working in a small children’s clothing store at the time, and the owner of that shop sent my parents the entire girls’ display from the window. My paternal grandmother, meanwhile, bought every pink item of clothing she could find.
Then came the scary news. The social worker called my parents to say that the Korean agency had reported that I had a serious birth defect, so serious, in fact, that my parents could refuse me and take the next baby available. My parents were thinking . . . eleven fingers and twelve toes . . . no face . . . half panda. To be certain my parents understood what they were getting into, the agency in Korea sent them three pictures of me, one where I was being held by my foster mother, and two where my arm with the “serious birth defect” was circled and highlighted with arrows. My mother has since been told that this strawberry patch was once considered a sign of bad luck in Korea, but we are not sure if it meant bad luck for the child or the parents, or if this is even the truth. A medical report was forwarded to our pediatrician, and the “serious” defect was nothing more than a raised strawberry patch birthmark, known as a hemangioma, on my left arm. Our doctor assured my parents it would be gone before my second birthday.
My parents did not delay with the adoption. In my mother’s heart and mind, I was her baby, even if the hemangioma had been problematic. My foster mother wrote my mom and dad a letter in Korean, which the social worker translated and read to them over the phone. It said that I was her first foster child, and that she never put me down, but always carried and cuddled me. She warned them that I had my days and nights confused, and although I would fall asleep eventually, I preferred to be held on her shoulder to do so. How unbelievable to have been loved so much by my first caretaker.
My parents had a wait of more than two months to finally meet me, so they had time to prepare my nursery, set up my crib, and baby-proof the house. Mom also received her special gift from Dad—whenever a bab
y arrives in my family, my dad buys Mom a piece of jewelry to commemorate the event. For Matt’s birth in 1982, Mom got a diamond band ring. For Andrew, born in 1985, Dad gave her a diamond necklace. When I was born, she got a gold bangle bracelet with bits of jade and emerald, the green gems chosen to represent Korea.
On March 21, 1988, my parents, accompanied by my two brothers, drove to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport to await my arrival. It is so strange to think that only two weeks prior, six time zones away, a French couple was picking up a little Korean girl at Paris’s international airport—a baby born the same day as me.
Throughout the adoption process, my mother’s motives were transparent—she wanted her third baby, end of story. She hadn’t worried about taking care of a third one, as she already had a supremely supportive, loving family. What my mother didn’t tell me until very recently was that the night before I arrived in New Jersey, she had a major panic attack. Suddenly, she felt guilty that she had subconsciously been “stacking the deck” to ensure herself a daughter. She also feared that bringing me to New Jersey was selfish and not the best choice for me, that she wasn’t as capable of taking care of three young children, that our town would not accept me, that I would have no friends. Overcome with anxiety, she fell to pieces, crying uncontrollably in the shower. She managed to pull herself together for the trip to the airport on very little sleep.
Separated @ Birth: A True Love Story of Twin Sisters Reunited Page 6