A pair of Chinese twin sisters who were separated at birth were reunited on live television show Good Morning America.
The 10-year-old identical twins, Audrey Doering from Wisconsin and Gracie Rainsberry from Washington, were separated at birth in China and then adopted by two different American families.
As the long lost sisters were for the first time on, the pair broke down in tears whilst embracing each other.
Audrey had told ABC that she asked her parents for a sister last Christmas but could never have imagined that she had an identical twin on the other side of America. “I thought my parents were, like, playing a joke on me.”
Gracie expressed her happiness and excitement, saying the experience was “very overwhelming”, whilst Audrey said, “it felt like there was something missing”.
“I was, like … started to cry a lot, and my mom kept on asking me … what my crying was for, and I was saying, ‘I don’t know,” Gracie said. “I didn’t know what to think.”
Gracie also added that she and her new sister have a great deal in common, “We both love chicken Alfredo. That’s like one of our favorite foods. And we both love mac ‘n’ cheese.”
Furthermore, both twins suffered heart conditions – Gracie underwent two heart surgeries, whilst Audrey underwent one.
Jennifer Doering, Audrey’s mother, told ABC News that it’s “the craziest thing in the whole wide world to look at your child exactly. I mean, everything was the same. The same hair, the same glasses, the same outfits.”
Whilst looking into Audrey’s past with a Chinese researcher, her curious mother discovered a photo of her daughter with her her foster mother who was carrying another baby that also resembled Audrey.
Doering became curious about her daughter’s past while she was trying to find a Christmas present for her. With the help of a Chinese researcher, she discovered a photo that depicts her daughter on the knee of her Chinese foster mom, who is also carrying another baby that looked just like Audrey.
“As soon as I had that picture, I was desperate to find out … who that other child was,” Doering said. It later unraveled that the other child was her daughter’s twin and was adopted in the US too.
“Oh, it was unbelievable. I’m like, ‘How?’ I mean, this is stuff you read about,” Doering said. “And how, how could it really be that there are two of them?”
With the help of Facebook, Doering found Nicole Rainsberry, Gracie’s mother.
“I mean, it’s hard to process that information,” Rainsberry said, “It was so crazy to be looking at what looked like Gracie, but knowing that it wasn’t Gracie.”
