Audiobook14 hours
Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History
Written by Yunte Huang
Narrated by P.J. Ochlan
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
4/5
()
About this audiobook
Nearly a decade after his triumphant Charlie Chan biography, Yunte Huang returns with this long-awaited portrait of Chang and Eng Bunker (1811-1874), twins conjoined at the sternum by a band of cartilage and a fused liver, who were "discovered" in Siam by a British merchant in 1824. Bringing an Asian American perspective to this almost implausible story, Huang depicts the twins, arriving in Boston in 1829, first as museum exhibits but later as financially savvy showmen who gained their freedom and traveled the backroads of rural America to bring "entertainment" to the Jacksonian mobs. Their rise from subhuman, freak-show celebrities to rich southern gentry; their marriage to two white sisters, resulting in twenty-one children; and their owning of slaves, is here not just another sensational biography but a Hawthorne-like excavation of America's historical penchant for finding feast in the abnormal, for tyrannizing the "other"-a tradition that, as Huang reveals, becomes inseparable from American history itself.
Related to Inseparable
Related audiobooks
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Mobituaries: Great Lives Worth Reliving Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Barnum: An American Life Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5American Rhapsody: Writers, Musicians, Movie Stars, and One Great Building Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Thanks, PG!:Memoirs of a Tabloid Reporter Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Irrepressible: The Jazz Age Life of Henrietta Bingham Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5In the Sanctuary of Outcasts: A Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ladysitting: My Year with Nana at the End of Her Century Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I Am a Girl from Africa Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Mary Lynn Rajskub: Live from the Pandemic Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTicking Clock: Behind the Scenes at 60 Minutes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5All God's Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Who Is Alex Trebek?: A Biography Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Passing Strange: A Gilded Age Tale of Love and Deception Across the Color Line Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trumbo: A Biography of the Oscar-winning Screenwriter Who Broke the Hollywood Blacklist Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Jew Store: A Family Memoir Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Deliberately Divided: Inside the Controversial Study of Twins and Triplets Adopted Apart Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsLeisureville: Adventures in a World Without Children Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ice Bound: A Doctor's Incredible Battle for Survival at the South Pole Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Thomas Jefferson Dreams of Sally Hemings Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Carville's Cure: Leprosy, Stigma, and the Fight for Justice Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Unforgettable: A Mother and Son's Final Days---and the Lessons that Last a Lifetime Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Twelve Years a Slave Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Tears of Salt: A Doctor's Story Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just Kids from the Bronx: Telling It the Way It Was: An Oral History Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Ethnic Studies For You
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 10th Anniversary Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Barracoon: The Story of the Last ""Black Cargo"" Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Searching for Savanna: The Murder of One Native American Woman and the Violence Against the Many Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Blackout: How Black America Can Make Its Second Escape from the Democrat Plantation Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5All About Love: New Visions Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Our Migrant Souls: A Meditation on Race and the Meanings and Myths of “Latino” Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Heavy: An American Memoir Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The FBI War on Tupac Shakur: The State Repression of Black Leaders from the Civil Rights Era to the 1990s Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Inconvenient Indian: A Curious Account of Native People in North America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Pulling the Chariot of the Sun: A Memoir of a Kidnapping Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sweet Taste of Liberty: A True Story of Slavery and Restitution in America Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Our Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ordinary Notes Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Black Imagination: Black Voices on Black Futures Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism 2nd Edition Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Man Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Rivermouth: A Chronicle of Language, Faith, and Migration Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Ceremony Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Inseparable
Rating: 3.8846153846153846 out of 5 stars
4/5
13 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5I stumbled upon this book accidentally, wandering by the "New Non-Fiction" shelves of my public library. I'm glad I stopped and picked it up. The story of Chang and Eng, while not overly remarkable in its strict narrative, provides an important look at how "othered" people both did and didn't integrate into American society of the nineteenth century.As a disabled person, I was naturally most interested in Chang and Eng as people with physical differences who became celebrities as so-called "freaks." Huang certainly spends time on that subject, but the book has a much stronger through-line of how Chang and Eng's Siamese origins impacted their lives in America. (That's unsurprising, knowing that Huang's other biographical work also focuses on intersections of Asian and American culture.) There is a particular focus on Chang and Eng's subtle shift from (public interpretation as) almost bestial, foreign figures to attaining wealth as "white" landed gentry - and back again. To explain this, Huang dips his readers head-first into a rich morass of nineteenth century American culture, with little sojourns into the worlds of P.T. Barnum, Mark Twain, Nat Turner, General Stoneman, and more. We learn about the various figures who "owned" and managed Chang and Eng as young men, the community of Mount Airy, NC, where they bought land, the families of their wives, and so on. There's even an epilogue where Huang stays the night in modern-day Mount Airy, inspiration for the fictional "Mayberry," to draw a contrast with The Andy Griffith Show, which is openly celebrated there, and the Siamese Twins, who are relegated to a room in the basement of the museum.Of course, I have read criticisms that Huang's style buries Chang and Eng's own story under a mountain of unnecessary additional material. That's not entirely unfair; Huang's literary style is more than a little lofty, and he sometimes makes far-reaching comparisons to justify throwing the spotlight on another famous American, or another significant cultural event, for a few pages. (He even has a slightly odd habit of repetition, or at least a lax editor; I caught half a dozen moments where he offhandedly repeated a small anecdote from earlier in the book). Overall, though, the book adds up to a rich cultural experience precisely because Huang veers around a bit. Chang and Eng's own life story is not overly remarkable - or at least, what can be ascertained by the few documents and artifacts left behind doesn't add up to much. Between the major beats of their narrative is a lot that can only be assumed. By providing us with so much background, Huang allows us to understand the world they lived and operated in, and to speculate for ourselves how they felt, reacted, loved, and lived. In so doing, we might think about how we are shaped by our present culture, too. As readers, we finish Huang's book a little more familiar with two men who, perhaps, still seem very unlike us - and who made their way in an overbearing, adversarial world startlingly similar to our own.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This is a very interesting biography of Chang and Eng Bunker, (1811-1874) known as the first the Siamese twins . They were brought to the U.S. at 18 years old to be exhibited in 'freak' shows.. Eventually they gained their freedom and lived as 'normal ' a life as possible. Both married and fathered many children. The book goes into much detail of the times during the civil war. Appears much research went into writing this book. Lots of interesting facts and all put together in a very readable book.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The twins are Chinese and were living in Siam. They lived along the river in a houseboat. Their father died when they were young. Their family was of a community known for its ability to market its goods. They were excellent swimmers, hunters, and fishermen – and helped support their mother and siblings.They themselves were “harvested” by a man who traveled the world in search of oddities. He promised their mother he’d bring them back in 5 years; that never happened. They eventually gained their freedom from this bondage and established themselves in America. They lived their lives as normal men – having separate homes and families, fathering 21 children, owning their own land and slaves, establishing themselves within community – while at the same time plying the trade of their abnormality. Living as both freaks and humans at one in the same time, and causing others to deal with this reality. The narrative exposes society’s need to categorize humanity and exclude some from full membership, the role of domination (including that those in slavery become slave owners), and the role of the trickster in America.Page 266Trickster “as a covert but quintessential American hero. …Anthropologists who study the myriad manifestations of the trickster in diverse cultures 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 possess no values, moral or social…yet through his actions all values come into being.”In the American context, some have argued that the confidence man as a trickster is ‘one of America’s unacknowledged founding fathers.’…Americans are ‘peddlers of assurance.”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…are those who show an extraordinary capacity for identifying the needs of others and playing them for suckers, as a shrewd confidence man would.”narrative includes description of P.T. Barnum as an ultimate trickster Page 297“The Civil War and Reconstruction represent in their primary aspect an attempt on the part of the Yankee to achieve by force what he had failed to achieve y political means…to make over the South in the prevailing American image and to sweep it into the main current of the nation.” ~W.J. Cash, “The Mind of the South” (1941)The war decimated Chang and Eng’s major asset – the 32 slaves they owned.It was after the Civil War that they had to go back on the road again, selling their freakishness in order to survive financially.Page 332The twins lived in Mount Airy, NC, which is also the hometown of Andy Griffith.The Andy Griffith ShowFather Knows BestLeave It to Beaver“classic depictions of 1950s and 1960s American ‘normalcy’… 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…, ‘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…Preface“To then, being human meant being more than one… They defy what Leslie Fiedler once called ‘the tyranny of the normal’……when we see, once again, a rising tide of human disqualification, of looking at others as less than human or normal…when everyone feels entitled to an opinion but cannot, by virtue of ignorance or innocence, tell the difference between a gag and a gem, between what show biz calls ‘gaffed freaks’ and ‘born freaks,’ the confidence man swoops in to make you feel better while he takes your money, or outright steals your soul. In this sense, the freak show, which lies at the heart of Chang and Eng’s story, is not just about looking at others as less human. To borrow a concept from the eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, a freak show is a 'deep play.’ Or, in the streetwise lingo of a humbug, it is ‘the long game.’”