Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins and Their Rendezvous with American History by Yunte Huang 1.2 stars

what part of life isn't remarkable?

They had separate houses.

That’s not the even remotely the most remarkable thing about Chang and Eng Bunker, but given that they were conjoined, it’s something. Chang and Eng were known during their lives as ‘Siamese Twins’ having been born in Siam in 1811 conjoined at the sternum. After their father died when they were still young, their mother provided for them by raising and selling ducks. A Scottish merchant named Robert Hunter happened upon them when they were 11 and made plans to exhibit them. They were 17 when they came to the United States and soon learned to speak and read English. In time, they became wealthy, rich enough to buy those separate houses. They needed two homes after they married a pair of sisters. They had a total of twenty-one children.

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They went back and forth, from house to house, a week at a time. Whichever brother’s house they were in, got to be in charge, so that when Eng was at Chang’s house, Chang made the rules and vice versa. They found it best to will themselves into a state of passivity during their times as houseguests, zoning out and letting the hosting brother do as he wished.

There were occasional problems with that system.

Chang was an alcoholic who drank until he passed out. Eng hated alcohol, but when Chang drank, Eng got drunk too. At one point, in a drunken rage, Chang pulled a knife and threatened his brother, saying, “I’m going to cut your guts out”.

Eng got his revenge by refusing to keep any alcohol in his home, forcing his brother to be sober every other week. Still, when Chang had a stroke, Eng lovingly took care of him.

Family is always tricky.

The two made a great deal of money and were wealthy for a time. They had friends in society and retired. By then, they were living in North Carolina, which is, in a way, also remarkable.

In 1839, North Carolina was a slave state. When Chang and Eng got married to Adelaide and Sarah Yates, newspaper reports expressed horror not only because of the twins’ physical connection, and because they were marrying sisters, but because they were Asian and the Yates were white. Still, Chang and Eng owned slaves and were ardent Confederates during the Civil War. You’d like to believe that people who struggle learn empathy, but sometimes they just learn that they want to put others beneath them. They lost their money as most Southerners did, and had to go back on tour.

Huang’s book is poorly written and unfocused, but the story is amazing. About four years before she died, Christian missionaries found Chang and Eng’s mother, still living in Siam, decades after her sons had gone to the States. She’d assumed they’d died, and instead found out they were rich, famous, married with large families of their own. It must surely have been incomprehensible to her.

It’s incomprehensible still, not just because of the strangeness of it all, but because of how Chang and Eng worked it all out. They argued and made up, fought and took care of each other. It is possible to love people without always liking them. Everyone, now and again, dreams of being alone. And yet, real solitude is equally unimaginable. We need human connection to live, but connection makes its own demands and those demands can be draining.

How much harder though, is it to love someone without ever really liking them? That happens too, of course. The relationships we have with those we love, while rarely this remarkable, are always mysterious.

When Eng’s son told him early one morning that, ‘Uncle Chang is dead’, Eng replied, ‘then I too am going.” The two brothers had spent 62 years together, traveling an impossible distance, loving each other and making do with each other’s company as best they could. Two hours after Eng’s death, Chang passed away.

Those were the only two hours, he’d ever been alone. No matter how much he may, at times, have wished for it, he simply wasn’t built to be on his own.