by Yunte Huang
“They are very astute,” she said.
When I asked her about the ducks, she told me that some campers had left them behind. Now they had become a nuisance, she said, because they would forage in trash cans and leave their droppings everywhere. I had thought about mentioning the twins’ early life as duck farmers in Siam, but words got stuck inside of me, words like reincarnation, karma, and soul. Perhaps only someone like me, having pursued the twins’ story for so long, would believe it to be good karma that, as I came to the end of my journey, I would encounter these wayward ducks, left here as though by design, roaming freely in the land of two duck fanciers who took the world by storm.
“You’re here for the Mayberry Days, right?” she asked.
“No, I’m here for the twins.”
She was taken aback.
When I asked her what she thought of the twins, she hesitated for a minute, trying to find the right answer.
“They’re very different,” she said.
Her careful choice of words, a polite euphemism, marked light years of distance from Captain Coffin’s crude nomenclature, a commonplace assumption of that age about people like the twins—calling them freaks, monsters, jokes of nature, and so on. Over the years, these demeaning labels have slowly disappeared from our lexicon. But her remark on difference, though understandable, alerted me to what’s troubling about the Myth of Mayberry, to the fact that in Mount Airy the Siamese Twins and Andy Griffith can coexist as a story about America. From the very beginning, Chang and Eng stood for what was abnormal, exotic, and extraordinary; they were the epitome of what Mayberry attempted to exclude. The Myth of Mayberry is built on kinship, on bond, and on the desire to stay put, if not to keep strangers out.
As Sherwood Anderson put it in Poor White (1920), a novel about small-town America characterized by homogeneity and xenophobia: “The people who lived in the towns were to each other like members of a great family. . . . Within the invisible circle and under the great roof every one knew his neighbor and was known to him.” Or, as Gustavo Pérez Firmat rightly points out in his critique of TAGS, there remains no path to citizenship for outsiders in the Mayberry myth.3 But Mount Airy, the inspiration for Mayberry, actually proved, though only for a matter of decades, otherwise. It was here that Chang and Eng, perhaps the most exotic “freaks” that America ever beheld, found a home. It was here, right in Mount Airy, that they got married, had offspring, and lived a semblance of a life like everyone else. In some strange ways, the story of Mayberry and that of Mount Airy, as two strands of the American identity, are still intertwined like that of the inseparable Siamese Twins.
In the wee hours of the next morning, I woke up in the backseat of the Jeep, shivering from cold. I had left open a crack in the window, and now the nippy mountain air crawled inside like something alive. Never having been a camper before, I crouched under a thin blanket and peeked out through the rear window.
The half-moon had crossed the apex of its nightly journey, caught in tall pines that soughed in the wind like the audible rushing of time. The highway continued to thrum like heartbeats. As I drifted in and out of slumber, some images of the previous day still hovered in my head like dream fragments, a mosaic of scenes both real and cinematic.
At some point, Floyd, that unvanquishable barber from TAGS, appeared like a phantom, squinting his almost Chinese-like eyes and speaking one of the most clichéd lines of what had bizarrely become my most favorite TV show, intoning, “It could only happen in America. . . .”
Acknowledgments
At the end of a book about human bonds, I wish to express my enormous gratitude to Bob Weil and Glenn Mott, two men with whom I have had the good fortune of building a bond of friendship. Ever since he became my editor at Norton, Bob has remained my inspiration and a sui generis “implied reader,” who sets a high bar for all my writings. Having him as an editor should be the dream of every writer, and having him as a friend is a total blessing.
To call Glenn my agent is both a misnomer and, to quote Ezra Pound, a “correct naming.” While our friendship started more than a quarter century ago in Alabama, Glenn, who has agented all my books for Norton, truly represents my interests in all aspects, both as a writer and as a human being.
Writing is a solitary job, but I have been blessed with wonderful friends and colleagues, who have given me encouragement, assistance, and camaraderie, including Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, Hank Lazer, Stephen Greenblatt, Jill Lepore, Harry Stecopoulos, Candace Waid, Rita Raley, and Evan Wender.
I also wish to thank the following people and institutions for having most ably and generously assisted me in accessing precious images and research materials: William Brown at the State Archives of North Carolina; Matthew Turi and Tim Hodgdon at the Wilson Special Collections Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Dr. Annette Ayers, president of Surry County Historical Society in North Carolina; Elizabeth Williams-Clymer, Special Collections Librarian, Kenyon College; Heather Magaw at the Osher Map Library, University of Southern Maine; Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University; and William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan.
It is my good luck to have again had as my copyeditor Kathleen Brandes, who has, as always, gone well beyond her call of duty and made this a much better book.
A generous fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation enabled me to take a leave from my university in order to conduct research and writing for this book.
An earlier version of the prologue was published as a story in The Iowa Review. I thank the editor and the journal for permission to reprint the piece here.
The writing of this book coincided with the arrival of two new persons in my life, my wife JZ and our son Henry, who have both redefined my existence. In the same period, however, I also suffered a most painful loss, the sudden passing of my father, who had taught me to write when I was growing up in a small town in southeastern China. It seems that the universe has a strange way of evening out the scores.
Again, I have left for last my acknowledgment of the deepest bond, Isabelle and Ira, two tenacious kids who have now blossomed into vivacious young adults. They have given a special meaning to the title word, inseparable.
Notes
PROLOGUE: A GAME ON THE HIGH SEAS
1. Official Guide and Album of the Cunard Steamship Company (London: Sutton Sharpe and Co., 1878), p. 7.
2. Passenger Lists of Vessels Arriving at New York, New York, 1820–1897. Microfilm Publications M237, 675 rolls. Records of the US Customs Service, Record Group 36. National Archives (Washington, DC).
3. Sid Lipsey, “Cruise Nostalgia: Cunard Looks Back at 175 Years at Sea,” Yahoo Travel. https://www.yahoo.com/travel/cruise-nostalgia-cunard-looks-back-c1427914909167/photo-2-those-first-cruises-weren-t-exactly-super-luxurious-photo-1427914867608.html (accessed 4/1/2015).
4. Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation, ed. John S. Whitley and Arnold Goldman (New York: Penguin, 1972), p. 55.
5. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (New York: Ecco Press, 1992), vol. 1, p. 2.
6. Official Guide and Album of the Cunard Steamship Company, p. 105.
7. William DeWitt Hyde, ed., Vocations, Vol. 10 (Boston: Hall and Locke Company, 1911), pp. 247–50.
8. Official Guide and Album of the Cunard Steamship Company, pp. 18–20.
9. James W. Hale, An Historical Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers, from Actual Observations (New York: Elliott and Palmer, 1831), p. 9.
10. Edward Wilmot Blyden, “The Fifth President of the Republic of Liberia,” in African Repository XLVI (1870), pp. 121–22.
11. Svend E. Holsoe, “A Portrait of a Black Midwestern Family during the Early Nineteenth Century: Edward James Roye and His Parents,” in Liberian Studies Journal 3.1 (1970–71), pp. 41–52.
12. Tom W. Shick, Behind the Promised Land: A History of Afro-American Settler Society in Nineteenth-Century Liberia (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 3–
4.
13. “The President of Liberia,” in New York Daily Tribune, August 17, 1870, p. 3.
14. “Sunbeams,” in The Sun (New York), November 14, 1870.
15. Claude A. Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), p. 5.,
16. “The Siamese Twins,” in New York Times, August 14, 1870.
17. “Chang and Eng,” editorial in Philadelphia Medical Times, February 28, 1874.
CHAPTER 1. SIAM
1. R. Adey Moore, “An Early British Merchant in Bangkok,” in Journal of the Siam Society XI (1914–1915), p. 21. W. S. Bristowe, “Robert Hunter in Siam,” in History Today 24:2 (February 1974), p. 90.
2. David K. Wyatt, Thailand: A Short History (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 167–68.
3. Moore, pp. 22, 34. Bristowe, p. 90.
4. Kay Hunter, Duet for a Lifetime: The Story of the Original Siamese Twins (New York: Coward-McCann: 1964), p. 26.
5. Bristowe, p. 91.
6. Hunter, p. 26. Irving Wallace and Amy Wallace, The Two: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 35.
CHAPTER 2. THE CHINESE TWINS
1. Judge Jesse Franklin Graves, “The Siamese Twins as Told by Judge Jesse Franklin Graves,” unpublished manuscript, North Carolina State Archives (Raleigh), n.d., p. 1 (hereafter, NCSA).
2. Wyatt, p. 166.
3. B. J. Terwiel, A History of Modern Thailand, 1767–1942 (St. Lucia, Australia: University of Queensland Press, 1983), p. 110.
4. Rama II, King of Thailand, Nang Loi: The Floating Maiden. A Recitation from an Episode of the Ramakien, translated by Pensak Chagsuchinda (Lund, Sweden: Studentlitteratur, 1973), p. 30.
5. Terwiel, p. 123. John Crawfurd, Journal of an Embassy to the Courts of Siam and Cochin China. Oxford in Asia Historical Reprints (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 136–37.
6. William H. Pancoast, Report of the Autopsy of the Siamese Twins: Together with Other Interesting Information Concerning Their Life (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1874), p. 2.
7. Wallace and Wallace, p. 17.
8. Terwiel, p. 114. G. William Skinner, Chinese Society in Thailand: An Analytical History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1957), pp. 1–68. Walter F. Vella, Siam Under Rama III, 1824–1851 (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1957), p. 27.
9. Hsieh Yu-jung, Hsien-lo kuo-chih (Siam Gazetteer) (Bangkok: Nan-hai tung-shun-she, 1949), p. 275.
10. Quoted in Sun Fang Si, Die Entwicklung der chinesischen Kolonisation in Südasien (Nan-yang) nach chinesischen Quellen (Jena, Germany, 1931), p. 15.
11. Wyatt, p. 145.
12. Skinner, p. 97.
13. Michael Smithies, ed., Descriptions of Old Siam (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 58.
14. John Bowring, The Kingdom and People of Siam; with a Narrative of the Mission to That Country in 1855 (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1857), p. 23.
15. Ibid., p. 24.
16. Charles Gutzlaff, Journal of Three Voyages Along the Coast of China in 1831, 1832, 1833 (London: Frederick Westley and A. H. Davis, 1834), p. 53.
17. Edmund Roberts, Embassy to the Eastern Courts of Cochin-China, Siam, and Muscat: in the U.S. Sloop-of-War Peacock, David Geisinger, Commander, during the Years 1832-3-4 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1837), p. 73.
18. Bangkok Calendar, 1870, p. 90.
19. Skinner, p. 127.
20. Anna Leonowens, The English Governess at the Siamese Court (first published 1870; New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 78. Contrary to her claim of pure British blood, Leonowens was born of a British officer and an Indian prostitute in Bombay, a secret she kept from King Mongkut and from the readers of her wildly popular and sensational autobiography.
21. Edmund Roberts and W. S. W. Ruschenberger, Two Yankee Diplomats in 1830s Siam, ed. Michael Smithies (Bangkok: Orchid Press, 2002), p. 86.
22. Wallace and Wallace, p. 22.
23. Anthony Farrington, ed., Early Missionaries in Bangkok: The Journals of Tomlin, Gutzlaff and Abeel, 1828–1832 (Bangkok: White Lotus Press, 2001), p. 3.
CHAPTER 3. CHOLERA
1. Terwiel, pp. 110–11.
2. Crawfurd, p. 158.
3. Graves, p. 2.
4. Ibid., p. 7.
5. Archie Robertson, “Chang-Eng’s American Heritage,” Life, August 11, 1952, p. 72.
6. A report on CNN recently ranked Century Egg first on the list of “Most ‘Revolting’ Food I’ve Had,” with a tagline running, “Century eggs—not as old as they sound, but they taste like it.” “iReport: The Most ‘Revolting’ Food I’ve Had Is. . . ,” June 28, 2011. http://travel/cnn.com/explorations/eat/ireport-most-disgusting-foods-world-053021 (accessed 4/10/2015).
7. Wyatt, pp. 112–18, 164. Bristowe, pp. 88–89. Gutzlaff, pp. 51–52. Moore, p. 34.
CHAPTER 4. THE KING AND US
1. Christine Quigley, Conjoined Twins: An Historical, Biological and Ethical Issues Encyclopedia (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2003), pp. 46–47.
2. Ibid., p. 148.
3. Ibid., p. 90.
4. Moore, p. 21.
5. Graves, p. 7.
6. Smithies, p. 211.
7. Ibid., pp. 213–14.
CHAPTER 5. DEPARTURE
1. Moore, p. 34.
2. Smithies, p. 214.
3. Moore, p. 23.
4. Quoted in Moore, p. 24.
5. Karl Gutzlaff would later anglicize his first name to Charles.
6. Terwiel, pp. 133–34.
7. Gutzlaff, p. 71.
8. Terwiel, pp. 138–39.
9. Farrington, pp. 20, 21, 39–40.
10. Wallace and Wallace, p. 45.
11. Even though he dismissed the Chinese belief and practice regarding the lunar eclipse as pagan idiocy, Jacob Tomlin duly recorded in his missionary journals the events on March 20, 1829, as he witnessed them in Bangkok. See Farrington, pp. 46–47.
12. In March 1977, a short notice appeared in the classified ads section of the Winston-Salem Journal, advertising for sale a copy of the original agreement that had brought the Siamese Twins to America. After some negotiation, A. B. Clark, a professor at the University of Maine, a descendant of Abel Coffin and owner of the contract, donated the item to the Surry County Historical Society. See Roy Thompson, “Chang-Eng Pact Acquired,” in Winston-Salem Journal, August 6, 1977.
CHAPTER 6. A CURIOSITY IN BOSTON
1. Cynthia Wu, Chang and Eng Reconnected: The Original Siamese Twins in American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), p. 1.
2. Abel Coffin, letter to Susan Coffin, June 28, 1829, NCSA.
3. Barbara M. Benedict, Curiosity: A Cultural History of Early Modern Inquiry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p. 1.
4. Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Northwestern–Newberry Edition (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1988), p. 19.
5. Benedict, p. 248.
6. Leslie Fiedler, Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology and Myth (Boston: David R. Godine, 1996), p. 151.
7. Fanny Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832; reprint, Gloucester, UK: Alan Sutton, 1984), p. 150.
8. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), p. 592.
9. William H. Herndon and Jesse W. Weik, Life of Lincoln (New York: 1896), vol. I, pp. 108–9.
10. Marquis James, Andrew Jackson: The Border Captain (Indianapolis: Grosset & Dunlap, 1933), p. 19.
11. Robert Bogdan, Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 27–28.
12. Wallace and Wallace, p. 50.
13. Dickens, American Notes, p. 74.
14. The Patriot (Boston), August 17, 1829.
15. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, e
d., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 1–3.
16. Edward Warren, The Life of John Collins Warren: Compiled Chiefly from His Autobiography and Journals (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1860), vol. 1, pp. 207–8.
17. Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), p. xii.
18. John Warren, “An Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers United Together from Their Birth,” in American Journal of the Medical Sciences 5.9 (November 1829), p. 253.
19. John Warren, “The Siamese Brothers,” in Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 2 (September 1829), p. 460.
20. Warren, “An Account,” p. 255.
21. Warren, “The Siamese Brothers,” p. 461.
22. Warren, “An Account,” p. 255.
CHAPTER 7. THE MONSTER, OR NOT
1. Harold Kirker, “The Boston Exchange Coffee House,” in Old-Time New England, vol. LII, 1961, pp. 11–13. Jack Quinan, “The Boston Exchange Coffee House,” in Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 38.3 (October 1979), pp. 256–62.
2. Wu, pp. 24–25.
3. Anonymous, “A Tour from Cincinnati to Boston, and Return, October 1829,” Flint’s Western Review, December 1829, reprinted in Salem Gazette, January 8, 1830.
4. John Kuo Wei Tchen, New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture 1776–1882 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 100.
5. Leslie Fiedler, Freaks: Myths and Images of the Secret Self (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), p. 31.
6. Robert Bogdan, pp. 7, xi.
7. John C. Warren, “Some Account of the Siamese Boys, Lately Brought to Boston,” in Boston Daily Advertiser, August 26, 1829.
8. Boston Bulletin, August 29, 1829.
9. Baltimore Patriot, September 3, 1829.
10. Rhode Island American, September 8, 1829.
11. Wallace and Wallace, p. 61.