by Yunte Huang
The waxing and waning of the moon also happens to be a metaphor for the reunion and separation of a family for the Chinese. One can imagine how loudly and passionately Nok, the mother of the twins, was banging her cooking pots during the two-hour lunar eclipse. They had celebrated the Chinese New Year not too long ago, and now her twin boys would leave her for a long journey to the other side of the globe. Her family would not be whole for some time, the eclipse appearing as an ominous sign.
Reluctant as she was to let her twin boys go—they were only seventeen and were the mainstay of the family business—the offer of $500 from Hunter and Coffin (in ways reminiscent of the transactional nature of slavery, though lacking the barbarity and oppression) and the prospect of more money in the future were too tempting to turn down. Besides, the white men had promised to bring back her boys within five years. To further alleviate her worry, an arrangement was made for a Chinese neighbor, a young man named Tieu, to travel with the twins as a companion and caretaker.
On the day of departure, April Fools’ Day of 1829, the twins signed a contract, a document that has miraculously survived the passage of time to this day. In this contract, handwritten by Hunter and witnessed by Tieu, Chang and Eng agreed “to engage ourselves with our own free will and consent (also that we have the free will & consent of our Parents and the King of our country) to go with Capt. Abel Coffin to America and Europe and remain with him wherever he chooses until the expiration of the time agreed upon between Capt. Coffin and the Govt. of our country, and that he according to promise will return us to our Parents and friends anytime within five (5) years, and that Capt. Coffin will allow us from his profits ten Spanish per month and pay all our expenses, and nothing is to be deducted from the money allowed our mother.”
CONTRACT BETWEEN SIAMESE TWINS AND ROBERT HUNTER/ABEL COFFIN, 1829
Although the contractual provisions were well documented, the physical existence of the contract had remained unknown to the world until 1977, when a descendant of Captain Coffin advertised the family heirloom for sale.12 From this document, which is now in the collection of the Surry County Historical Society in North Carolina, we can shed light on a question that has long puzzled biographers and scholars: the names of the twins. Here we find the explanation of why the famous Siamese Twins came to be known as Chang and Eng. On the contract they signed, their names appear for the first and only time that we know in Chinese as and .
, which means “once” or “increase,” is pronounced in Mandarin Chinese either as /zeng/ or /ceng/, and in Cantonese as /tsang/ or /zang/. , which means “cause,” is pronounced in Mandarin Chinese as /yin/ and in Cantonese as /yen/. Therefore, Chang and Eng, an anglicized variation of the original “Chun” and “In,” is a phonetic approximation of the Cantonese pronunciations of and .
Right next to their signatures is a Chinese sentence scribbled by their witness and travel companion, Tieu: . The sentence can be translated as “I, Tian Cheng, witnessing Zeng and Yin signing their names.” , the first Chinese character in Tieu’s name , is pronounced in Mandarin Chinese as /tian/ and in Cantonese as /tieu/, which explains why he is known as “Tieu.” The Chinese word for “signing” is actually misspelled; it should have been rather than , indicating that Tieu probably had only a rudimentary level of education.
At the bottom of the contract, in a postscript, Hunter added: “At the request of Capt. Coffin I have translated the above to the Boys, and they are fully satisfied with the contract.”
Carrying light luggage and their pet python in a cage, waving teary farewells to their mother and siblings, the “boys” stepped aboard the Sachem—a double-decked, three-masted, 387-ton ship—and sailed for the New World. Unbeknownst to them, they would never see Siam again.
Part Two
FIRST YEARS
(1829–1831)
CHANG AND ENG, LITHOGRAPH
6
A Curiosity in Boston
“No! by the great Sachem, no!”
—Mark Twain, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
PASSENGER LIST OF THE SACHEM
After what seemed like an infernal voyage lasting 138 days, the Sachem hove into Boston Harbor on August 16, 1829. In addition to a cargo of sugar, sapan wood, gamboge, buffalo horns, leopard skins, and tin, the Nantucket-based merchant ship declared only two passengers on board: Robert Hunter, male, age twenty-six, merchant from Scotland; Teene [i.e., Tieu], male, age seventeen, servant from Siam. It was odd that Chang and Eng were not listed as passengers on the ship manifest. Was it, perhaps, because they were seen as “monsters” and hence not human? Or was it because Captain Abel Coffin did not want anyone on the dock to have a free peek at the “rarity” he had acquired from a distant land? At least one historian has speculated that the twins were hidden under a tarp and smuggled into Boston in an enclosed carriage.1 Like the monomaniacal Captain Ahab hiding his secret crew on the Pequod and saving those colored bodies of dubious origin for the ultimate goal of catching Moby-Dick, Captain Coffin also kept his stowaways under cover for maximum effect and profit. In a similar move, P. T. Barnum, the future impresario, when he took twenty-five-inch-tall General Tom Thumb to England in 1844, sneaked the midget past customs by camouflaging him as a suckling infant in a woman’s arms.
Two months earlier, when the Sachem had approached St. Helena, a remote island where the dethroned Napoleon Bonaparte had died in isolation eight years earlier, Coffin could barely contain his enthusiasm. On June 28, he shot off a missive to his wife in Newburyport, Massachusetts: “Susan, I have two Chinese boys, 17 years old grown together they enjoy extraordinary health. I hope these will prove profitable as a curiosity.”2
When Coffin penned this letter to his family, curiosity was a loaded term, a word that encapsulated the shifting, early nineteenth-century dynamics of cultural history and global geopolitics, reflecting Emerson’s line that “Language is the archives of history.” As an English word, curiosity originally refers to an intellectual inclination to inquire, a virtuous attribute that Thomas Hobbes believed to be lying at the foundation of the human institutions of language, science, and religion. David Hume identified it as “that love of truth, which [is] the first source of all our inquiries.” But curiosity has also been depicted as “the cause of mankind’s errors,” that “lust of the eyes” sanctioned in the Bible: “Be not curious in unnecessary matters: for more things are shewed unto thee than men understand” (Ecclesiasticus 3:23).3 From Eve’s temptation by the forbidden fruit to Pandora’s peeking into the box, curiosity has been regarded as a sign of impiety, a mark of discontent. Vladimir Nabokov once called curiosity “the purest form of insubordination.”
This double connotation of curiosity—as a human desire to know more and as an onanistic peeping into the forbidden—remained with the word as it began to acquire a reference to new, exotic objects brought from distant shores in the Age of Discovery. Peter Coffin, the New England innkeeper in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851), tells Ishmael that Pacific savage Queequeg has “a lot of ’balmed New Zealand heads (great curios, you know).”4 The Oxford English Dictionary, in fact, cites the sentence spoken by Captain Abel Coffin’s fictional cousin as the earliest recorded use of the word curio. Likewise, in Captain Coffin’s family letter, by “curiosity” he most likely meant an odd, anomalous creature caged or staged in public spaces for profit. Variously called “monsters,” “freaks,” “lusus naturae,” “freaks of nature,” “rarities,” “oddities,” “eccentrics,” “wonders,” “marvels,” “nature’s mistakes,” “strange people,” “prodigies,” and “very special people,” these animal and human exhibitions had become a fad since the late eighteenth century and would continue throughout the nineteenth. Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1861), peopled by dwarfs, giants, misfits, waxworks, cheats, and performers, aptly captures the Zeitgeist of an age obsessed with human and nonhuman curiosities.5 As Leslie Fiedler puts it, “Some authors of the nineteenth century, indeed, seem so freak-haunted that remembering them,
we remember first of all the monsters they created. We can scarcely think of Victor Hugo, for instance, without recalling his grotesque Hunchback of Notre Dame, any more than we can recall Charles Dickens without thinking of his monstrous dwarf, Quilp, or our own Mark Twain without remembering ‘Those Incredible Twins.’ ”6
The Americans Chang and Eng would meet upon their arrival in 1829 were certainly a curious bunch. A young nation with a bursting population of twelve million people, America was in the throes of an industrial revolution that would begin to chip away at the Jeffersonian agrarian republic. Andrew Jackson, “Old Hickory,” a decorated general from the Far West (that being Tennessee) who had made his fame by decimating Native American tribes, had been sworn in as the seventh president, striking terror into the hearts of those who were still guided by the Founding Fathers’ philosophy. Jackson had little patience for East Coast nabobs and almost immediately sounded a bugle call of Manifest Destiny that would soon be heard as far off as the Pacific Slope. Americans were busy building turnpikes, canals, railroads, transforming a localized subsistence economy into a nationally integrated market economy. In the midst of this industrial frenzy arose the political cry of the common man, the staple of Jacksonian democracy. The Revolutionary War had already relocated the sources of political authority from monarchy to “We, the People”; the Jacksonian Age further solidified the transfer of power, undermining credentials, coats of arms, or university degrees as guarantees of what might pass for truth. Beyond his daily clockwork toil at farms and emerging factories, the common man needed not so much truth, virtue, or divine wisdom distilled from lyceum podiums or church pulpits, but rather entertainment, diversion, or, preferably, liquor distilled mostly at home but served in pubs and saloons.
Despite the prevalence of moonshine, the deep roots of Puritanism and broader Christianity, with their strict regulations against idleness and exhortations for frugality, had not made America a particularly welcome place for popular entertainment. Foreign visitors could not help but notice the contrast with Europe. In 1832, the British author Fanny Trollope wrote in Domestic Manners of the Americans, “I never saw a population so totally divested of gayety; there is no trace of this feeling from one end of the Union to the other. They have no fêtes, no fairs, no merrimakings, no music in the streets, no Punch, no puppetshows. If they see a comedy or a farce, they may laugh at it; but they can do very well without it; and the consciousness of the number of cents that must be paid to enter a theatre, I am very sure turns more steps from its door than any religious feeling.”7 Though Trollope sounded a bit too censorious in her put-down of penny-pinching, uncouth citizens of the New World, France’s Alexis de Tocqueville confirmed Trollope’s observation in Democracy in America, arguably the most prophetic book ever written about nineteenth-century American democracy: “The Americans are both a Puritan and a trading nation. Therefore both their religious beliefs and their industrial habits lead them to demand much abnegation on the women’s part and a continual sacrifice of pleasure for the sake of business, which is seldom expected in Europe.”8
Despite an apparent Calvinistic creed of repression, American recreation grew nonetheless in the form of tavern sports, horse racing, cockfights, card playing, hunting, fishing, concerts, theater, and so on. The interests of America’s early presidents reflected these activities. George Washington, for example, attended cockfights, as did Abraham Lincoln, whose presence at such an event was described vividly in a biography: “They formed a ring, and the time having arrived, Lincoln, with one hand on each hip and in a squatting position, cried, ‘Ready.’ Into the ring they toss their fowls, Bap’s red rooster along with the rest. But no sooner had the little beauty discovered what was to be done than he dropped his tail and ran.”9 Andrew Jackson, as a young man in North Carolina, was known as “the most roaring, rollicking, game-cocking, horse-racing, card-playing, mischievous fellow, that ever lived in Salisbury.” A president of the common folk and the frontiersmen, Jackson was also the living embodiment of popular American recreation, having left behind a note among his earliest personal effects that read: “How to feed a Cock before you have him fight Take and give him some Pickle Beef cut fine. . . .”10
Around the time of Chang and Eng’s arrival, the minstrel show, which would become so popular in the 1840s that it gave birth to mass entertainment, had just emerged on the scene. Although cultural historians often cite the 1843 opening of Dan Emmett’s Virginia Minstrels at the Chatham Theatre in New York as the landmark date, it was actually the comedian Thomas D. Rice who gave the earliest, most popular blackface performances in Louisville, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh around 1829. And very much related to the Jim Crow show (more on that later) was the display of human anomalies. Or, to adopt the parlance of the day, the freak show.
Prior to Chang and Eng, America had seen at least two living human anomalies on display: Henry Moss and Martha Ann Honeywell. Moss, a black man from Virginia whose body was covered with white patches, was exhibited in Philadelphia in 1796, drawing great interest from across the social spectrum, especially among members of the prestigious American Philosophical Society. Honeywell, a young woman without limbs who could help herself to drink and do needlework, had a long run on display at the Peale Museum in New York, beginning in August 1828. While Moss was mostly a local attraction, Honeywell did have a national appeal and would, in ensuing years, be exhibited in “all the principal cities of the Union.”11 But, as Coffin expected, the Siamese Twins would easily top these exhibitions and take the freak show to a new level of sensation.
To prepare the twins for exhibition, Captain Coffin and Robert Hunter had to do some grooming, just as elephants and lions caught in the wild needed to be tamed before entering the circus ring. During the four-month-long voyage from Bangkok to Boston, Chang and Eng had taken English lessons from the crew members, familiarized themselves with Western manners, and learned to play checkers, chess, and other games that would later become part of their exhibition routines. Intelligent youths, they were quick learners. By the time they landed in Boston, “they were able to understand the language fairly well and to carry on simple conversations in broken English, as well as to do a limited amount of reading.”12 In chess and other board games, they also became excellent players, soon able to beat the men who had taught them.
Boston was then a robust city with more than sixty thousand residents. Perched on an island and accessible by roads built over water, it sported a magnificent three-story State House overlooking the scenic Boston Common, making it literally what the Puritan leader John Winthrop had imagined as “a city upon a hill.” With its cobblestone streets, elegant Greek Revival mansions, and saltbox houses, the city, as many visitors from the Old World had observed, resembled an English town. Construction had just been completed on the Tremont House, a four-story, granite-faced hotel with a Greek portico, and it would begin to receive guests within a month. Often regarded as America’s first modern hotel, Tremont House had unsurpassable luxuries and conveniences: indoor plumbing and running water, free soap (one wonders whether guests back then stole the soap), locked rooms, and bellboys. Charles Dickens, who stayed at the hotel during his 1842 visit and was much impressed by the grandeur, described the Tremont as having “more galleries, colonnades, piazzas, and passages than I can remember, or the reader would believe.”13
To Chang and Eng, Boston was a far cry from Bangkok, a city of gilded palaces, tiered pagodas, spidery canals, and floating bazaars. One can easily imagine the awe with which the twins gazed at their first American city. It turned out, however, that the sense of wonder cut both ways, for the Bostonians were equally taken aback by the sight of the curiosity from Siam.
The day after their arrival, the Boston Patriot ran an article, the first ever in the Western Hemisphere, about the Siamese Twins:
Lusus Naturae—The Sachem, arrived at this port yesterday, has on board two Siamese youths, males, eighteen years of age, their bodies connected from their birth. They appear to be in go
od health, and apparently contented with their confined situation. We have seen and examined this strange freak of nature. It is one of the greatest living curiosities we ever saw.
It seems that even though Coffin and Hunter had smuggled in the twins as stowaways, they certainly knew the importance of publicity and had invited a reporter for a sneak preview. The reporter’s article, which would spawn countless reprints all over the country in the ensuing days, goes on with its description of the newly arrived “freak of nature”:
The two boys are about five feet in height, of well-proportioned frames, strong and active, good-natured, and of pleasant countenances, and withal intelligent and sensible—exhibiting the appearance of two well-made Siamese youths, with the exception that by a substance apparently bony or cartilaginous, about seven inches in circumference and four in length, proceeding from the umbilical region of each, they are firmly united together.
As though writing about the purebred dogs at the Westminster shows (which did not, in fact, begin until 1877), the reporter observed:
They have a good appetite, appear lively, and run about the deck and cabin of the ship with the facility that any two healthy lads would do, with their arms over each other’s shoulders, this being the position in which they move about. They will probably be exhibited to the public when proper arrangements have been made. They will be objects of great curiosity, particularly to the medical faculty. Their unnatural union is not more of a curiosity than the vigorous health they enjoy, and their apparent entire contentedness with their condition. One of the boys is named Chang, the other named Eng; together they are called Chang-Eng.14
