Chang And Eng And Me (And Me) by Tobi Poster-Su (review)

Mixed-race Chinese British puppeteer, performer, and scholar Tobi Poster-Su’s newest work, Chang and Eng and Me (and Me) was a highly personal reflection on diaspora, identity, and the loss that comes with assimilation. Poster-Su intertwines his own story with that of the real-life Sino-Siamese-American conjoined twins Chang and Eng Bunker in this devised, mostly solo performance created for the 2021 Chinese Arts Now Digital Festival. He uses the Bunkers’ history and particularly the narrative of their deaths as a spine for a reflective, partially improvised soliloquy on his family’s experiences of immigration and the subsequent generational cultural disaffiliation leading to his own fraught relationship with his Chinese heritage. Per W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of double consciousness, Chang and Eng and Me (and Me) explored the doubling and dividing of perspective resulting from inhabiting a minoritized body that the dominant culture views as an eternal marker of the Other, with the Bunker twins serving as a metaphorical model for Poster-Su’s bifurcated British and Chinese identities.

The first “and Me” of Poster-Su’s title represents his acculturated British self, including his physical being. The second, parenthetical “Me” is his conceptual Chinese self, created and nurtured through his family’s maintenance of culture and language across generations. Poster-Su treated this Me as profoundly vulnerable to degradation due to the adoption of local customs in younger generations and the deaths of members of the older, less Westernized ones. The show suggested that Poster-Su’s dual selves are, like the titular freak-show performers, inseparably connected and equally real. This production provided an opportunity for him to bring forth his Chinese other self, making it visible and present for the audience while he mapped the connections and disconnections between it and his usual mode of living. Furthermore, he used the opportunity to examine that self for injuries old and new, suggesting that his psychology depends on the continued health of his second self, just as Chang and Eng each depended on their brother’s heartbeat to continue living. When Chang died, Eng followed soon after. As Poster-Su recounted that story, weaving it together with the history of his family and his own experience as a Chinese British man today, he asked if and how he might survive should his paired identity be lost through the metaphor of Eng Bunker’s deep pain and grief during his brief window of solo existence.

Cloth puppets pole dancing. Tobi Poster-Su in Chang and Eng and Me (and Me). (Photo: Tobi Poster-Su.)

The material indeterminacy of Poster-Su’s puppets allowed them to successfully carry these multiple and shifting significations. The first and third acts of this slim, thirteen-minute-and-forty-second work—titled “Violence” and “Death” respectively— featured unfired clay puppets with minimal markers of specific identity other than the band of clay connecting the two at torso level in place of the band of tissue connecting the Bunker twins. The second act, “Sex,” featured cloth-doll puppets that were likewise minimally ornamented, with only a Qing dynasty–style queue of hair as a signifier of “Chineseness.” One puppet was constructed from white fabric and the other from red, but beyond that they were essentially identical. Between the two, both connecting and separating them was a cylindrical braid made from the dolls’ fabrics. This small fabric tube suggested numerous readings, in addition to serving as an icon of the Bunker brothers to identify the puppets and, through the primary metaphor of the work, of Poster-Su’s semi-separate sense of his own Chinese identity. As a result, it served as a compelling example of the density of ideas and signifiers within this apparently simple work. The use of the two colors identified the physical space of their conjoining structure as shared in contrast to their otherwise singular...