They were brought from Siam to America to entertain people at their expense. However, they were able to turn their weakness into strength - thanks to their innate entrepreneurship, they gained not only freedom, but also a considerable fortune. How was the fate of the famous Bunker brothers?
American dream through the eyes of the most famous siamese twins
Chang and Eng were both 17 years old when they left their native Siam. They were supposed to come home after five years, but that never happened. The brothers, knotted together on the chest with a strip of cartilage and sharing a common liver, set off on a journey through the United States. Within a decade, they gained fame, fortune, and American citizenship. They bought land and slaves, built a house in the south, and married two white sisters with whom they raised a large group of children. However, as is sometimes the case with the American dream - it collapsed as quickly as it had come true at the beginning.
Yunte Huang tells the incredible story of the first Siamese twins to be called. It shows the birth of stars at the peak of the development of the American entertainment industry. But while they earned their success and achieved the status of wealthy landlords, they were seen all their lives as "freaks" from circus shows. This extraordinary book deals with many phenomena that were the hotspots in the United States of the nineteenth century. It flows against the myth of American individualism and at the same time makes an excellent commentary on the times in which we live.
After years of serving as an itinerant attraction, the famous "Siamese Brothers" Chang and Eng Bunkers settled in a small town in North Carolina and lived the lives of nineteenth-century southern nobility, others in words - identifying with the white oppressor class, begetting at least 21 children, and sending their sons to the Civil War to fight on the side of the Confederacy. Huang in his insightful and captivating story perfectly captures the irony of this story.
The New York Times, Times Critics ′ Top Books of 2018
You will learn about the extraordinary story of Chang and Eng Bunkers in the book by Yunte Huang "Inseparable. Famous Siamese brothers and their encounter with American history ” (Poznań Publishing House 2019).
The great history of America told in the perfect metaphor of its era. The fate of "exotic freaks" is also the essence of what we understand as American. It is a crooked, circus mirror walking along the road in the 19th century. But it is also a story about our contemporaries - show business as we know it today was born out of biographies like this one. Come on, come on! Here is America - the strangest country in the world!
Karolina Sulej, Barłóg Literacki
Yunte Huang is a writer, university lecturer and Guggenheim scholarship holder from China and living in the USA since 1991, winner of the Edgar Allan Poe for Best Critical / Biography Book ( Charlie Chan:The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History ). His second book , Inseparable:The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History is in the finals of the National Book Critics Circle Award (results will be announced in March 2019).
Translation:Maciej Miłkowski
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