by Yunte Huang
During the monthlong engagement at Barnum’s museum, the twins and two of their children, twelve-year-old Montgomery and ten-year-old Patrick, were displayed next to an albino family and an exhibition called “What Is It?” The former consisted of a European couple and their son, all albinos with pink eyes, discovered on a human spelunking mission in Holland by Barnum and then recast as “Negroes from Madagascar.” The latter was “a deformed, intelligent Negro named William Jackson,” whom Barnum had renamed “Zip, the Monkey Man” and promoted as the missing link between man and the ape.21 Having experienced the leisurely life of slaveholding Southern gentry, the twins must have found it hard to swallow the humiliation of being put on display along with “Barnum’s freaks,” or being regarded as one of them. Standing next to the deceptively labeled albino family and the Monkey Man, they were especially appalled by Barnum’s sales puffery. They felt that Barnum was probably the most freakish of all the men they had met, a natural wonder in his own right, a new incarnation of the ubiquitous Yankee Peddler they had encountered during their decade-long life on the road. It was a sentiment shared by none other than Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who visited the museum about a week after the twins had opened there. Arriving on a day when Barnum was out of town, and having inspected thousands of oddities at the American Museum, the future King Edward VII of England asked, “I suppose I have seen all the curiosities; but where is Mr. Barnum?” With a touch of British humor, His Royal Highness was suggesting that he had missed “the most interesting feature of the establishment,” the owner himself.22
To allude to Barnum as a curiosity, making him one of the freaks and wonders he had corralled and caged at his own museum, is to acknowledge the unique character of a humbug and his special place in American history and culture. A humbug, flimflam man, shingle man, confidence man, or, to some, just Yankee, is a trickster. As Melville recognized long ago, a trickster is not necessarily the Devil, although he could traffic in devilish ways. “Trickster is amoral, not immoral,” declares Lewis Hyde in his book on the trickster as a covert but quintessential American hero, an interpretation resonating with many thinkers and writers.23 Anthropologists who study the myriad manifestations of the trickster in diverse cultures—Native American coyote, Polynesian Maui, West African Eshu, Hindu Krishna, Chinese Monkey King, Greek Hermes, and others—have all recognized the figure as one of the most archaic of mythical generators. In the words of Paul Radin, “Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. . . . He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social . . . yet through his actions all values come into being.”24
In the American context, some have argued that the confidence man as a trickster—a colorful figure ubiquitous in literature and film—is “one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers.” In The Confidence Game in American Literature (1975), Warwick Wadlington goes so far as to suggest that “Americans have always been, in one sense or another, confidence men,” because Americans are “peddlers of assurance.” America was founded on the loftiest metaphor of its being the land of promise, the New Jerusalem. The soaring language from statesmen and orators ranging from Benjamin Franklin to Ralph Waldo Emerson vivified the myth of self-reliance and economic optimism, a matrix of robust confidence.25 In the Jacksonian Age, democracy also became a game of confidence, in the double sense of the word: political representatives gain the trust of the common men and pull a con on them. The most successful politicians, Jackson being the best example, are those who show an extraordinary capacity for identifying the needs of others and play them for suckers, as a shrewd confidence man would. The founding myth of promise, the ideology of rugged individualism, and the politics of democratic representation all joined forces to make America a breeding ground for confidence. From Yankee peddlers to sly politicians, smart investors, and even imaginative writers, every American was involved, as Melville put it, in the creative act of “godly gamesomeness.”
In nineteenth-century America, no one did it better than P. T. Barnum in turning confidence into entertainment; no one was a better trickster than the Prince of Humbugs. For that reason, both the Prince of Wales and the Siamese Twins were correct in recognizing the curator of the freak show as the most freakish figure at the aptly named American Museum.
29
Minstrel Freaks
After a rather humiliating stint at Barnum’s American Museum in New York, Chang and Eng struck out again on their own. Considering themselves gentry, they no longer wanted to be dime-museum freaks or sideshow riffraff. So in November 1860, when the nation was roiling as a result of the presidential election, the twins took two of their children, Montgomery and Patrick, and boarded a ship for California.
Judging by their latest two attempts, Chang and Eng astutely concluded that the East Coast market had been tapped out and that the fast-growing West, to which people continued to flock, might present better opportunities. Since the discovery of gold twelve years earlier, California had boomed. San Francisco, initially a loose cluster of adobe haciendas, had mushroomed into a city overnight; or, as Will Rogers quipped, it “was never a town.” But getting to the fabled Gold Mountain before the completion of the transcontinental railroad in 1869 or the Panama Canal in 1914 required a lengthy journey. From New York, the twins and their sons sailed for eight days down to Panama City, and then took a train across the Isthmus of Panama to catch the steamship Uncle Sam on the other side.
Aboard the 1,800-ton Pacific Mail steamer, the Bunker quartet sailed for the new Eldorado. During the sixteen-day journey, they saw, as teenage Montgomery wrote in a family letter, plenty of whales and flying fish, and enjoyed a diet of fresh green corn, beans, and peas. When the ship stopped at Acapulco, Mexico, for coal, the ubiquitous palm trees and the verdant tropical vistas caused a stir in the twins’ hearts, a sudden pang of homesickness—not for North Carolina but for Siam, which lay far beyond the horizon of the blue Pacific, the “heart-beating center of the world,” as Melville put it. Among the passengers was a Reverend J. A. Benton, native of Sacramento, who had left California for China a year and a half earlier on a mission to demonstrate that, “if one will but keep going in the same direction he will get home again at last.” Speaking at length with the globetrotting reverend, the twins were hungry for any tiny morsel of tidings about the native land they had left almost a lifetime earlier.1
CHANG AND ENG BUNKER AND THEIR CHILDREN
Arriving in San Francisco, Chang and Eng were surprised to find that their reputation had preceded them. Not only were they household names, but their success as showmen had also spawned imitation and mockery in the hands of a new breed of performers, who represented an emerging American art: the minstrel show. In fact, when they were still in New York, they had already witnessed the increasing popularity of blackface minstrelsy. During the month of their exhibition at the American Museum, at least half a dozen minstrel bands were performing every night at popular local joints, including Niblo’s Saloon, Mechanics Hall, and the New Bowery Theatre.
Minstrelsy had begun in the early 1800s with white men in blackface portraying Negro characters and performing putative Negro songs and dances. By the mid-nineteenth century, it had expanded its repertoire, or racial cast, to include Chinese, Irish, Japanese, Native American, and other ethnic minority characters. Originating in East Coast cities, minstrelsy had also spread geographically, especially to California. According to Robert C. Toll, “When a large number of people trekked across the continent in search of California gold . . . minstrelsy quickly established itself there. First presented in 1849 by local amateur groups scattered throughout the goldfields, minstrelsy by 1855 claimed five professional troupes in San Francisco alone.”2 A sure sign that San Francisco had become a hub for minstrelsy, one of the most famous troupes at the time, the Christie Minstrels, led by E. P. Christie and others, “changed their name to Christie’s San Francisco
Minstrels to add to their luster when traveling around the country.”3
What made California a particularly fertile ground for minstrelsy was not only the prevalence of rowdy, gun-toting, pleasure-seeking crowds but also the huge influx of immigrants who made for a more racially mixed population. The Chinese, especially, had a strong presence in California, a fact repugnant to many and one that, as we saw, had irked the ilk of Hinton Helper, Chang and Eng’s fellow Tar Heeler-turned-Sinophobe. Chinese immigration to the United States had been sporadic before the mid-nineteenth century, but the discovery of gold at John Sutter’s mill suddenly spiked the number of Chinese arriving in North America: 325 in 1849, 450 more in 1850, 2,716 in 1851, and 20,026 in 1852. By 1860, there were about 37,000 Chinese in the United States, most in California. At first, Chinese were welcomed in the state that had just joined the Union in 1850. Their arrivals were routinely reported in the newspapers as increases to a “worthy integer of population.” But as the competition in the goldfields became more intense, the tide soon turned against the Chinese, and the affectionate feelings soured. When Emerson said in 1854, “The disgust of California has not been able to drive or kick the Chinaman back to his home,” the New England sage seemed well informed about the happenings in the Wild West and the rise of anti-Chinese sentiments, which would soon lead to mob violence and the passage of discriminatory laws. A sure sign of change in the air: The word Chinaman, previously a neutral, catchall term for Asian men, had already picked up a negative tone when Emerson used it.4
Rising hostility toward the Chinese led to demeaning portrayals in minstrel shows. The stock character of John Chinaman—in yellowface, sporting a long queue and a pair of loose pantaloons, speaking in a caricatured dialect—often appeared on the minstrel stage, as depicted in the following song, “Big Long John”:
Big Long John was a Chinaman,
and he lived in the land of the free . . .
He wore a long tail from the top of his head
Which hung way down to his heels . . .
He went to San Francisco for Chinee gal to see,
Feeling tired, he laid down to rest,
Beneath the shade of huckleberry tree.
Or, as in another minstrel song, “Hong Kong,” in which John Chinaman speaks of his doomed love for his “lillee gal”:
Me stopee long me lillee gal nicee
Wellee happee Chinaman, me no care,
Me smokee, smokee, lillie gal talkee,
Chinaman and lillee gal wellee jollee pair.5
As a predecessor to Ah Sin, the other stock character created and popularized by F. Bret Harte in his satirical poem “The Heathen Chinee,” John Chinaman was the Asian counterpart to such blackface figures as Jim Crow and Zip Coon. During his disappointing adventure in the West, Hinton Helper must have been so impressed by these minstrel songs that he would later adopt “John Chinaman” as the generic name for all the “Celestials” maligned in his books.
Arguably the most famous “Chinamen” in the nineteenth century, the Siamese Twins naturally were featured in minstrel shows that parodied the Chinese. Their nonstop tour across the country from 1829 to 1839, followed by sensational stories of their married lives in the South, had turned them into cultural icons as familiar as Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu were in the twentieth century. In Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, a study of the representation of Asians in American culture, Robert G. Lee astutely identifies two motifs of change embodied by the Siamese Twins: “The forty-year career of Chang and Eng suggests both the shift in the signification of the Chinese from object of curiosity to symbol of racial crisis and the shift in the popular sites of that signification from museum to minstrel show.”6 In other words, if a freak show, as I have suggested earlier, often staged racial freaks, the rise of minstrelsy in the 1840s and the surge of anti-Chinese sentiments in the 1850s had opened up a new arena for the staging of racial others. Freak show was transitioning to minstrel show, or at least the two were joining forces to channel the boiling racial tensions in antebellum America. It was a historical change experienced, and indeed embodied, by Chang and Eng.
On December 10, 1860, when the twins opened their exhibition at Platt’s New Music Hall in San Francisco, many in the audience had already seen or would soon see minstrel renditions of the freak show. Chief among those minstrel appropriations were the skits performed by Charley Fox and Frank B. Converse, both pioneers of blackface minstrelsy. Fox was known for the popular songbooks he edited, and Converse was regarded as the “Father of Banjo.” As seen in a songster cover, the Fox–Converse team performed banjo duets by impersonating the Siamese Twins, tossing their pigtails and kicking around the stage with pointed wooden shoes. Chang and Eng’s unique physicality, something that the twins themselves had exploited successfully in their onstage repartee, also made it convenient for Fox and Converse to appropriate the twins as characters for skits such as “Conundrums,” which featured chin-wags between two speakers:
When is a bedstead not a bedstead?
When it’s a little buggy.
Why is a railroad-car like a bed-bug?
Because it runs on sleepers.
Why is a poor man like a baker?
Because he needs de dough.
Who was the oldest woman?
Aunt-Iniquity.7
Arriving in the West after the Civil War broke out, hence too late to see Chang and Eng’s California shows in person, Mark Twain nonetheless had an obsession with the Siamese Twins that was part of his lifelong infatuation with what he called the “genuine nigger show.” Twain, or little Sam, first saw minstrel shows when he was growing up in Hannibal, Missouri. He was struck by the “loud and extravagant burlesque.”8 Like Jakie Rabinowitz, the boy who fell in love with “negro numbers” (jazz songs) against his Orthodox Jewish father’s strictures in the iconic film The Jazz Singer (1927), Twain became enamored with minstrelsy despite his mother’s warnings. After he arrived in the West, he regularly attended performances of the San Francisco Minstrels, whose core members included Billy Birch, Dave Wambold, and Charley Backus. In his Autobiography, Twain devoted an entire chapter to minstrelsy, detailing his childhood fascination with it, his later acquaintance and friendship with blackface artists, and his lament over the passing of the golden age of minstrelsy, declaring that, “if I could have the nigger show back again in its pristine purity and perfection I should have but little further use for opera.”9 As for Twain’s literary work, there has been ample scholarship shedding light on the fact that Twain, very much like Melville and other major American writers of that era, was indebted to blackface minstrelsy both aesthetically and ideologically. Critics have noted how, for instance, in both Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer Abroad, Twain appropriated the three-part structure of a minstrel show as a controlling framework for narrative; or how he lifted many of his most radical elements from minstrelsy when he absorbed its costuming, vernacular, and stock figures; or how he learned beneficially from minstrelsy “its insistence on a self that was complexly constituted from a mixed gender, class, and racial sourcepool.”10 Ralph Ellison’s astute remark that Nigger Jim in Huckleberry Finn rarely emerges from behind the minstrel mask also speaks to blackface’s profound influence on Twain’s literary imagination.11
Scholars have also noticed that Twain carried his avowed love for blackface minstrelsy into his obsession with the Siamese Twins. Around 1868, he wrote the burlesque sketch “Personal Habits of the Siamese Twins,” which traffics more in exaggeration than fact. The beginning of the story resembles closely the standard opening of a minstrel routine called a “stump speech,” which always starts with a personal pitch to gain the audience’s confidence: “I do not wish to write of the personal habits of these strange creatures solely, but also of certain curious details of various kinds concerning them, which, belonging only to their private life, have never crept into print. Knowing the twins intimately, I feel that I am peculiarly well qualified for the task I have taken upon myself
.” After plenty of absurdities, the piece ends with an obviously facetious factoid: “Having forgotten to mention it sooner, I will remark in conclusion that the ages of the Siamese Twins are respectively fifty-one and fifty-three years.”12 And then there was the book known as The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson, to which is attached, like Siamese Twins, a sequel called The Comedy, Those Extraordinary Twins. Twain himself admits candidly to the defect of his creation: “two stories in one, a farce and a tragedy.” Even though Pudd’nhead Wilson is allegedly based on a different set of Siamese Twins, Twain worked some of Chang and Eng’s life stories into the novel, full of burlesque and other features of blackface minstrelsy: disguises, cross-dressing, racial mixing, and pastiche.13
The epitome of Twain’s appropriation of the Siamese Twins as minstrel figures, however, was his stage performance. A successful public speaker who made almost as much money from lectures as from book royalties, Twain often tapped the repertoire of minstrelsy in his delivery of speeches, casually reeling off anecdotes, scrapping rhetorical flourishes, and shooting for foolery and the tall tale. The famous tagline for his lectures, “The Trouble Begins at Eight,” was actually a standard byline in minstrel-show advertisements.14 On February 28, 1889, when storyteller James Riley and humorist Edgar “Bill” Nye gave a program of readings at Tremont Temple in Boston, their manager induced Twain on short notice to introduce the duo. His unexpected appearance on the stage “provoked a great waving of handkerchiefs and a tumult of applause and cheering, the organist doing his bit by sounding off fortissimo.” Not missing a beat, Twain stepped into the spotlight and introduced Riley and Nye as Chang and Eng. His opening salvo ripped a page from his own earlier sketch of the famous twins, establishing his own credibility as the speaker while making the audience chuckle and roar: “I saw them first, a great many years ago, when Barnum had them, and they were just fresh from Siam. The ligature was their best bond then, but literature became their best hold later, when one of them committed an indiscretion, and they had to cut the old bond to accommodate the sheriff.”15