Yunte Huang | Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History / 2018

connections

by Douglas Messserli

 

Yunte Huang Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2018)

 

Like his earlier biography, Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang’s newest work on the “original” Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng—who, although living in Siam, were actually of Chinese origin—the author writes on a populist subject in a manner that catapults it into larger contexts of cultural and literary history, personal biography, and racial commentary, even interweaving it with autobiographical details. Huang’s writing, which weaves patterns that few other biographical recountings do, a kind of writing I myself aspire to, wherein everything seems to be related to something else, a kind of coincidence I greatly admire.

      From a fairly straightforward tale of western greed and a slightly more benevolent (if there can be such a thing) slavery—the adjoined boys being sold into performative bondage by Scottish businessman and (what we might describe him as today) gunrunner (he had brought the new Siamese King, Rama III a gift of a thousand muskets) when he bought the boys, held together by a band of skin that apparently connected one liver between them, from their loving by poverty-stricken mother in order to show them as a “curiosity” throughout Europe.

    Huang spends almost an entire chapter explaining the increasingly popularity of human and animal curios, including its US manifestation in the shows of P. T. Barnum, with whom the twins would later have a testy relationship. And even in these early pages, Huang is already connecting Tom Thumb with Melville, David Hume, Captain Abel Coffin, Charles Dickens, Andrew Jackson and numerous others in just a few pages.

     Prodded by doctors and curiosity seekers—among one of the doctors trying to determine the nature of their “inseparable” connection, notes Huang, was Dr. Peter Mark Roget, then secretary of the Royal Society of London, but known today as the compiler of Roget’s Thesarus of English Words and Phrases, a book which nearly all writers keep by their desks (we have two copies in our house and another at my office). Huang cannot resist comparing the “galvanic influence” between the two twins with Roget’s later dictionary of synonyms. It’s his dozens of such connections that make us feel that Huang’s version of the twin’s reality is totally connected with their times. By book’s end he has shown their connections with everybody from Melville, Edgar Allen Poe, and Mark Twain, to Victor Hugo, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and even Rabelais and Diderot. It is as if Huang were the living example of E. M. Foster’s adage, “only connect.”

     The other marvelous aspect of his study, moreover, is just how the author reveals that underneath their seeming “freakishness” and their cultural racist audiences, that Chang and Eng were, in the end, quite normal individuals, young intelligent boys who quickly learned English, flirted with hotel maids (they were, in fact, both loved by one English woman), and were possessed, despite being put on constant display, with a great deal of wit. If Chang was the more outgoing, as Chang grew increasingly inebriated in old age, it was more level-headed of the two, Eng, who had to bring him under control. If they shared that band that bonded them together they evidently did not share the same ideas, behaviors, nor, as Huang makes clear in several chapters, the same wives, despite the fact that their wives were sisters. The author turns things a bit on their head when he finally reveals that one reason the sisters might have determined to marry the so-called “perverse” brothers was the fact that their own mother, weighing in at about 600 pounds, was perhaps an even bigger freak.

      These young boys gradually grew up, saving the money they made on tour, to become rather wealthy landowners who settled in Mr. Airy, North Carolina (that’s right, the television Mayberry of The Andy Griffith Show). And not only did they run successful farms, but, rather shockingly given their own strange histories, held at least 26 slaves. And like many southerners after the Civil War found themselves relatively bankrupt, now forced to pay the former slaves who returned to work for them. While their sons had survived the Confederate army, the fathers were desperate for their survival.

      Not only were they nearly penniless, but one of Eng’s children, Kate, was ill and needed a serious doctor. Chang had already lost a daughter. Accordingly, the two had no choice but to go on the road again, this time bartering with the now also quite poorer P. T. Barnum, who paid their way to Scotland so that they might seek out a doctor for Kate. With that girl and Chang’s daughter Nannie they traveled to Europe once more, an experience that deeply troubled, the innocent Nannie who had not been prepared for the pokings, proddings, and verbal abuses which Chang and Eng had long endured. The consulting doctor reported that Kate had consumption, after which the family returned home, realizing that he had, in those days, given a death sentence to their beloved child.

      Huang’s description of Chang’s death, followed soon after by Eng’s, could make an intense drama by itself. By this time the two had been long arguing, sometimes violently, and Chang, suffering from a winter cold wanted more heat, when Eng was determined to cool down his own house (the twins lived in separate houses, over which they had agreed they would each have control when they were visiting one another—obviously a constant necessity.

       But, even after their deaths, the twins revealed new discoveries and strange facts. The twin’s autopsy was conducted at the Mütter Museum, affiliated with the Philadelphia College of Physicians, and remains as a curio (along with a section of brain from President Garfield’s assassin, a piece of tissue from the thorax of assassin John Wilkes Booth, etc) still today.

      Perhaps the most eerie fact that Huang’s biography reveals is that Mt. Airy citizen Andy Griffith kept in his home basement a memorial to the Siamese twins who had inhabited the nearby country. Huang expresses the ghoulishness of this exhibition best:

 

                         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, in

                         a manner that Leslie Fiedler…dubs the “tyranny of the normal.”

 

The author describes little of what exists in this odd little museum, except for an antique trunk, which might clearly have carried the twin’s clothes across Europe and the US. But the oddest artifact stands in a corner of the room: frames from the extra-wide conjugal bed that was used by the twins and their wives, made of solid pine.

       By the time one has finished reading Huang’s astonishing book, one feels that the twins were not only personally connected through their band of flesh, but were connected to all of American, Asian, and European history, connected in some mystical way with our lives even today. Clearly the issues they faced are so very unrelated to some of the concerns, sad to say, we still face today.

Difference and similarity, oddness and normality, outsiderness and community are still important issues in our own time. Just this morning, I saw them played out yet again in the marriage of the bi-racial American Megan Markle to the royal British Prince Harry Windsor. Let us hope that acceptance is the norm.  

 

Los Angeles, May 19, 2018