When I first met the Danish twins Steffen and Patrick in 2011, it was simply another professional assignment.
I had been hired as the Thai researcher, facilitator and translator for the Danish television programme Sporløs, which helps Danes reunite with family members they have lost contact with or, as in many adoption cases, biological relatives they have never known.
I had worked on similar searches before and have done several more since. My job is to follow the available clues, locate people and places, make contact and help overcome language and cultural barriers. If the search succeeds, I am also there to translate when the person searching finally meets the person we have found.
These can be intensely emotional encounters. But once the cameras have left and everybody returns to their lives in different countries, maintaining the relationship can be difficult. After a year or two, contact often becomes less frequent.
Steffen and Patrick’s story has been quite different.
Fifteen years later, their biological mother, Mayuree, she still calls me regularly, sometimes almost every week. She cannot speak English and her sons do not speak Thai, so quite unexpectedly for all those years I have remained a small bridge between them.
This summer, I visited Steffen and Patrick and their adoptive parents in Denmark. The young men I had once accompanied going upcountry in Thailand to look for their mother were now both fathers themselves.
The story didn’t end in Thailand
Steffen and Patrick were adopted by a Danish couple when they were only two years and five months old. They grew up in Denmark knowing they had been born in Thailand, but knew little about the family they had left behind.
That was the case that Sporløs came to Thailand in 2011 to solve.
Eventually, we found Mayuree, and Steffen and Patrick were finally able to meet their biological mother as well as siblings they had never known.
For the television programme, that reunion was the culmination of the story. For the family, it turned out to be the beginning of another one.
Over the following years, Mayuree continued to call me. Sometimes she wanted news about Steffen and Patrick; sometimes she simply wanted to talk to someone connected with the two sons living so far away. I translated her requests and sent them forward to the twins.
Steffen and Patrick, meanwhile, remained connected with their Thai siblings through Facebook. They could not easily talk to each other, but they did not disappear from each other’s lives.
Fifteen years later
Fast forward to my visit this year, 2026, to Denmark, where my husband and I were invited to join Steffen and Patrick for dinner at the home of their parents, Anton and Marrit Agerskov, where the family was celebrating their father’s birthday.
Their parents had once run a farm with more than 200 pigs. Now retired, their father has sold the business and built a new home on an old farm property not too far from the previous farm..
When we arrived, both twins came out to welcome us.
Patrick was there with his wife and their two children. The older child, August, was almost three years old and the youngest had been born only about three weeks earlier. Steffen also has a three-year-old daughter, although she and her mother could not join us that evening because the little girl was unwell.
Seeing the twins again made the passing of fourteen years suddenly very tangible. The two teenagers I remembered from their journey to Thailand in 2011 now had children of their own.
While we were sitting together, I opened Messenger and video called Mayuree.
Suddenly she was there on the screen, looking into the Danish home where her sons were sitting with the parents who had raised them.
It was already late in Thailand and Mayuree had been sleeping, but she got up to join us. Soon she was sitting with tears in her eyes, looking at Steffen and Patrick and at her grandchildren in Denmark.
Patrick’s wife was moved to tears as well.
Other members of the Thai family joined the call, and Steffen and Patrick saw their three siblings, a girl and another set of twins boys, now also grown up. We exchanged greetings and I translated where necessary.
It was not a long conversation, but it didn’t need to be.
As we talked afterwards, I was surprised by how clearly Steffen and Patrick still remembered the journey we had made together fourteen years earlier. They remembered their mother, their siblings, places we had visited and things that had happened during filming.
They still follow their siblings’ lives on Facebook. Photographs and occasional video calls may not overcome the language barrier, but they have been enough to keep the connection alive.
“And our parents chose us”
Later that evening, the conversation went further back, to the decision that had brought Steffen and Patrick to Denmark in the first place.
Their Danish mother told us that before the adoption she had suffered eleven miscarriages. Eventually, she and her husband began considering another way of becoming parents. They decided to adopt.
They were offered a choice in Thailand: a child of around five years old or twin boys aged two years and five months. As their mother reached this point in the story, Steffen interrupted her with a smile.
“And our parents chose us.”
Everyone around the table smiled.
It was only a short sentence, but it said a great deal about how Steffen and Patrick see their adoption. They had not simply ended up in this family. They had been wanted.
Their parents had always been open with them about their origins. The twins themselves remember little about leaving the orphanage in Thailand. They were too young to understand that the Danish couple who had come for them were about to become their mother and father.
Their father still remembers the first days together in Bangkok. Before flying home, they stayed at the Baiyoke Tower Hotel on the 32nd floor, where the two small boys were frightened when they looked down from the window.
Years later in Denmark, Steffen and Patrick began asking different questions. In kindergarten, they noticed that the other children had blond hair. Their parents had blond hair.
Why did they have black hair?
The answer was never hidden from them. They grew up knowing that they came from Thailand and had been adopted, while apparently never doubting that the Danish couple raising them were their parents.
Sitting around the dinner table decades later, that bond was unmistakable.
There was also something else that struck me as Thai. Steffen and Patrick had spent less than three years of their lives in Thailand and had been raised entirely by Danish parents. Yet in the way they spoke to their parents, the respect they showed them and the quiet gratitude with which they talked about what their parents had done for them, I recognised values that are deeply familiar to me from Thai family life.
Perhaps it was simply the way their Danish parents had raised them. Perhaps I noticed it because I am Thai myself. But sitting there watching them together, I could not help thinking that there was something very Thai in the way these two Danish sons treated their parents.
Coming home with their own children
Today, Steffen and Patrick have jobs, homes and families of their own. They remain close to their parents and visit regularly, usually bringing their children with them.
Watching the grandchildren running around their grandparents’ home, I thought about how the roles had changed.
Once, Steffen and Patrick were the small children being brought home by their new parents. Now they were fathers bringing their own children back to the people who had raised them.
Their lives are rooted in Denmark. It is where they grew up and where they are now raising the next generation.
But Thailand has not disappeared.
There is still a mother called Mayuree and there are brothers and sisters whose lives they follow from afar. Knowing their Thai family has not competed with their love for the Danish parents who raised them. Both can be part of the same story.
And perhaps that is what makes this particular Sporløs assignment so special to me.
I have helped with other searches before and since. I have witnessed the moment when someone finally meets the person they have travelled halfway around the world to find. There are tears, embraces and sometimes answers to questions that have been waiting for years.
Then the production team leaves.
Fifteen years ago, the cameras also left Steffen and Patrick and their newly found Thai family.
But somehow the story continued.
Sitting in Denmark this summer, watching Steffen and Patrick with children of their own, I realised I was seeing the sequel that we could not possibly have filmed in 2011.
The cameras left long ago.
But the connection remained.
