Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
(By Yunte Huang)
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| Author | Yunte Huang |
Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited
portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811–1874), twins
conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused
liver, who were “discovered” in Siam by a British merchant in
1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost
implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston
in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy
showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads
of rural America to bring “entertainment” to the Jacksonian
mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich
southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in
twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just
another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation
of America’s historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal,
for tyrannizing the “other”—a tradition that, as Huang
reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.”
