by Yunte Huang
In other words, Chang and Eng were destined, for life as it turned out, to be bound together. The boundary between them, as Raleigh’s Daily News put it, was “clear as mud.”13
In addition to these discoveries about the band, other peculiar details became public, such as the fact that each twin had pubic hair that was gray on the left and black on the right, and that Eng’s bladder had become overdistended and his right testicle retracted, suggesting that fright contributed to the poor man’s death. Having sated their curiosity about what they continued to consider a “monster,” the doctors finally sent the bodies back to North Carolina in March, sans the liver, lungs, and entrails. When Christopher and Stephen Bunker met the train and received the bodies in Salem, they were shocked to see “only the shells” of their fathers. Outraged, the two battle-wounded Confederate veterans shot off a terse letter to the conniving Yankee doctors:
Sir
Enclosed you will find the receipt for bringing the bodies of Papa and Uncle from Salem to our home. You will please send the Money by post-office order.
My Mother and Aunt was very sorry that we did not bring the lungs and entrails of our Fathers with the bodies home. And as we did not bring them, you can keep them until further orders from the families.
Respectfully
CW and SD Bunker 14
Today, visitors to the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia are still treated to a mind-boggling display of medical, anatomical, and pathological specimens, millions of oddities that include a section of the brain of President Garfield’s assassin, a piece of tissue removed from the thorax of assassin John Wilkes Booth, and bullets removed from bodies of Civil War soldiers. Standing at the center of this dioramalike shrine of curiosity is the conjoined liver of Chang and Eng, soaking in a tub of formalin. The doctors had taken it out of their bodies during the autopsy and kept it for posterity in the name of science and knowledge. We don’t know what became of the lungs and entrails. It seems morbidly fitting then that the twins, who were repeatedly exhibited throughout almost half of the nineteenth century, are now perpetually instantiated through the preservation of their liver—exhibited, as if for eternity, still in the twenty-first century.
Epilogue
Mayberry, USA
On the last day of summer in 2015, after giving a lecture in Knoxville, Tennessee, I rented a car and drove across the state line, over the Great Smokies and the Blue Ridge, to visit the picturesque town of Mount Airy, North Carolina, better known nowadays as Mayberry, USA.
In The Andy Griffith Show (or TAGS, as it has become known), Mayberry is portrayed as a sleepy town filled with oddball characters and quaint customs. With a population of eighteen hundred souls (exactly the same as Winesburg, Ohio, in Sherwood Anderson’s eponymous short-story cycle), Mayberry, though curiously lacking racial minorities in its depiction by CBS during the tumultuous decade of 1960s, remains a quintessential American small town. It is an Arcadia where life’s troubles—whether a family feud, a farmer looking for a wife, a pickle-contest debacle, property foreclosure, or baby delivery—can all be solved in twenty-five minutes with the help of amiable Sheriff Andy Taylor and his bungling deputy, Barney Fife. In the words of the garrulous barber Floyd, Mayberry is “a nice, clean community, tucked away in a peaceful valley, where all our children have good teeth.”
In reality, Mount Airy, nestled in the foothills of western North Carolina, population 10,388 by the 2010 census, is not only the actual birthplace of Andy Griffith, the star on America’s most popular rubecom, bearing his name. It is also, unknown to most, the adopted hometown of Chang and Eng, the original Siamese Twins (as readers of Inseparable already know).
It was a good day for driving. The September sun, after a brief bounce off the ragged ridges in the east, had finally disappeared behind rainclouds. A soft drizzle followed, moistening the highway till it became smooth and curvy like a bamboo strip, or perhaps spaghetti. The dogwood—which appeared in literature as early as Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales as a whipple-tree—dotted hills as ancient as the Bible. Red and flying squirrels flashed their fluffy tails here and there in the woods, which had deepened in color. Winding through gaps between mountains, my rented Jeep Grand Cherokee navigated terrains where real Cherokee had once thrived, as had General George Stoneman’s six-thousand-strong cavalry during his famous raid into North Carolina in the waning days of the Civil War.
The news on the radio that day was about the arrival of Pope Francis in the United States. Switching between news and Appalachian bluegrass, I reflected on the long journey that had brought me to Mayberry. The lecture I had given a day earlier at the University of Tennessee was about Charlie Chan, a chubby, aphorism-spouting Chinese detective from Honolulu. Unlike Chan, who had hooked me from the get-go, Sheriff Andy Taylor was a more recently acquired taste. I had sporadically watched some reruns of Matlock on TV, and, as a mystery aficionado, I had enjoyed Griffith’s new incarnation as a silver-haired lawyer with hayseed wisdom and a steel-trap mind, drawling his vowels and outsmarting suspects, in a manner not so different from Charlie Chan, with his broken English and overpolite demeanor. TAGS, however, was no love at first sight. A bachelor sheriff mollycoddled by an aging aunt, or a blabbermouth deputy with a mild case of malapropism and a perpetual habit of misfiring a gun like a Keystone cop, was not really my cup of tea. Only after I began to research western North Carolina did my interest in Mayberry and its piquant citizens blossom. Slowly but surely, the “Magic of Mayberry” grew on me. I began to get the hang of the cornball sheriff constantly ribbing his horny deputy, and to appreciate the hick burg that runs its jail like a motor lodge for a henpecked town drunk or uses it as a nursery for babies.
After three hours of driving, I cleared Tennessee, rounded the southern tip of Virginia, and came down from a high plateau overlooking the lush hills and sleepy hollows of the western edge of the Tar Heel State. On this last day of summer, under gray skies, the broad valley far below was a dense mass of green wilderness, tinted by patches of autumnal gold and crimson. The tranquility and timelessness of the vista reminded me of the Chinese shi wai tao yuan, the Land of Peach Blossoms, a mythical paradise of eternal peace and happiness. When the Moravians first arrived in this area in the 1750s, they simply called it “The Hollow.” I could see why the Siamese Twins would, in 1839, choose “The Hollow” as a place to settle down after a decade of globetrotting. They considered this area a “garden spot of the world,” and they had indeed traveled a very long distance to get here. Their story from Meklong to Mayberry, as I have described in Inseparable, is patently astonishing. Or, as Sheriff Andy says, “If you wrote this into a play, nobody’d believe it.”
Coming down from the high plateau, I was soon on flat land. Sandwiched between fields of big-leaf tobacco, of which the twins had been early pioneering growers, Interstate 74 was not really the crowded Highway 6 portrayed in TAGS, where the speed limit was kept under thirty-five miles an hour. I had read somewhere that I-74 cut through the farm that had once belonged to the Siamese Twins. As soon as I turned off the highway, I came across twin bridges spanning a creek and saw a sign marked ENG AND CHANG BUNKER MEMORIAL BRIDGE. I knew immediately I was in the twins’ land. But as I drove farther into town, the ubiquity of “Mayberry”—“Mayberry Auto Sales,” “Mayberry Insurance,” “Mayberry Antique Mall,” and so on—began to assault my sense of history and reality. These sensory attacks, however, were only the beginning, rather like the initial excitement one feels when pulling in to a parking lot at Disney World.
Unsure of the parking protocol in town, I pulled in to a small lot next to the public library and parked the Jeep there. The Mount Airy Public Library, an award-winning architectural gem, actually occupies the spot where the Jesse Franklin Graves house once stood. Judge Graves, an old friend of Chang and Eng, had written the first complete, though unpublished, biography of the Siamese Twins, which became a goldmine for later writers.
Across the street from the library was the police department, no
longer the ancient brick-front courthouse featured in TAGS, but a modern, stand-alone concrete building with big glass doors and windows. I knew there would be no amiable Sheriff Andy sitting there behind his desk, clacking away on a typewriter with two fingers, talking on the phone to reassure Mrs. Vickers that the loud bangs she had heard were not Yankee cannons but blasts from highway construction. Nor would there be an overzealous Deputy Fife marching out the door, whipping out a pad from his hip to write me a citation for jaywalking or illegal parking. Since it was not a weekend, there would be no inebriated Otis snoring away on a cozy cot in Cell No. 2. For those imaginary scenes, I would need to walk down the street to visit the local shrine, The Andy Griffith Museum.
Built on the street where little Andy had gone to school, the museum features hundreds of items from the life and career of Mount Airy’s favorite son in movies, television, and music. It also collects memorabilia donated by cast members from TAGS, including a special section devoted to current Mount Airy resident Betty Lynn, better known as Thelma Lou, Barney’s steady. When Lynn retired from acting in 2006, the Missouri native decided to settle in the town that had made her famous. Interestingly, the Surry Arts Council, which oversees the museum, is headed by Tanya Jones, a descendant of Chang Bunker.
In front of the museum, standing under the green canopy of a Bradford pear tree, was a bronze statue of Andy and Opie carrying fishing poles, as they always do in the opening sequence of TAGS. I could almost hear the sprightly tune Andy whistles, as he walks Opie down to Myers Lake, possibly playing hooky for a day. After passing the statue, I came to a neatly designed sunken garden, full of manicured viburnum, holly, arborvitae, English laurel, and autumn cherry. A walking path led me to the entrance to the museum, whose lobby had a cutout of Goober Pyle, the gas jockey at Wally’s filling station, standing next to two Acme gasoline pumps marked “Ethyl” and “Regular.” I paid the $6 admission fee—not to Goober, but to a lovely lady sitting behind a window. She kindly reminded me that when I finished the tour, I could go out and walk down to the back garden to visit the special Siamese Twins exhibition. “It’s free,” she emphasized. Imagine her surprise when I made a beeline for the door and went straight to the twins’ exhibition!
STATUE OF ANDY AND OPIE TAYLOR, MOUNT AIRY, NORTH CAROLINA
At the bottom of the garden, I pushed open a heavy, faceless door that looked like a back entrance to a theater stage. Perhaps the Siamese Twins, in the eyes of many, were merely a sideshow to TAGS, which competes with the likes of Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver as classic depictions of 1950s and 1960s American “normalcy” in a period of affluence, suburban sprawls, and middle-class lassitude. Most episodes of TAGS end with “things back to normal,” as Andy puts it, with a sigh of relief. In one episode, when a carnival comes to town and some of the local women are shocked by an exotic dance show, Sheriff Andy asks the manager to “tone it down a little,” essentially shutting down the “gootchie-hootchie dance.” In contrast, the story of Chang and Eng, with their physical abnormalities, double matrimony, miscegenation, and slaveholding, was anything but normal. They were regarded as carnival freaks in their day—like Victor Hugo’s Quasimodo, “an almost.” To open the door to the twins’ show in the basement of the Andy Griffith Museum is in some sense to reveal the “underbelly” of America, to see how the normal is built on top of the abnormal, in a manner that Leslie Fiedler, as I mention in the preface, dubs the “tyranny of the normal.”
The basement room had no other visitors when I entered. Dimly lit, the walls were covered with posters, photos, paintings, newspaper clippings, and framed documents related to the twins. Next to the entrance, an antique trunk was displayed inside a glass cabinet like a Keatsian urn, that “foster child of silence and slow time.” Made by the venerable New York firm of Crouch & Fitzgerald, the old trunk was missing a leather strap, and above the keyhole was the date of manufacture: “May 12, 1868.” Judging by the time stamp, the trunk must have been used by the twins during their trips to Europe after the Civil War.
In a corner of the room, next to the trunk, were disassembled bedframes, displayed on the wall. They were extra wide—understandable, considering the number of people the conjugal bed needed to accommodate—and made of solid pine. The twins were said to have been excellent carpenters and might have made this bed themselves. In fact, they were jacks-of-all-trades, skilled in breaking horses, trapping wild animals, target shooting, and stoneworking. Three years earlier, during my last visit to this area, I had seen some of the household utensils, such as a rolling pin, that the twins had made, and a church that the twins had helped build, an architectural gem.
On that earlier trip, in the spring of 2012, I had driven more than three thousand miles from Santa Barbara, California. En route, I stopped to see friends and family and arrived in North Carolina just when the dogwood was in full bloom. Like Ronnie Howard’s Opie doing research for his essay on the Battle of Mayberry, I had first spent a week at the State Archives in downtown Raleigh, mining information from the records and documents in the collection. Then I moved on to Chapel Hill to examine the papers archived at the University of North Carolina. After two weeks of research—laying my hands on old letters, faded photographs, tax records, land deeds, court papers, and the twins’ meticulously kept ledgers—I made a field trip to the state’s western mountains to see the old stomping ground of Chang and Eng.
My first stop that day was Wilkesboro, where the twins had first settled. On a quiet Sunday morning, with all stores shut for the day or, for that matter, permanently, the one-street downtown proudly showed off its centerpiece—a rusted cannon pointing toward a small war memorial that stood like a totem pole on the town square. Except for a Tyson Foods processing facility down the road, Wilkesboro seemed to be reposing in time. I circled around the war memorial, reading the names of the fallen heroes. One name that caught my attention was “Roby P. Yates,” killed in World War II, possibly a descendant of the Yates family, the clan of the twins’ wives.
I soon hit the road again, following a winding rural route northward, and arrived in Mount Airy about half an hour later. In my ignorance, not having been raised in America, I had not yet made a connection between the Siamese Twins and Mayberry on that trip, so I did not look out for traces of Sheriff Taylor or Deputy Fife. Nor, when I pulled in to a gas station, was I surprised that no friendly Gomer or Goober came out to help me fill up. My destination that day was the cemetery where Chang and Eng were buried. I quickly found the spot, a churchyard on a small mound by a quiet country road, facing the ramparts of the Blue Ridge to the north. I had seen the photos of the twins’ grave many times, but I was surprised by the sheer number of other Bunkers buried here. It was essentially their family graveyard.
CHANG AND ENG BUNKER’S GRAVE, WHITE PLAINS, NORTH CAROLINA
Most impressive of all was the wood-framed church, painted white, with a remarkable beauty of symmetry like a perfect mathematical equation. While I was walking around and admiring the building, a woman emerged from a side door. “Are you looking for the Siamese Twins’ grave?” she asked. She then handed me a pamphlet that introduces the history of the White Plains Baptist Church. According to the four-page pamphlet, the twins’ wives—daughters of a Baptist pastor—were avid congregants, whereas the twins were born Buddhist. But what they lacked in evangelical background, they made up in material support—not only did they donate the land for the church, they also helped to build it. Glancing at my California license plate, the woman realized that I had come a long way to visit the place, so she chatted with me, as if to reward my effort. She told me of an incident that occurred when the twins were building the church, after the wood frame had been raised. One day when they were working on the roof, one of the twins accidentally hit the thumb of the other with a hammer. Tempers flared and an argument broke out, leading to a fistfight. They ended up tumbling down the roof together. The woman chuckled as she wrapped up the anecdote and handed me a smaller church brochure tit
led “The Only Doorway.” Having attended Sunday sermons in Alabama, I did indeed know where the doorway was supposed to be: Jesus Christ.
WHITE PLAINS BAPTIST CHURCH, NORTH CAROLIINA
The sound of music from a TV monitor on the wall broke my reverie. A documentary film had just started, showing two child actors reenacting the conjoined twins’ early life in old Siam. Judging by the images, it must have been The Siamese Connection, the film by Josh Gibson. I had watched its excellent documentary during my previous adventure in North Carolina, sitting in the library at UNC and wearing a headset.
I went around the basement room, looking at items displayed on the walls. I had already seen most of them during my research, but there were some surprising finds: copies of the twins’ wills, a rare nineteenth-century photograph of Mount Airy’s muddy main street, and pictures of some of the Bunker descendants in rural settings. A black curtain shielded one corner of the room. Out of curiosity, I delicately pulled aside the curtain and found a stack of binders on a table. Inside the binders were newspaper clippings about Bunker descendants, arranged chronologically, with dates scribbled in longhand. What particularly caught my attention were clippings from the Tallahassee Democrat, all articles about Alex Sink, the 2010 Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Florida. Great-granddaughter of Chang, Sink had grown up in Mount Airy, at the twins’ homestead. A savvy businesswoman like her forefathers, Sink started out in the banking business in North Carolina before heading down to the Sunshine State and being elected Florida’s chief financial officer. When she ran for governor in 2010, I had watched her debate against Rick Scott on CNN and greatly admired her aplomb and acumen. In interviews, she had often reminisced about growing up in America’s quintessential small town. Because of her mixed look, townspeople who saw her on the streets would say, “You must be one of the Bunkers.” Maybe it was her appearance, or maybe it was the quixotic hanging-chad politics of Florida, but she lost the election by a hair-thin margin to a scandal-ridden Republican opponent.