Twins born in Indonesia and put up separately for adoption have been reunited after finding each other on Facebook, living just 40km apart in southern Sweden, three decades later.
Non-identical twins Emilie Falk and Lin Backman — strangers until last year — were separated nearly 29 years ago.
According to a DNA test the pair had done two months after reuniting in January last year, there is a 99.98 percent chance of them being sisters.
Photo: AFP
A complex string of events led up to that revelation.
Both were adopted from an orphanage in Semarang in northern Indonesia by Swedish couples, but there was no mention in either of their documents of the fact that they had a twin.
When Backman’s parents left the orphanage with her all those years ago, the taxi driver had turned around and asked them: “What about the other one, the sister?” and they jotted the girls’ Indonesian names down on a piece of paper.
The name helped Backman’s parents track down the Falks back in Sweden and the two families got together a few times when the girls were babies to compare notes.
“They went through the adoption papers, but they didn’t think we were very similar and there was a lot in the papers that didn’t add up ... And there were no DNA tests back then,” Falk said.
Among the discrepancies were different names for the girls’ fathers. And although the records showed they had the same mother, the families eventually decided that this too was an error.
The two couples in the end wrote off the idea and eventually lost touch.
Although their parents had told them the story as children, both Falk and Backman later forgot about it. Growing up, neither was interested in information about their biological background, so they never asked.
“But when I got married two years ago I started thinking about family and my adoption, and when I asked my mother she told me this story again, and I decided to look for Lin,” Falk said.
She had a name and began searching through a network for Indonesian children adopted by Swedish families, and found her on Facebook.
“I was born on March 18, 1983, in Semarang, and my biological mother’s name is Maryati Rajiman,” Falk said she wrote, and quickly received the reply: “Wow, that’s my mother’s name as well! And that’s my birthday!”
They found they had a lot in common.
They lived only 40km apart in the very south of Sweden, they are both teachers, they got married on the same day only one year apart and even danced to the same wedding song: You and Me by Lifehouse.
“It was really strange,” Falk said.
“When Lin called me [with the DNA test results], I remember I was sitting in the car and when she told me I started laughing, because it just felt so strange,” she said, adding: “I suddenly started thinking that we shared a womb. It was really strange, but really cool too.”
Since then, the two have kept in close touch and have talked about going to Indonesia to search for their biological parents.
There are a number of details, some contradictory, in the adoption papers, including a reference to their father as a taxi driver.
“We are very curious if he is THE taxi driver,” Falk said.
Asked if she wished she had found out about her twin earlier, Falk said: “There’s no use in being sad about something I didn’t know about. I am only happy to have found her.”
RIGHTS FEARS: A protester said Beijing would use the embassy to catch and send Hong Kongers to China, while a lawmaker said Chinese agents had threatened Britons Hundreds of demonstrators on Saturday protested at a site earmarked for Beijing’s controversial new embassy in London over human rights and security concerns. The new embassy — if approved by the British government — would be the “biggest Chinese embassy in Europe,” one lawmaker said earlier. Protester Iona Boswell, a 40-year-old social worker, said there was “no need for a mega embassy here” and that she believed it would be used to facilitate the “harassment of dissidents.” China has for several years been trying to relocate its embassy, currently in the British capital’s upmarket Marylebone district, to the sprawling historic site in the
A deluge of disinformation about a virus called hMPV is stoking anti-China sentiment across Asia and spurring unfounded concerns of renewed lockdowns, despite experts dismissing comparisons with the COVID-19 pandemic five years ago. Agence France-Presse’s fact-checkers have debunked a slew of social media posts about the usually non-fatal respiratory disease human metapneumovirus after cases rose in China. Many of these posts claimed that people were dying and that a national emergency had been declared. Garnering tens of thousands of views, some posts recycled old footage from China’s draconian lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, which originated in the country in late
French police on Monday arrested a man in his 20s on suspicion of murder after an 11-year-old girl was found dead in a wood south of Paris over the weekend in a killing that sparked shock and a massive search for clues. The girl, named as Louise, was found stabbed to death in the Essonne region south of Paris in the night of Friday to Saturday, police said. She had been missing since leaving school on Friday afternoon and was found just a few hundred meters from her school. A police source, who asked not to be named, said that she had been
VIOLENCE: The teacher had depression and took a leave of absence, but returned to the school last year, South Korean media reported A teacher stabbed an eight-year-old student to death at an elementary school in South Korea on Monday, local media reported, citing authorities. The teacher, a woman in her 40s, confessed to the crime after police officers found her and the young girl with stab wounds at the elementary school in the central city of Daejeon on Monday evening, the Yonhap news agency reported. The girl was brought to hospital “in an unconscious state, but she later died,” the report read. The teacher had stab wounds on her neck and arm, which officials determined might have been self-inflicted, the news agency