Bordier Anais - Separated @ Birth

the first time i caught a glimpse of her

Saturday, December 15, 2012, was the most incredible day of my life. On this day, while sitting on a double-decker bus near Oxford Circus, shivering from the winter rain and rushing to the warmth of my shared flat in Finsbury Park, I discovered there was a young woman in America who looked exactly like me! Her image, a screenshot from a YouTube video, had been sent to my cell phone by a friend. The young Asian woman so closely resembled me that she had to be my double!

The day had started out like any other: an early morning wake-up followed by two cups of strong French coffee and a few bites of a croissant. I wanted to stay in bed and out of the rain, but I had an important missionto find fabrics for my designs that I would be presenting in the Central Saint Martins graduate fashion show in the spring. All final-year students at the University of the Arts Londons Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design would be presenting six pieces in May, and in ninety seconds, each of our collections, which had taken an entire final years worth of energy, would be up and down the catwalk. But when this requisite was behind me, I would receive a degree in fashion design from one of the top fashion schools in the world. Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Stella McCartney were among its distinguished alumni.

I was well on my way to having the drawings/design portion of my portfolio ready, so I could now start collecting my fabrics. Christmas break was looming, however, and I had a lot to do. After breakfast, I went to Soho and looked over the excellent inventories at my three favorite fabric stores, secured a few swatches that I really liked, and was settling myself on the bus back to my flat when my cell phone buzzed. It was a notification from Facebook, alerting me that a friend, Kelsang, had posted something on my wall. I opened my Facebook wall immediately, only to have my breath taken away. There in front of my eyes was a screenshot of a presumed stranger, but whoever she was, she had the same eyes, the same skin, the same hair length and color, the same nose, and the same smile as me.

My Internet connection on the bus was really bad, so I couldnt do any more investigating until I got home, still twenty minutes away. I was in complete disbelief. I was adopted from South Korea as an infant and raised in France, so all my life, I had wondered if there were people out there who looked like me. The girl grinning back at me on my Samsung Galaxy looked so much like me that I thought one of my artistic friends might be pranking me. They were all very creative, and could manipulate images with ease, and they all loved a good laugh, so it was reasonable to think this could be a joke. Every possibility of who this girl might be consumed me for the remainder of the ride. Was she a doppelgnger? Was she a relative? Was she real? Was she an impostor? Did she know about me?

When I finally got home, I ran straight to my computer. It turned out Kelsang had been surfing through YouTube videos when he had stumbled upon my look-alike. She was an actress in a short video called High School Virgin, a staged comic piece where she was playing the role of a teenage tease. The entire video was only four minutes long. My double had a forty-second speaking part, but as none of the four actors was credited, I didnt have her name. The more I watched the video, the more I thought I was looking at myself, except for the American-accented English. (When I speak English, I do so with a British accent.) But other than the accent, I could not find a single difference that would distinguish one of us from the other. All I could find were the similarities. Who was she? I knew I needed to find her.

I got in touch with Kelsang as fast as I could and asked him how he had come across the video. He told me he had been doing some research, and it had popped up on the right side of his computer screen. The female character had looked so much like me that he had posted her picture to my Facebook wall for me to see. I didnt ask him what he was researching that would bring up a title called High School Virgin, because that was his business, but I was thankful that he had. I love everything about Kelsang. He and I have been friends since my second year at Central Saint Martins. He is Tibetan, came to school with more experience in fashion than I did, and is always teaching me personal fashion tricks.

Part of my intrigue with the mysterious American stemmed from the fact that I was adopted. I dont have any siblings and I dont resemble anyone in my family, including my European parents, Patricia and Jacques Bordier. My mother is blond-haired and blue-eyed, and my father is as French-looking as they get. Even though there is a neighborhood in Paris with a very small Korean population, it was nowhere near Neuilly-sur-Seine, where I lived. I knew other Asians, but I didnt look very much like them, either, although people joked that we all looked alike. A lot of French people tend to think of all Asians as Chinese.

I had one Korean friend, but she was eight years older. She had been adopted, too, and coincidentally she was also named Anas. We went to the same Catholic school in Neuilly, Institut Saint Dominique. When we had glasses on, we looked quite similar. Anas was like a big sister to me when I was growing up, protective and kind. We had become friends when I was five and my mother had come to pick me up in the schoolyard at dismissal. She called my name, so the other Anas turned around, too. Our mothers started talking, and it turned out the other Anas had also been adopted from South Korea. It was nice to have that in common with someone.