I always enjoy a good history or biography, and was pleasantly surprised to realize midway through this that I'd read something by Huang before (a book on Charlie Chan that unfortunately uses the same "and his Rendezvous with History" tagline). Like Prairie Fires, Inseparable adds to its biographical sketch by adding context of the times of their focus point. Understanding the times a person lived is crucial to setting the scene, and that's especially true with 1800s race relations in the United States, especially pre gold rush where Asians could be invisible in the black-white dichotomy and yet still be viewed as alien.

Structurally, chapters are short and this was an easy read. ( )

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. ( )

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. ( )

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 266
Trickster “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 332
The twins lived in Mount Airy, NC, which is also the hometown of Andy Griffith.
The Andy Griffith Show
Father Knows Best
Leave 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.’” ( )

The 19th-century lives of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original “Siamese twins,” were all the more extraordinary for how ordinary they became — at least according to what the times, and their conjoined bodies, would allow. Two boys from Siam, sharing an abdominal ligament and a liver, went from the humiliations of showcased servitude all across Andrew Jackson’s America to a life of Southern comfort in small-town North Carolina, fathering at least 21 children between them and at one point owning as many as 32 slaves.

“Regarded as freaks, the twins would always have to fight to be treated as humans,” Yunte Huang writes in “Inseparable,” his new history of the brothers. That they would eventually identify as part of the white oppressor class that dehumanized others is one of many paradoxes explored by Huang — a professor of English and the author of a book about Charlie Chan — in this contemplative yet engrossing volume.

Born in 1811 in a Siamese fishing village to an ethnically Chinese family, Chang and Eng turned 18 about a month into a 138-day journey to Boston Harbor. They had been contracted into service by a Scottish businessman and an American captain, who promised the twins’ mother they would bring her sons back in five years. Chang and Eng would never see Siam or their family again.

What followed their arrival was a decade of touring the United States and England as “monstrosities” to be gawked at by paying crowds. But showbiz was only part of the attraction.

As Huang explains, the twins were also served up as scientific specimens “to be inspected, poked, tested and, most important of all, verified” by esteemed members of the medical establishment. Examining the twins, the Boston doctor John Collins Warren — who publicly staged the first surgical use of anesthesia (“like a peep show,” Huang wryly notes) — jabbed their connecting band with a pin, recording the central point at which “both said it hurt.”

Yunte Huang Miriam Berkley
Chang and Eng became an immediate national sensation, giving Huang a bounty of sources from which to choose when tracing the contours of their story. Modern writers like Mark Slouka and Darin Strauss have written novels based on the twins’ lives. A popular biography by Irving and Amy Wallace was published in the 1970s; more scholarly monographs have been published since.

But it’s the contemporaneous accounts that give an unvarnished look at the degradation and disparagement the brothers had to endure. A British visitor recalled grabbing their connecting band, only to have one of the twins say (with what one imagines was barely concealed displeasure), “Your hand is cold, sir.” Philip Hone, the ex-mayor of New York City and an inveterate diarist, recorded his impressions in his journal: “Their faces are devoid of intelligence, and have that stupid expression which is characteristic of the natives of the East.”

As common as such racism was, Chang and Eng happened to arrive in the United States well before the 1849 gold rush, when the number of Chinese living in the country was still negligible, and before Chinese labor was considered a threat to working-class whites. As a result, the official government census didn’t even have a category for Asians until 1870 (when a “C” for Chinese would stand in for all of them). “Before that,” Huang writes, “the Chinese were considered white for census purposes.”

The brothers, then, may have been subject to the prejudice of individual bigots, but when it came to American law, they were able to use loopholes — their ability to blend in, legally speaking — to their benefit. In 1832, the year they turned 21, they claimed their freedom from the captain and his wife, using the money they had saved up to declare a very American independence, going boating at Niagara Falls and buying a horse named Bob. (Chang and Eng kept meticulous ledgers, and Huang deduces quite a bit from their purchases.) They became citizens in 1839, even though the 1790 Naturalization Act — which wouldn’t be repealed until 1952 — was supposed to apply to “free white persons” only.

They were even able to marry white women, despite Americans’ panic at the time over “racial mixing.” In 1843, having retired from touring a few years before, Chang and Eng married Adelaide and Sarah Yates, two sisters from Wilkes County, a rural corner of North Carolina. The couples settled down just outside Mount Airy, N.C. — later the inspiration for the town of Mayberry in “The Andy Griffith Show” — to make room for their sizable families.

Huang devotes a short chapter titled “Foursome” to the question of sex. The couples had to deal with considerable physical and logistical challenges. (According to interviews with their widows, Chang and Eng would alternate weeks as the “complete master” who dictated how he wanted to go about business, with the other brother “blanking out.”) But the widespread social disapprobation that greeted their arrangement was beyond their control. The most vociferous indictments came from the abolitionist papers in the North, which declared “so bestial a union as this” yet another sign of how slavery had corrupted the Southern soul.

And the twins did seem determined to be identified as Southern gentry. In addition to owning slaves, they supported the Whigs and became ardent supporters of the Confederacy, sending two of their sons to fight in the Civil War.

Huang is right to point out the cruel irony in all of this, but when he characterizes his subjects as “two brothers formerly sold into indentured servitude and treated no better than slaves,” he inadvertently downplays the incomparable brutality of the slaveholding system in order to heighten the contradictions.

As Huang shows elsewhere, Chang and Eng were treated better than slaves; if anything, what really rankled them were instances when they compared themselves to white men and felt they weren’t given the respect they were due — such as their first trans-Atlantic journey, when they were booked in steerage rather than first class. In the excellent 2014 study “The Lives of Chang and Eng,” Joseph Andrew Orser argues that the twins deliberately “made claims to whiteness.”

But their intentions were one thing and public perception another. They would always be known as the conjoined brothers from Siam, and after the Civil War rendered their slaveholding assets worthless, they went on tour again, this time with their children, to show the world that their union with two women “was able to produce normal offspring.”

Huang writes movingly about the twins’ painful end in 1874, when Chang, a heavy drinker, died and the teetotaling Eng perished soon after. But it’s in the epilogue that Huang unveils one of his most surprising turns.

When Huang visited Mount Airy, or Mayberry U.S.A., he learned of a Chang and Eng exhibit kept in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum. In other words, a shrine to an American myth of old-timey homogeneity was literally built on the more convoluted reality. Huang knew that the symbolism was almost too much to bear: “As Sheriff Andy says, ‘If you wrote this into a play, nobody’d believe it.’” ( )