The focus of Inseparable is the extraordinary life of Chang and Eng Bunker, the original Siamese Twins, who, by virtue of their physical anomaly, were seen as freaks, subhuman, or, as Victor Hugo so devastatingly couched it in The Hunchback of Notre Dame, “an almost.” An odd pair, they beat impossible odds—touring the world, making money, getting married, and having children. Better yet, they did all of this with grit and gusto.
It feels like a cliché to say that their story is an example of the triumphant human spirit. This is the kind of trope you might find in a high school primer, for their experience actually not only questions what it means to be a human but also examines the outer limits of living one’s own life and dying one’s own death. As the cornerstone of liberal democracy, individualism is not capable of defining or, conversely, confining the conjoined life of the Siamese Twins. To them, being human meant being more than one, inseparable from the other—never alone in life, death, happiness, pain, procreation, or even in answering the call of nature. They defy what Leslie Fiedler once called “the tyranny of the normal,” a cultural malaise the eminent literary critic cogently denounced.
Writing this book at a historical moment when we see, once again, a rising tide of human disqualification, of looking at others as less than human or normal, has given me an acute sense of urgency. My concern has much less to do with partisan kibitzing (yes, a very unChinese word) than with the disquieting fact that, in the words of the great Yogi Berra, “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”
The fact that this remarkable story commences in the age of Jacksonian democracy and gathers steam at the apex of American humbuggery is not an insignificant aspect of my book. Although P. T. Barnum, much to his chagrin, did not play a key role in Chang and Eng’s career, the Prince of Humbugs was, in fact, a mover and shaker of American popular culture in his time, the progenitor of an industry that entertained and exploited and made money out of displaying curiosities, be they freaks, wonders, beauties, or beasts. Even the glitzy beauty pageant today has its origin in the nineteenth-century freak show as niftily orchestrated by Barnum. Or, for that matter, the film industry also began in the freak show before making the transition to projecting beautiful faces or beautified illusions, and part of the cinema’s power persists with shock and awe. As history reveals, the success of the freak show, indubitably the birthplace of American mass entertainment, relied not only on the ingenuity and sacrifice of superb showmen like the Siamese Twins but also on the braggadocio and charlatanism of impresarios, or carnival barkers, who enticed crowds via sales puffery and manipulation of public opinion. Barnum once said to the effect that the American people loved to be entertained and humbugged—or, more bluntly, according to some, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
As I relate in Inseparable, it would contribute very little to our understanding of American culture if we were simply to dismiss Barnum and his ilk as conniving charlatans or Yankee peddlers. We need to recognize a humbug as a trickster, a confidence man who is not necessarily the Devil, even though he often traffics in devilish ways. Being tricked by a con man, as Herman Melville reminded us long ago in The Confidence-Man, is a price we pay in the confidence game called Democracy. It is worth noting, then, that the boom of the freak show as humbuggery coincided with the rise of the common man during the Jacksonian Age, an era that nowadays some see as approximate to our own. When everyone feels entitled to an opinion but cannot, by virtue of ignorance or innocence, tell the difference between a gag and a gem, between what showbiz calls “gaffed freaks” and “born freaks,” the confidence man swoops in to make you feel better while he takes your money, or outright steals your soul. In this sense, the freak show, which lies at the heart of Chang and Eng’s story, is not just about looking at others as less human. To borrow a concept from the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a freak show is a “deep play.” Or, in the streetwise lingo of a humbug, it is “the long game.”
Brushing against the grain of American individualism, democracy, and humbuggery, the story of Chang and Eng is also complicated by their imbroglio with the institution of chattel slavery, miscegenation, and a host of other incendiary issues that roiled nineteenth-century America. Virtually sold into slavery, they would later own and trade slaves themselves. Having married two white sisters—an unusual union denigrated as “bestial” by some penny-press editors—they might also have fathered children with their own slave women. As slaveholding Southern gentry, they stood staunchly with the Confederacy in the epic fight against the Yankees, who once exploited them. All these narrative strands, in varying shades of verity and plausibility, make their biography more complex even than the short, fleshy band that so famously connected them.
The legacy of Chang and Eng, not surprisingly, survives far beyond their death. I don’t just mean the longevity of their brand name, which now applies to every pair of conjoined twins; or the thriving Bunker clan, their proud descendants numbering more than 1,500 today; or their shared liver on permanent display as an anatomical curio at the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia. As I will show at the conclusion of the book, after their story seems over (and, no, I’m not giving away anything), we are surprised to find what we can call their “Mayberry connection.” Most fans of The Andy Griffith Show would know that Mayberry, the fictional setting for that most popular 1960s American rubecom, was based on Griffith’s actual birthplace, Mount Airy, North Carolina. But, unknown to most, Mount Airy was also the adopted hometown of Chang and Eng, the place where they lived and died. It is fair to say that The Andy Griffith Show is supposedly about the “American normal,” Mayberry being a sleepy hamlet where everyone is kith or kin, an Arcadia where no trouble is too big for the amiable sheriff and his bungling deputy. The fortuitous coexistence of Andy Griffith and the Siamese Twins—one representing the “normal” and the other the “freakish”—is a case of cultural symbiosis. It is a condition often forgotten or willfully ignored, as were any racial themes in what, in fact, appeared like Jim Crow–era Mayberry, which featured virtually no black character in its folksy haven. The norm, to paraphrase Fiedler, continues to tyrannize the abnormal, burying it deep underground, into the granite foundation of America. Chang and Eng revolted against that tyranny, in part by mimicking it, and, in the course of their incredible life and beyond, revealed the inseparable tie between what’s accepted as human and what’s rejected as freakish—that is the story of the Siamese Twins I want to tell.