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

Cynthia Wu’s Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture offers a fresh and novel approach and contribution to the study of Chang and Eng Bunker, as many of the studies on the twins are historical. Wu’s book is not necessarily just about the original Siamese twins, but also about the interest and preoccupation with ideas of duality, twinness, and unusual anatomy as evoked by the historical and symbolic figures of Chang and Eng. As Wu argues throughout the book, the real and fictional Chang and Eng serve to reveal the contradictions of racial and cultural difference, gendered, sexual, and anatomical norms, and the myth of U.S. national belonging. The twins were living embodiments of these contradictions, immigrating to the United States in the early nineteenth century and making their living as sideshow performers, they also became U.S. citizens and plantation and slave owners while fathering twenty-one children between them from white mothers (who were also sisters) during a time of anti-Asian sentiments, anti-miscegenation, and slavery.

The study covers a lot of territory, spanning three centuries (nineteenth, twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries) and multiple disciplines, history, literature, film, ethnography, Asian American studies, and disability studies. Wu’s book is organized around the three different archives that anchor the three sections of the book: history, literature/film, and ethnography. Section 1 contains three chapters that begin with a historical examination of the Bunker’s lives and their demise. Bringing in the enlightenment concept of possessive individualism, and organized loosely around Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of democracy, Wu argues that the twins’ racial and anatomical differences challenge racial binaries in the United States and medical authorities’ definitions of their bodies. Section 2 examines the ambivalent identifications of the U.S. nation through a reading of the twins’ metaphoric and symbolic appearance in literature and film that includes a reading of post–Civil War American literature by Mark Twain, Herman Melville, and Thomas Nast, Asian American literature by Maxine Hong Kingston, Hualing Nieh, and Monica Sone, and films Dead Ringers and Twin Falls Idaho. The last section reexamines notions of kinship through the author’s participation in and research of the contemporary Bunker’s family lineage.

Wu’s most engaging chapters in the book, “The Mystery of Their Union” and “Strange Incursions into Medical Science at the Mutter Museum,” reveal how she captures our readerly fascination with the twins’ anatomy (in life and postmortem) and gives a keen critique of this very interest: the public’s preoccupation with the twins’ domestic and sex lives and the medical establishment’s violating and exploitative gaze. Wu argues that modern medicine sought to legitimize its profession and authority through their ability to “empirically” interpret the Bunker’s death and experiment on their bodies as medical specimen (autopsy). More interesting is the fight for the right to interpret the Bunker’s death and the significations of their body by the doctors who performed the autopsy and the Bunker’s wives and children who asserted control over the use and interpretation of their husbands’/fathers’ bodies. If anything Wu shows us the shaky foundations of modern medical empiricism and authority from its very beginnings.

More important, Wu’s book theorizes an Asian American critique with disability studies. Given that critiques of “nondisabled normativity” remain undertheorized (7), Wu uses her study as a way to identify how the structures of normative assumptions of disabled subjects, bodies, and minds are coterminous with readings of racial, sexual, and gendered differences. In her second section, she argues that Asian American literature’s reference to twinness and duality in Hualing Nieh’s Peach and Mulberry and Monica Sone’s Nisei Daughter can be read as referencing earlier legal and historical representations of Asian immigrant women and men as diseased and contagious bodies warranting surveillance and control in which the...