Inseparable the original Siamese twins and their rendezvous with American history Huang, Yunte creator author. text bibliography biography nyu 2018 2018 First edition. monographic eng print xxvi, 388 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm. With wry humor, Shakespearean profundity and trenchant insight, Yunte Huang brings to life the story of America's most famous nineteenth-century Siamese twins. Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring "entertainment" to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry, their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the "other," a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself. Prologue : a game on the high seas -- Part one. In Siam. Siam ; The Chinese twins ; Cholera ; The king and us ; Departure -- Part two. First years. A curiosity in Boston ; The monster, or not ; Gotham city ; The city of brotherly love ; Knocking at the gate ; Racial freaks ; Sentimental education -- Part three. America on the road. The great eclipse ; A satirical tale ; The Lynnfield battle ; An intimate rebellion ; Old dominion ; Emancipation ; A parable ; America on the road ; The deep south ; Head bumps -- Part four. Look homeward, angel. Wilkesboro ; Traphill ; A universal truth ; Foursome ; Mount Airy, or Monticello ; The age of humbugs ; Minstrel freaks -- Part five. The Civil War and beyond. Seeing the elephant ; Reconstruction ; The last radiance of the setting sun ; Afterlife -- Epilogue : Mayberry, USA. Yunte Huang. Includes bibliographical references and index. n-us--- Bunker, Chang 1811-1874 Bunker, Eng 1811-1874 Bunker, Chang 1811-1874 Bunker, Eng 1811-1874 Conjoined twins United States History 19th century Conjoined twins United States Biography Conjoined twins United States History 19th century Conjoined twins United States Biography Twins, Conjoined History, 19th Century United States HISTORY United States 19th Century SOCIAL SCIENCE Ethnic Studies Asian American Studies HISTORY / United States / 19th Century SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Asian American Studies 1800-1899 fast QM691.B86 H83 2018 616/.043092 B 2018 D-437 QS 675 9780871404473 0871404478 2017055799 DLC 180118 20190718161633.0 in00004001392