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

Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography,Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaitedportrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (18111874), twinsconjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fusedliver, who were discovered in Siam by a British merchant in1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almostimplausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Bostonin 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvyshowmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroadsof rural America to bring entertainment to the Jacksonianmobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to richsouthern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting intwenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not justanother sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavationof Americas historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal,for tyrannizing the othera tradition that, as Huangreveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist (Biography) In the follow-up to his Edgar Award-winning Charlie Chan biography, Huang uncovers ironies, paradoxes and examples of how Chang and Eng subverted what Leslie Fiedler called the tyranny of the normal. Excellent.... Mr. Huang compellingly makes his case that racism was a factor in these two self-made gentlemen land owners still being considered, late in life, as nothing more than a Barnumesque freak show.... Its not difficult to find in this, as Mr. Huang most definitely does, a comment on the times in which we live. After years of showcased servitude, the original 'Siamese twins' Chang and Eng Bunker settled down in small-town North Carolina and adopted the lives of 19th-century Southern gentry  identifying with the white oppressor class, in other words, fathering at least 21 children between them, owning slaves and sending their sons to fight for the Confederacy. Huang is attuned to the ironies of their story in hil³«