At their first meeting they held hands nervously, played with their dolls to break the ice and then wouldn’t let each other go. The three-year-old girls, Mia Funk from Chicago and Mia Ramirez from Miami, looked and acted just like sisters.
Now, in a remarkable tale of coincidence and discovery beginning in a Chinese orphanage and ending in an emotional reunion sparked by some internet sleuthing, two sets of parents are working out how to bring up the twin girls living 2 240km apart. ”It has to be a miracle of God,” said Douglas Funk, the adoptive father of the girl he and wife Holly named Mia Diamond before bringing her to a new life in the United States two years ago.
”What are the odds that of all the people in China these two are sisters? What are the chances of the two of them getting together to find each other? It’s amazing.”
The girls were taken in, separately and unidentified, by the children’s welfare institute in Yangzhou, a city in the heart of Jiangsu province, after they were abandoned a week apart. In a country where parents are normally allowed only one child, there is nothing unusual in finding newborn girls discarded at the roadside.
It was only when Diana Ramirez of Pembroke Pines, a Miami suburb, wrote about her daughter Mia Hanying’s forthcoming birthday on an internet site for parents who had adopted from the orphanage that Mrs Funk saw the message and began to wonder. E-mails were exchanged, followed quickly by DNA tests that showed an 85% likelihood the girls were sisters. With unidentified parents this is the highest possible reading.
”We found out that they had the same name and they were both three years old,” Mrs Funk said. ”We swapped pictures and they looked so much alike. Then we found out they were found at the same spot. It’s an awesome thing, a miracle. In the sea of humanity, these kids found each other.”
After chatting several times on the phone, the twins wore matching Chinese outfits for their first face-to-face meeting at Chicago’s O’Hare international airport. They stared at each other in fascination before tentatively holding hands and gradually becoming friends as they played with dolls and a musical lamb that Mia Diamond brought as a present for her sister.
”They’re inseparable,” Mrs Funk said after a weekend visit from Mrs Ramirez and Mia Hanying, who came to Florida to join her new parents last year after being held back from adoption for 12 months by medical treatment of a heart defect that is now cured.
While the reunion brought joy, both families realise it will also create hardship as the fraternal twins grow up so far apart from each other. ”It’s a little bit of a distance, but whenever we can we’ll get together,” said Mrs Ramirez, who has two sons aged 13 and 10 with her husband Carlos, a building contractor. ”I want to have them speak on the phone frequently, as they live in different states.”
The Funks, who have five biological children aged six to 21, and have adopted a four-year-old Taiwanese boy since Mia’s arrival in July 2004, plan to visit Miami in October. ”It’s like an in-law situation with the Ramirezes and us, we’re going to be family,” Mrs Funk said. ”We plan on letting them get to know each other.”
Psychologists say twins who grow up apart can end up embittered, and that studies have shown fraternal or identical twins who grow up together have happier relationships. ”Adult twins who only met in their 40s or 50s often have resentment at having lost time together, but the parents of these girls will do a wonderful job in not letting that happen,” said Dr Nancy Segal, director of the Twin Studies Centre at California State University, Fullerton.
”They can only get together as often as time and money allows, but I don’t see them suffering. There are photographs, the internet, telephone calls, so much that can be done now to stay close that couldn’t several years ago.”
Mrs Ramirez said: ”You keep thinking how is this thing possible.” The answer lies in the internet and DNA technology, which have broken down the barriers to what were once closed histories. Many websites have been set up to link families who adopted from the same towns or orphanages overseas, and testing has proved several blood relationships that would otherwise have gone undetected.
Backstory
The number of American families adopting children from China is rocketing, according to figures from the US department of state. In 2005, immigration authorities issued 7 906 visas to Chinese orphans beginning new lives with families in the US, up from 4 681 in 2001. Most are girls, unwanted in a society in which men are traditionally the breadwinners. More than 30-million babies are born in China each year and hundreds of thousands are made available for adoption. The cost varies, but most people adopting spend up to $25 000 plus travel expenses. – Guardian Unlimited Â