Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture by Cynthia Wu (review)

Chang and Eng Bunker, conjoined twins, nineteenth-century celebrities, and historical icons known as The Original Siamese Twins, confound the valorization of individuality over interdependence that lies at the center of US national identity. Because of this, Cynthia Wu argues, the many versions of their story that have circulated in the US cultural landscape during the past 150 years both illuminate and interrogate collective understandings of race, sexuality, gender, and citizenship. Chang and Eng Reconnected is not a biography of the twins but an interdisciplinary analysis of the diverse cultural production—novels, films, museum exhibits, visual art, medical records, and family reunions—that represents them.

Despite emphasizing what she calls “the discursive Bunkers,” or the cultural figures pressed into service for a range of meaning-making projects, Wu is also sensitive to the Bunkers as “real people” with a “material record” (11). Born in a Thai village, the twins were taken on an international tour in 1829 as a sideshow exhibit, eventually gaining international fame. They went on to acquire US citizenship, to marry the daughters of a North Carolina plantation owner, and to enter the Confederate aristocracy. For Wu, their story is neither an affirmation of the so-called American Dream nor a tale of abjection. Chang and Eng Reconnected is a nuanced exploration of two extraordinary lives joined in one extraordinary body, whose image is still used to negotiate collective anxieties about national unity, belonging, and physical difference.

The book is organized into three parts, plus a theoretical introduction and epilogue. The first part, “Locating Material Traces in the Archives,” draws from the methodology of qualitative social science. Chapter One, arguing that the Bunkers’ story simultaneously challenges and reifies ideals of “possessive individualism” that connect “somatic sovereignty to a market-based sociality” (17), traces how the twins transformed themselves from exotic spectacle to Southern slave-owners. The next chapters describe competing interpretations of the Bunkers’ body after their deaths, focusing on tensions between their survivors and medical examiners surrounding the twins’ autopsy and the display of their liver and a plaster cast of their body at Philadelphia’s Mütter Museum. Chapter Two explores anxiety over the twins’ interdependency, a signal “to normatively bodied people that their individuality may not be as complete as American ideals of liberal republicanism would imply” (55), while Chapter Three examines the changing function of the museum itself and reveals how “scientific inquiry and the fine arts are similarly immersed in larger trends having to do with the anomalous body in society” (78).

The book’s second part, “Reading Literature and Visual Cultures,” engages the techniques of literary and cultural analysis to trace references to the Bunkers in literature, film, and print culture. Chapter Four examines post-Civil War texts employing the Bunkers’ “symbolic potential for conceptualizing unity and collaboration in the face of disunity and disagreement” (82), with particular attention given to the work of Mark Twain and Thomas Nast. Chapter Five looks at three novels (by Maxine Hong Kingston, Monica Sone, and Hualing Nieh), a poem (by Cathy Park Hong), and an essay (by Karen Tei Yamashita) to examine the significance of the twins in contemporary Asian American women’s literature. Finally, Chapter Six examines work (by David Cronenberg, Mark and Michael Polish, Judith Rossner, Darin Strauss, Mark Slouka, and Peter and Bobby Farrelly) to reveal how the cultural legacy of the Bunkers is used to negotiate “the tension issuing from concerns about white women who exercise their economic and sexual independence” (124). The texts examined in these chapters do not always directly represent the Bunker twins (although many do) but instead invoke conjoinment as a metaphor to explore the aftermath of war and the ruptures of race and gender that remain visible within the US body politic.

The final segment, “Observing and Participating,” consists of one chapter examining the “kin-making practices” (146) of the Bunkers’ descendants, who gather annually...