Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  Still, in our ignorance we were not unlike most of the five million other Siamese peasants, a people who knew almost nothing. Not that a North Carolinian could be mistaken for Isaac Newton, but at least information is available in America—you don’t have to walk all day with your shins deep in muddy water just to find someone who’s been somewhere. On the Mekong, it was not possible to enjoy a breeze; every whiff was tainted by the stench of fish and physical struggle. Boggy pathways congested with bent-backed girls, their shoulders contorted under heavy yokes, their legs covered to the knees in drying mud: this is the philosophy of my native land. And the Thai language may be a honey-tipped tool for minstrels, but its lack of precision led to a puerile brand of science that almost killed Chang and me many times over.

  Nevertheless, Siam is my homeland and I will always regret spurning her.

  After Chang and I were born, news of the spectacular delivery brought droves of sightseers, and soon physicians came forward to suggest methods of separation. And though I was but a few months old, I can only assume I would have craved disunion, even then.

  The first of the surgeons arrived one afternoon and poured a libation at our doorway. Then he closed his eyes and prayed to himself in a whisper. Not moving, Mother and Father watched this little man as he picked up his calico sack and walked over to Chang and me in our bedstead. Father and Mother tiptoed side by side toward the physician and waited for him to speak. Chang and I lay squeaking and playing with Mother’s rag doll, named In.

  Dr. Lau had thinning, braided hair, a trimmed gray goatee, and a freckled nose. He was a Bangkok sophisticate. Resting his sack on the sawed tree butt at the midpoint of our houseboat, he looked around before addressing my father: “Please take no offense at what I am about to say, sir.” The doctor was squinting the way Father did whenever he noticed our band. “How does one manage to live in these conditions?”

  Father blinked as he took a step back, letting my mother’s hand fall from his forearm. He told the doctor that we enjoyed our home, speaking as if each word was a pain he wanted quickly out of his mouth. His hair was wild, a few tufts standing from his head while the rest lay flat, as usual.

  “Please, mister.” The doctor scratched his chin. “I do not mean to be rude—”

  “What do you mean to be, then?” Father took a step toward the doctor.

  “—it’s just that I’ve heard you are half Chinese.” The doctor had begun talking in upper-class Mandarin. Outside, reeds snapped like crickets as a sightseer tried to get a peek into our houseboat.

  “Ask our neighbors, they’ll tell you.” Father continued to speak in the Thai language, drawing in air and exhaling through his nostrils.

  The doctor gave a little shrug.

  “I am a Mekong River fisherman,” Father said. “I’m proud of my vocation and learning to be good at it.”

  “You see, mister,” the doctor smiled, “I boast some Chinese blood as well.” He fingered his withdrawing hairline as if he was petting a prize animal.

  Father stormed to the doorway, grumbling. The doctor seemed nonplussed. When Father walked outside, the sightseer could be heard splashing away through the reeds. Dr. Lau chuckled softly.

  Mother wasn’t the kind of woman to waste time caressing her husband’s insulted pride. She turned to Dr. Lau with eyes prematurely old but unweary: “Sir, my babies?”

  The physician examined us with a nod of amused distaste, and squeezed our band until we cried. He clawed at it, pummeled it like a Confederate lumberjack trying to chop through a Union log, then pressed an ear gently to our breasts. Next he circled the bedstead with his hands held out from his sides, and began purring.

  “This is what we must do,” he said finally, his head bowed in concentration, but he lifted his face when he heard Father shuffle back inside.

  Mother, nervously jiggling her loose brown front tooth with her tongue, motioned all quiet to her husband with a finger to her lips; Father looked to his feet for solace. The sadness in his downcast face touched Mother.

  “We must”—the surgeon furrowed his brow—“hang the boys for ninety days across a cord of fine catgut.” The physician ignored Mother and Father’s confused interjections, and said, “This will be positioned at the center of that connecting ligature so they will dangle like a pair of saddlebags.”

  Mother stood tensely, her expression like that of someone about to shoo birds from a window.

  “This catgut cord will,” said the doctor, “by the end of the term, bore its way through their ligature, by degrees, thereby allowing the severed parts time to heal as it progresses.”

  Mother’s lips quivered. Father ushered the physician out the door.

  “If you have a change of mind—” the doctor said, coughing. Flat green coastline stretched beyond our houseboat, damp and quiet. The river lay ahead.

  Other charlatans came and went, each with a new inspiration: to cut the band with a scalding-hot wire, or to burn it, saw us apart (this seemed particularly prosaic), somehow to use termites on it, etc. Each procedure would have bifurcated the stomach we shared inside our ligament, and killed us, of course.

  Perhaps it was the doctor, or the onlookers, because it took Father some time fully to acknowledge that, even with our absurd and, to his eyes, repulsive condition, it was his duty to hide his disgust. By the time the King’s men came for us a few years later, Father had become caring, in his reserved way. “All right, children,” he would say to us sometimes. “All right.”

  Mother was of a sweeter temper. She worked without end to ensure our childhood would be a pocket of softness in a callous life. She sewed our “clothes” herself, designing a makeshift drape with a pair of holes for our heads. We were raised as normal boys, not pitied or slighted. She kept us utterly isolated from other children, she taught us to sing, speak, to help out around the house. She had us do everything, that is, except feel unlike others. We quarreled as I imagine other brothers do, perhaps a little more, and a little more troublesomely, due to what’s obvious. But I would say we lived a discordant concord, to quote Horace.

  After some time we were deemed deserving of names. My name means “strictly, to tie strongly,” in the Thai language; Chang means “tasteless.”

  My brother liked to tell reporters that he and I thought ourselves complete and ordinary, and that, when eventually we saw other boys for the first time (the day we were attacked), it was the separate children who were odd and lacking in our eyes. But I did not feel that way; even as an infant I knew that the onlookers came to visit for a reason. I knew we were different, that we were constrained.

  Early on, Chang’s frailty didn’t make learning to walk any easier. Our little connector did not allow us yet to stand side by side. My brother’s chin nearly touched mine, day and night. Facing each other like a pair of dancers, we walked in side steps. But managing simple daily maneuvers was a hurdle we eventually learned to clamber over. Taking a seat without breaking the chair, reaching for something just beyond my grasp and not being jerked backward, and, much later, making love—these seemed like locked doors before we built our own passkey. I have seen two rummies trying to support each other in an attempt to get home unscathed, and I doubt that act is as difficult as it is simply to move when you are the “Siamese Twins,” unequal in height and temperament. I was always a little taller.

  It took a while to become capable walkers. I scarcely remember the first time (we were about three) when we strayed outside alone, but years later a British pamphlet from our first European tour dramatized the moment.

  Whosoever has been a Christian child and yet now and again wanted to take to one’s heels and hasten off on the double quick; whosoever has thought it about unbearable, at least once toward evening in November, to stand pat, attending to his business and the like—he will understand the wanderlust agitating the yellow blood of the baby Siamese Twin-Monster. The Bound-Duo were toddling by the entry to their floating skipper when they were beguiled by some Oriental music from a th
eater drifting by; the Double-Boys embarked toward it, and fell, in a topple, into the river directly. Thrashing about like the oddity they are, the Twins must have made quite a fanfaronade! The crew of an aquatic laundry eventually came to Chang and Eng’s salvation, and the Twins were evermore attracted to music!

  I can call back some particulars about that fall—a commotion of dust, the tang of peat bog in my mouth, thick green water blocking my lungs, and, later, the boredom of lying next to Chang during his delayed recovery. He was sick and ashen for weeks. After days in bed like this, I began to cry. “I hate him,” I said. “I hate him.” He was meager and pale and the work of looking at me seemed too much for his little face.

  Mother hugged me, and I could smell the salt in her hair. When she tried to release me so she could embrace him, I held on and would not let go. My twin leered as if a judge had whispered in his ear—Chang’s turn to win.

  “I hate him,” I said. But Mother brushed me aside and sat up straight. “A double-boy must never fight among yourself.” Her face was very serious. “Others argue and are capable of escaping each other. You do not have that advantage. You may as well cut off your own head.” She brought her hand to my soft cheek and to Chang’s pallid one, and she smiled. “All right, Bean Sprout?” she asked Chang. “All right, Eng?” she asked me.

  Calm down, I said to myself. I am sorry.

  I cannot calm down, I still have to linger in this bed, I said to myself.

  Ignore it, I said to myself. And I am not sorry.

  All right, I will ignore it.

  I was acquiring the Silence, learning how to remain true to the talk that stirred in my own heart and, instead of articulating the tragedy of my situation, recount it to myself.

  Chang came around and we were up and both healthy, and soon I spent the days pestering Father for the philosophies of Mekong fishing and Gung-Fu—his twin passions.

  Father sat with us on the small dinghy he’d kept tied to the raft that formed the floor of our houseboat, and his eyes gleamed. Mekong fishing is an art worthy of the knowledge and practice of a wise man, somewhat like poetry. It is contingent upon great precision: in the sewing of the twine with a delicate needle and silk, and the fastening of the twine into perfect square nets, and in the positioning of the worm (imposing your arming wire through his top and out at his bottom, and then affixing him to the net, and doing so as though you loved him).

  “Here, Eng.” Father grinned, something he scarcely did, and it made his big teeth look odd against the rest of his face. “Here, Chang. Now you do it.” Ten thousand tunas were whipping just beneath the glinting surface of the water, I was certain of it. But Mekong fishing is Humility; it has a calmness of spirit and a world of other blessings nourishing it. The strands of the fishing net are the very sinews of virtue. “Mekong Fishermen stay abreast of change,” he said. “River men’s judgment helps one to make the appropriate decisions at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate.”

  Father also showed us how to use our condition to fight better than any one child. On the river, in the mornings and at night, before and after the day’s work, he would reveal the warlike arts of China’s Shao-lin temple, and the history of the temple monks who had organized combat into five phyla, each based on the rhythms of a distinct animal: the tiger, snake, crane, leopard, and the dragon. When the Shao-lin temple had been destroyed by fire, two of the survivors founded a town called Kowlein Tang. One of them, named Hung, was an ancestor of mine. Hung and Lau, the other remaining monk, had studied the tiger and the crane forms, respectively, and throughout their lives they continued training together. Their dual-animal method of Gung-Fu came to be taught in my family for generations.

  Awash in the glow of the setting or rising sun, his feet an inch deep in the Mekong, his hair a disorderly black nimbus, Father would school us, contorting his hands into an approximation of a tiger’s claw to scratch or grab an imagined opponent by the face; or, as the crane—moving his arms in circles to block imagined punches, emulating a beak with his fingers—he would teach us to poke out eyes. Gung-Fu accommodates both iron and silk, it yokes the supple with the solid.

  Father had us flip in the air together, the better to master rare grace and agility. Being off of the ground was a brazen maneuver, especially for conjoined fighters, and it urged the limits of our attuned movement. Father was wise to educate us in his Gung-Fu, because soon we had to use the fighting arts even at our very young age, the very first time we encountered other children.

  One day five boys arrived on the shore wearing triangular straw hats. Chang and I had been playing by ourselves, eight-year-old twins laughing and swinging face-to-face from the lines of bamboo fishing stakes that made a half-submerged corral off the bank of the Mekong. The boys in the hats were some years older.

  How odd these separated youngsters were, and how lovely! I had assumed disconnection was for adults only. And now, hanging from the fishing lines, Chang and I looked upon these creatures the way seafarers would their first mermaid.

  “They are half formed!” Chang whispered. To me they seemed liberated. This world, I understood then, had been created without thought of me.

  These boys ran around making a great noise until the tallest one saw us and stopped. He was too tall for his gray mackinaw and red pants. One by one the others adopted their leader’s posture of frozen shock.

  “Hello,” I sputtered with unease and spittle, my brother and I still dangling together on the fishing line above the river. From the shore, about five feet from us, these boys inspected Chang and me, and we them. Each of their dirty faces was an ugly denunciation of our existence, of their own wretched existences, of the grimy swampland spread around them, even of this bright day because surely it would be followed by two hundred rainy days in a row.

  “They are coming closer,” Chang whispered, and many sounds crowded into that moment, the lapping of the river, passing birds, and the wheeze my brother’s breath made from what was weak in us.

  The lead boy had a wide gap between his front teeth that he dammed angrily with his lower lip. Though this was long before I knew about the Bible, I understood from looking at this arrogant child that the meek were placed on this earth to contend with the enemies of God. I wanted to be among the latter group; I wanted to be separated.

  The five attacked. They rushed us in unison, advancing into the Mekong in a massed and splashy movement, leaning against one another as they charged. This human wall grabbed us before we could move, and hoisted us free from the fishing line and threw us into the air, where we stayed until the water sneaked up on us. I feared for our life.

  The tallest boy, the leader, lifted one of the bamboo stakes up from the riverbed, snapping it loose from the fishing lines. “Hold the monster down,” he ordered his playmates, pointing the sharp stake at us. The others seized us by our shoulders and twisted us around; our faces were now two inches deep in the water. My mouth filled with the sour Mekong.

  They spun us so our shoulders were submerged now, while each of us had a cheek pointing to the sky. But before we could gasp for breath, the leader stepped forward and began chopping at our band with the sharp stake. He was trying to separate us. With each blow, a swash of water jumped from the river like a flying fish. He drew blood, thrashing Chang and me both.

  “Snap!” the boy’s face gnarled in rage. But our tie would not break. “Snap!”

  After a minute of chopping, the followers released our shoulders and looked to their leader. The chief tormentor started to walk away. We would not split. The leader threw the cane down in disappointment.

  It was soon in my hands.

  Taking heaving breaths, cracking the cane in two, I passed a half to Chang. If the gang had attacked then, they’d have ruined us, but they hesitated; their mouths were open. We clambered to our feet—I was an inch taller than Chang, but he was strong in his own right. And we stepped forward and swung ferociously, in unison and with Gung-Fu. We likely made a scary sight, a
fourarmed little fighter holding two sharp poles, each with inches of fresh white bamboo shards for a tip. My brother and I targeted the tall boy, the leader, and the other four scattered, shrieking as they left the one to face the two by himself.

  Our swift double-kick to the boy’s face and neck threw him backward with a curious serenity. He looked like a bird landing; his arms flailed like a sparrow’s wings.

  He bounced on the riverbank, sounding a dull poof that echoed off the trees. I chuckled. My brother and I had known wordlessly to kick at the same time—we simply did somehow. That is the way it was with us; our natural awareness of one another created a spark that in its white glow smoothed differences, answered questions, brought the world into our rhythm. That did not mean we were of one mind.

  We have him now, I said to myself.

  My brother nodded.

  Our adversary, still on his back, reached next to him and clutched one of the bamboo stakes poking up through the water. The boy leaned on it as he rose, listlessly, to his feet. He wedged the pink mush of his bleeding lip through the gap between his front teeth. And he wrenched the pole free and held it like a sword.

  Face-to-face, Chang and I trained our pointed tips in his direction. He charged us. Three would-be swords clattered together.

  Chang and I approximated the crane, using placid circling to fend off the boy’s haphazard blows, and the air was filled with staff sounds: crack, crack. Even with the smallness of our bendable band, a conjoined child could twist better than any one, and we were enveloping the boy in a cloud of bamboo. Two, four, eight times we struck. We were close to him now, and in the smallest part of an instant, I had a good look at the boy’s young face, crumpled in fear. He fell back.

  We spun the boy with a blow to his hip and forced him against the bamboo corral; he nearly tripped when one of its stakes caught him in the back of the leg, and his expression asked: How did I become turned around?