Other than the fact that they both are clearly Asian, Becca Webster and Dee Iraca don’t look alike. Not that all twins are identical, of course. But they share almost zero physical features, and also have personalities that are vastly different.

So after returning to South Korea for the first time since they were adopted — in 2018, when Dee, then a Denver, Colorado-based chef, was tapped to cook for the USA Olympic Alpine Ski Team at the Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang — and after a visit to the agency they were adopted through in 1973 raised more questions than answers, the two women who had been told all their lives that they were twins agreed: We need to finally get a DNA test.

That spring, Dee, who now lives in Davidson, North Carolina, and Becca, a Concord resident who works as a nanny, dropped saliva samples into the mail.

Becca and Dee have an elaborate and amusing story about how simple user error caused them to spend three days believing their 23andMe tests had determined they were in fact not related — before realizing they had failed to click on the link that would show them their matches.

But in the end, it was finally settled, after almost 45 years. They were, indeed, fraternal twin sisters.

Besides each other, though, the test yielded no other results of note, and the law of diminishing returns applied to the every-few-months email digest Dee and Becca got from 23andMe with new sets of matches. They only ever produced cousins several times removed.

Not that the sisters were looking, or hoping, for anything in particular. It was just the novelty — which eventually wore off.

Then one afternoon in August 2021, more than three years after they’d done the tests, Becca opened her email to find a message that someone had sent to her through 23andMe’s system ... from a woman claiming to represent her birth father.

She immediately called Dee, who had an identical message. They both noticed they had a new match: “Father.” The username was “Mr. P.”

“Wwhhhh — whaaaaat?” Becca remembers thinking. “I was just in shock.”

A few minutes later, the phone started ringing.

Rebecca Kimmel also was adopted from Korea as a baby, a few years after Becca and Dee.

For her entire life, Rebecca had believed the backstory her adoption agency originally provided about the way she became an orphan.

But in 2018 — while preparing to return to the country of her birth for the first time as part of a “homeland tour” for Korean adoptees — Rebecca obtained information from her adoption agency in Seoul that conflicted with what she’d been told about where and how she was found.

From there, she went down a serious rabbit hole.

After her tour, Rebecca continued to pore over her adoption records. Eventually, her research led her to information that she says suggested she was a twin. That discovery led her in 2020 to a post on Korea Adoption Services’ family search bulletin board, which aims to reconnect adoptees searching for their birth families.

The man who’d written the post was looking for his long-lost twin daughters, who he’d not seen since the day they were born. He seemed fuzzy about when exactly that day was, even fuzzy about the year in fact.

Rebecca felt like she had to chase the lead though. She successfully located him — Park Jong Gyun — living alone in a tiny home on the South Korean island of Jeju. There, he told Rebecca that he and his wife, who had three sons already, were persuaded by hospital staff to give up their twin daughters on the day they were born — and then he and Rebecca took a DNA test to find out if this was a genuine reunion. They both hoped it was. But Rebecca and “Mr. Park” learned it was not.

She returned to the U.S. deflated. Before she got on the plane, she suggested to Park and his middle son, Young-bu, that they take a genetic test that would share results into a vast database. Rebecca bought a pair of 23andMe test kits, created accounts for them that she agreed to monitor, and collected their saliva samples. Back home, she mailed them out to be processed.

Three weeks later, on Aug. 12, 2021, the results came in. Rebecca jumped up and down on her bed when she saw them, screaming excited screams.

She sent individual messages through 23andMe to both of the women who had matched as Park’s daughter. She monitored the inbox until she saw one of them had read it. She waited for a response. In the meantime, because one of the women had a username that looked like a real name and also had listed her home state, Rebecca found a cellphone number.

The first time, she was sent to voicemail. It was hard to know what to say, so she just said something along the lines of this: “My name is Rebecca. I somehow met your birth father in Korea. Please call me.” She waited, impatiently again, then not long after, tried the number again.

This time, the woman, Becca Webster, picked up her phone.

Becca was struggling to process what Rebecca was telling her over the phone.

“Before we got into it too much,” says Becca, recalling her initial conversation with this strange woman, who quite clearly could hardly contain her excitement. “She’s like, ‘I know you have a lot of questions. It’s a lot of information. Let’s do a Zoom call with your sister.’ So we set it up for within the next hour.”

It’s true: Becca did have a lot of questions. For instance, How did this woman get her phone number? What was this woman doing with an account that appeared to belong to a man calling himself “Mr. P”? Are we somehow being played here?

“It was so unbelievable,” Becca says, that she actually called 23andMe just to see if they could tell her if this was a scam.

Becca describes her and Dee’s initial Zoom call with Rebecca as “a tornado of information.”

It took days for her explanation and her revelations to sink in. Then the following week, just as the sisters were starting to get their bearings back, they were in surreal territory again — on a Zoom call with their birth father.

Through a translator, Park told Becca and Dee a story that flew in the face of the one that was on their adoption records, which simply stated they’d been found abandoned on a sidewalk. The truth, he said, was that his pregnant wife was sick. That she’d had an emergency C-section. That one of the twins was born weak and in need of special care. That his mother and his wife’s mother were summoned to the hospital to help them make a decision, and that there was basically a mutual agreement to give them up for adoption due to the couple’s financial hardships.

Rebecca was incredibly eager to get the sisters to Korea. Park was too. From a logistical standpoint, it was a significant challenge, but finally, Dee, Becca and their husbands boarded a plane bound for Seoul this past October.

The moment Park embraced his twin daughters for the first time since their births in 1973 was as complicated, emotionally, as you might expect.

“It sounds a little harsh when I say this,” Dee admits, “but even if we might have talked on the phone a couple times, or we wrote a letter, or Zoomed ...

“It’s like meeting a stranger.”

But while so much of the next two weeks was filled with strangeness, and with complicated emotions, it was also filled with unexpected and simple pleasures.

When Dee and Becca hugged him at the airport before leaving to return to Charlotte, Park no longer felt like a stranger. Becca and Dee, meanwhile, are still adjusting to their new normal.

“We’re trying,” Dee says, “to figure out what having a relationship moving forward looks like. Because we want to have a relationship, and we’re happy to know now, and know more about our story, and the truth, and all of it. It’s just ... it’s a lot, you know?”