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    Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
    Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
    Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
    Audiobook14 hours

    Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

    Written by Yunte Huang

    Narrated by P.J. Ochlan

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHighbridge Company
    Release dateJul 3, 2018
    ISBN9781684410613
    Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History

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    Reviews for Inseparable

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    • 4/5
      I stumbled upon this book accidentally, wandering by the "New Non-Fiction" shelves of my public library. I'm glad I stopped and picked it up. The story of Chang and Eng, while not overly remarkable in its strict narrative, provides an important look at how "othered" people both did and didn't integrate into American society of the nineteenth century.As a disabled person, I was naturally most interested in Chang and Eng as people with physical differences who became celebrities as so-called "freaks." Huang certainly spends time on that subject, but the book has a much stronger through-line of how Chang and Eng's Siamese origins impacted their lives in America. (That's unsurprising, knowing that Huang's other biographical work also focuses on intersections of Asian and American culture.) There is a particular focus on Chang and Eng's subtle shift from (public interpretation as) almost bestial, foreign figures to attaining wealth as "white" landed gentry - and back again. To explain this, Huang dips his readers head-first into a rich morass of nineteenth century American culture, with little sojourns into the worlds of P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Nat Turner, General Stoneman, and more. We learn about the various figures who "owned" and managed Chang and Eng as young men, the community of Mount Airy, NC, where they bought land, the families of their wives, and so on. There's even an epilogue where Huang stays the night in modern-day Mount Airy, inspiration for the fictional "Mayberry," to draw a contrast with The Andy Griffith Show, which is openly celebrated there, and the Siamese Twins, who are relegated to a room in the basement of the museum.Of course, I have read criticisms that Huang's style buries Chang and Eng's own story under a mountain of unnecessary additional material. That's not entirely unfair; Huang's literary style is more than a little lofty, and he sometimes makes far-reaching comparisons to justify throwing the spotlight on another famous American, or another significant cultural event, for a few pages. (He even has a slightly odd habit of repetition, or at least a lax editor; I caught half a dozen moments where he offhandedly repeated a small anecdote from earlier in the book). Overall, though, the book adds up to a rich cultural experience precisely because Huang veers around a bit. Chang and Eng's own life story is not overly remarkable - or at least, what can be ascertained by the few documents and artifacts left behind doesn't add up to much. Between the major beats of their narrative is a lot that can only be assumed. By providing us with so much background, Huang allows us to understand the world they lived and operated in, and to speculate for ourselves how they felt, reacted, loved, and lived. In so doing, we might think about how we are shaped by our present culture, too. As readers, we finish Huang's book a little more familiar with two men who, perhaps, still seem very unlike us - and who made their way in an overbearing, adversarial world startlingly similar to our own.
    • 4/5
      This is a very interesting biography of Chang and Eng Bunker, (1811-1874) known as the first the Siamese twins . They were brought to the U.S. at 18 years old to be exhibited in 'freak' shows.. Eventually they gained their freedom and lived as 'normal ' a life as possible. Both married and fathered many children. The book goes into much detail of the times during the civil war. Appears much research went into writing this book. Lots of interesting facts and all put together in a very readable book.
    • 4/5
      The twins are Chinese and were living in Siam. They lived along the river in a houseboat. Their father died when they were young. Their family was of a community known for its ability to market its goods. They were excellent swimmers, hunters, and fishermen – and helped support their mother and siblings.They themselves were “harvested” by a man who traveled the world in search of oddities. He promised their mother he’d bring them back in 5 years; that never happened. They eventually gained their freedom from this bondage and established themselves in America. They lived their lives as normal men – having separate homes and families, fathering 21 children, owning their own land and slaves, establishing themselves within community – while at the same time plying the trade of their abnormality. Living as both freaks and humans at one in the same time, and causing others to deal with this reality. The narrative exposes society’s need to categorize humanity and exclude some from full membership, the role of domination (including that those in slavery become slave owners), and the role of the trickster in America.Page 266Trickster “as a covert but quintessential American hero. …Anthropologists who study the myriad manifestations of the trickster in diverse cultures have all recognized the figure as one of the most archaic of mythical generators. In the words of Paul Radin, ‘Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself…He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possess no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being.”In the American context, some have argued that the confidence man as a trickster is ‘one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers.’…Americans are ‘peddlers of assurance.”In the Jacksonian Age, democracy also became a game of confidence, in the double sense of the word: political representatives gain the trust of the common men and pull a con on them. The most successful politicians…are those who show an extraordinary capacity for identifying the needs of others and playing them for suckers, as a shrewd confidence man would.”narrative includes description of P.T. Barnum as an ultimate trickster Page 297“The Civil War and Reconstruction represent in their primary aspect an attempt on the part of the Yankee to achieve by force what he had failed to achieve y political means…to make over the South in the prevailing American image and to sweep it into the main current of the nation.” ~W.J. Cash, “The Mind of the South” (1941)The war decimated Chang and Eng’s major asset – the 32 slaves they owned.It was after the Civil War that they had to go back on the road again, selling their freakishness in order to survive financially.Page 332The twins lived in Mount Airy, NC, which is also the hometown of Andy Griffith.The Andy Griffith ShowFather Knows BestLeave It to Beaver“classic depictions of 1950s and 1960s American ‘normalcy’… In contrast, the story of Chang and Eng, with their physical abnormalities, double matrimony, miscegenation, and slaveholding, was anything but normal. They were regarded as carnival freaks…, ‘an almost.’To open the door to the twins’ show in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum is in some sense to reveal the ‘underbelly’ of America, to see how the normal is built on top of the abnormal…Preface“To then, being human meant being more than one… They defy what Leslie Fiedler once called ‘the tyranny of the normal’……when we see, once again, a rising tide of human disqualification, of looking at others as less than human or normal…when everyone feels entitled to an opinion but cannot, by virtue of ignorance or innocence, tell the difference between a gag and a gem, between what show biz calls ‘gaffed freaks’ and ‘born freaks,’ the confidence man swoops in to make you feel better while he takes your money, or outright steals your soul. In this sense, the freak show, which lies at the heart of Chang and Eng’s story, is not just about looking at others as less human. To borrow a concept from the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a freak show is a 'deep play.’ Or, in the streetwise lingo of a humbug, it is ‘the long game.’”