Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780871404473)

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.

Author: Yunte Huang
ISBN-10: 0871404478
ISBN-13: 9780871404473
Publisher: Liveright Publishing Corporation
Language: English
Published: 04/03/2018
Pages: 416
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.60lbs
Size: 9.30h x 6.10w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 11/15/2017
Kirkus Reviews 02/01/2018
Publishers Weekly 02/05/2018
Booklist 02/15/2018 pg. 10
Library Journal 03/01/2018 pg. 90
BookPage 04/01/2018