Chang and Eng
Page 36
The next morning, Sarah and Adelaide Bunker hire a local tinsmith named Joseph Augustus Reich to build a large metal coffin to fit the twins’ immense casket. Cutting thirty-four large sheets of tin, Reich fashions the extraordinary sarcophagus in four hours. Reich is a heavy-lidded young man from Wilkes County, and he wears a proud smile when making the special funerary box. He cannot put his reverence into words, especially when he struggles to lift the Siamese Twins into their coffin; they are interred in black silk raiment with black slippers. Chang and Eng are the greatest human curiosity in the history of the world, Reich thinks, and whoever thought I would be the man to solder them up.
For his sister, because she once visited Wood’s Curiosity Museum in New York City, the young tinsmith decides to save a drop of solder that falls from the coffin when he welds it shut.
The twins are buried in a double-plot, under a single large headstone, behind the old Baptist church in White Plains, North Carolina, just outside Wilkesboro.
A NOTE UPON FINISHING THE BOOK
The story you have just read is both true and not. The twins Chang and Eng Bunker, united at the chest, did in fact live between 1811 and 1874, as I have written in these pages. And they did meet the King of Siam, come to America and celebrity, entertain P. T. Barnum, marry sisters, father twenty-one children, and sustain a coupled life as farmers in North Carolina during the Civil War period.
But the book in your hand hopes to be ruled a novel and not a history. Most of its people and situations result strictly from the imagination. Where I have discarded or finessed or invented the details of Chang and Eng’s life, it was only to elbow the facts toward a novel’s own idea of truth, which is something else entirely.
It is a lucky strike for any writer to be read at all, and so I look at the success of Chang and Eng as a godsend. Since the book’s publication, people—a good number of people—now see this narrative as the factual story of Chang and Eng. No matter how many caveats you insert, once you write something down, once a story lives between hard covers, it takes on the attitude of firm truth. Soon after the first edition of this book came out, I was fortunate to meet some of Chang and Eng’s descendants. In talking with them I was reminded that the differences between biography and novel are esoteric, and while I hold them precious, a book is merely a book; a family is sacred. It is my sincerest hope that this book has not done the Bunker family anything that approaches dishonor.
No definitive record of the twins’ life exists; their conjoined history was a confusion of legend, sideshow hyperbole, and editorial invention even while they lived. That said, a number of reference works were essential to my research: The Kingdom of the People of Siam, by John Bowring (Oxford University Press, 1969); An Historical Account of the Siamese Twin Brothers, from Actual Observations, by James W Hale (Elliot and Palmer, 1831); The Two, by Amy and Irving Wallace (Simon & Schuster, 1978); America in 1857, by Kenneth Stampp (Oxford University Press, 1990); Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us about Human Behavior, by Nancy Segal (Dutton, 1999). I’d like to thank the staff of the Mütter Museum at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia—where the plaster cast of Chang and Eng resides—and Joan Baity, curator of the Old Wilkes Museum, who made me feel at home in Wilkesboro, a town as comely today as it must have been when the twins walked its streets.
And I’d like to express my gratitude to the following: Jonathan Strong, Alan Lebowitz, Jay Cantor, E. L. Doctorow, Peter Carey, and Lee K. Abbott for lessons; Brett Martin, Laurel Berger, Pamela Berger, Chris Noel, Jeff Roda, Doug Glover, and, especially, Susannah Meadows for giving me a read; the New York State Writers Institute; Brian Tart for noticing and fantastically editing me; Carole Baron and the rest of Dutton for bolstering me; and Rob Kraselnik, for lending me some history books.
Are you the REAL McCoy?
Darin Strauss returns with another strikingly original novel about identity, illusion, and the search for love.
Loosely based on the real life of the turn-of-the-century icon and charlatan, Strauss’s eponymous new book introduces a character like no other in recent contemporary fiction. McCoy was a man of many talents and faces: championship boxer, jewel thief, scam artist, and the most married man in America. Unfolding against the tumultuous backdrop of history, his story becomes a fascinating mirror of the times as he becomes a legend and a symbol of all that’s true in America.
COMING IN SUMMER 2002