Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture

Introduction

INTRODUCTION No one watching from the dock knew what Abel Coffin hid under the sheet that covered a shapeless but ambulatory form disembarking with him from the USS Sachem in Boston Harbor on August 16, 1829. Coffin, a mariner who specialized in overseas trade, led the rumpled mass down the gangplank and into an enclosed carriage, whereupon he and the swaddled creature were whisked away. An article that appeared in the Patriot the next day aroused even more curiosity about the strange cargo. The reporter announced that “two Siamese youths, males, eighteen years of age, their bodies connected from their birth” had arrived in the city and that “they will probably be exhibited to the public when proper arrangements have been made.”1 After an examination by a prominent anatomist at the Harvard Medical School, whose observations were publicized to generate more interest in the upcoming spectacle, the two young men went onstage for the first time as the Siamese Double Boys.2 Ultimately, their stage name became the Original Siamese Twins. Thus began the American lives of Chang and Eng. They were discovered in a Thai village by a Scottish merchant named Robert Hunter who collaborated with Coffin to bring them to the United States. Early on, Chang and Eng toured under contract with Coffin and his business associate, James Webster Hale, but as soon as they fulfilled the agreement’s terms, they went into business for themselves. Even though P. T. Barnum is often falsely credited with making the careers of the Original Siamese Twins, Chang and Eng had only a brief contract with the famous showman. The sideshow industry in the United States and abroad serendipitously peaked at the same time as Chang and Eng’s career. The twins toured extensively throughout North America, Europe, and parts of Latin America, and it is speculated that more people worldwide saw them 2 Introduction than any other entertainer in the nineteenth century. One could say that these early transnational circuits of popular culture grew up alongside Chang and Eng. They were so well known as public figures and so ubiquitous as conjoined twins that the term “Siamese twins” eventually came to describe all such twins even, anachronistically, those who had lived before they did. Their ancestry was more Chinese than Thai, but their origins in Siam, a nation that existed in the minds of Westerners as a mystical, isolated, and impenetrable space, was foregrounded in their stage name. Their adoption of the Anglo surname “Bunker ,” however, places them in more familiar territory for many Americans. Cultural Legacies of the Siamese Twins Chang and Eng Reconnected uses a cultural studies approach to explore how the Original Siamese Twins captivated the American imagination. Not only did the real-life Chang and Eng Bunker attract a tremendous following in the fan cultures of the entertainment industry; a series of fictionalized twins emerged, too. This preoccupation with a pair of famous entertainers persisted long after the twins’ natural life span. Writers, visual artists, medical professionals, film directors, and others continued to pursue the multiple—potentially endless— meanings behind them. Over and again, we see that the Bunker twins display countless possibilities for signification across time, space, and culture, showing that fascination with their extraordinary body is widespread. Moreover, the ways in which this figure of racialized conjoinment has been summoned are not static but contingent on shifting ideas about medicine, nation, race, gender, sexuality, and class. These conjoined twins from Asia, either as material presence or as metaphor, present a template for a wide range of cultural producers who engage in debates about the challenges of U.S. nation-building at moments in history when the imagined unity of the nation appears most threatened. From Reconstruction, to the standardization of medical authority, to the labor rebellions, to the Japanese American internment, to the Anglo-American women’s movements, and beyond, these conjoined twins—separate individuals who inhabit one body—offer a way to think about how difference is expressed, managed, maintained, suppressed, or resolved in modernity’s nationalist narrative of progress. This book is not a biography of Chang and Eng Bunker. Already, two booklength biographies and countless shorter essay-length accounts of their lives have been published.3 Nor is this book an interpretive history of their touring careers, tracking their appearances and theorizing spectacle and performance in nineteenth-century popular entertainment. A considerable amount of scholarship already addresses the politics of the sideshow in Jacksonian and industrial age America.4 Rather...