by Yunte Huang
Here we have finally discovered the root cause of Thomas de Quincey’s nightmares: the fear of being incorporated into an alien other, what Grosz defines as an “intolerable ambiguity.” Since that fated day when a turbaned Malay knocked on his cottage door, the English opium-eater had never recovered from the shock at the sight of a figure that was so outlandish and yet human just like himself. In his magisterial essay “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” de Quincey brooded over his initial inability to comprehend the significance of the heart-pounding knock in the Shakespearean drama, which broke up the deathlike stillness after Duncan’s murder in the bedroom. “However obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.” A first-rate essayist, de Quincey was able to write his way out of the hermeneutical conundrum by arguing brilliantly that the spine-chilling knock forced us to “throw the interest on the murderer”—or, in other words, to feel the fragile and fallible humanity of the murderer who panics at the sound. “Our sympathy must be with him,” he insisted. “Of course I mean a sympathy of comprehension, a sympathy by which we enter into his feelings, and are made to understand them—not a sympathy of pity or approbation.” In an elaborate footnote, de Quincey further drew a distinction between “sympathy with the other” and “sympathy for the other,” emphasizing that the interpretation of Macbeth relied on the former.17 But in the case of a knock on his own door, de Quincey was never able to reach a moment of sympathy with or for “the other.” For their unimaginable ambiguity and unassimilable difference, the Siamese Twins were racial freaks to Britons as much as the exotic Malay was to de Quincey.
“Macbeth: Whence is that knocking?”
12
Sentimental Education
Indeed, Quasimodo, one-eyed, hunchbacked, bowlegged, couldhardly be considered as anything more than an almost.
—Victor Hugo, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831)
Love conquers all. Almost.
We do not know who she really was, or whether the story is apocryphal, merely another publicity ploy to drum up excitement over the “freaks.” But it seemed that Victor Hugo, who, hounded by his publisher, was trying desperately to finish up The Hunchback of Notre Dame on the other side of the English Channel in the remaining months of 1830, was not alone in feeling the pull of a haunting attraction between a human monster and la femme fatale.
Sophonia Robinson, who went by Sophia, was a young and beautiful London socialite who delighted in poetry and exotica. After meeting the Siamese Twins, Sophia was smitten and fell violently in love with both of them. According to a promotional pamphlet, this enamored English Esmeralda took to the quill and wrote poetic epistolaries to the twins. Though not Shakespearean in literary quality, her expressed yearning was as strong as Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese, poems of passionate love so scandalous that the poet had to pretend they were translations from another country. Sophia lamented the improbability of having both twins:
How happy could I be with either,
Were the other dear charmer away.
. . .
Thy love, thy fate dear youths to share
May never be my happy lot
But thou may’st grant this humble plea
Forget me not! Forget me not!
It seemed that this love affair was more doomed than the affection between the gypsy dancer and the Hunchback of Notre Dame. Monstrous as he was, Quasimodo was one, or almost one, as the novelist phrased it, whereas Chang and Eng were two, or two in one, making it legally and morally prohibitive for Sophia to pursue the matter of heart any further. Cursing Fate, she finally had to give up, at which point she married, in the mocking words of a rumor columnist, “a commercial gent of promising prospects and unexceptional whiskers.”1
This romantic episode, though short-lived, opened the eyes of the twins, who had just turned nineteen. Despite their abnormal physicality, the twins had reached sexual maturity just like any other men. Never shy with the fair sex, they had flirted innocently with chambermaids and other working-class women. On the day they had arrived in London, as the Times reported, the chambermaid at the hotel “tapped their heads, and told them they should be her sweethearts, at which they laughed, and in a playful and boyish manner they at one and the same time kissed each side of her cheek. On being jocularly told of this, they said it was Mary that wanted to have them for a sweetheart, not they that wanted to have Mary.”2 But with Sophia, it was the first time that one of Cupid’s arrows had been shot from the direction of a popular fair lady. Even though they did not fall for her, they were taken by the possibility that they could love or be loved just like any other human being. As Bolton observed, love had now “become a very common subject of discourse between them.” The good doctor was concerned that “it is not an unreasonable conjecture, that some female attachment, at a future period, may occur to destroy their harmony, and induce a mutual and paramount wish to be separated.”3 Bolton was only partially right in his prediction. One day, the twins would turn that glimmer of hope for love into reality, but they would do it in a manner that would scandalize the world.
The sentimental education of these two Siamese youths went hand in hand with their study of other subjects. During their first voyage to the New World, they had already learned some spoken English from the ship’s crew, but they had never taken language lessons with a tutor. Now a gentleman visitor, intrigued by the unusual sight, volunteered to teach them to read and write, perhaps as an experiment to try to correct Nature’s error. The pupils, however, quickly outsmarted the master: The gentleman marked a large A on a card and then pronounced the letter. The boys imitated the sound exactly. He then formed a B and a C. While he was doing this, “Chang interrupted him, wishing to obtain the pencil; and both not only repeated the sounds of the three letters, but imitated their forms, Chang even making a pun on the letter C; for on being asked if he knew its form and pronunciation, he replied, laughing, ‘Yes, I see you.’ ”4
Their quick progress in the English lessons was amply documented in the family correspondence of the Coffins. In a letter from London to her son and daughter in America on March 6, 1830, Susan Coffin wrote that Chang and Eng “have learnt to speak very good English they can converse very well.”5 In July, Abel Coffin wrote to his children that “the boys Chang and Eng are quite well and are very good they wish to be remembered to you they can speak English quite well.”6 In September, Abel wrote again to his children, telling them that “Chang and Eng send their love to you they can write almost as well as you and if you do not pay great attention to your writing they will soon write better as they are quick to learn.”7
In November 1830, an English gentleman named John Layley gave the twins a copy of the newly published A Dictionary of General Knowledge; Or, An Explanation of Words and Things Connected with All the Arts and Sciences. Edited by the English lawyer and miscellanea writer George Crabb, the dictionary was modeled after Denis Diderot’s Encyclopedia, sort of the “Wikipedia of the Enlightenment.” Challenging religious authority and aiming to “change the way people think,” Diderot’s vast compendium of knowledge was credited with fermenting radical thoughts leading to the French Revolution. Crabb’s dictionary was much smaller in scale and more modest in intellectual ambition. Although it incorporated general knowledge in the various fields of arts and sciences, the dictionary was a reconfirmation and repackaging of Christian interpretations of history and events as cited in the Bible and skewed by religious biases. For instance, Paradise was defined in the book as “The garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve dwelt in their state of innocence.” Or, the History of Agriculture began with Abel and Cain, followed by Noah. Or, Gypsies were defined as “A wandering tribe, who are to be found in different countries of Europe, and are supposed to be of Egyptian origin.”8
Inquisitive souls, the twins clung on to this compendium of knowledge. Even though the language of the book was still a bit too soph
isticated for their level of English, they certainly enjoyed looking at the illustrations of things they used to know in their native language, such as elephant, buffalo, bridge, goose, pagoda, tiger, tortoise, rice, spider, and so on. They must have been surprised to see the entries for Pomona, Venus, and other Roman goddesses accompanied by images of half-naked or scantily dressed female bodies. This was no pornography, but it would be hard to underestimate the shock to the pubescent youths as they laid their eyes on illustrations of nude women for the first time.
From this book, the twins also learned the meanings of words and concepts that would define their unusual lives: exhibition, liberty, Negroes, phrenology, elopement, polygamy, etc. Throughout their lives, they would continue to mine the book’s vast supply of knowledge, and they would pack it in their luggage for every trip. In 2012, when I visited the Mount Airy Museum of Regional History, I saw a tattered copy of Crabb’s dictionary, apparently an heirloom in the twins’ family, which contained John Layley’s inscription and dedication to Chang and Eng. If Diderot’s Encyclopedia had changed the way people think, Crabb’s dictionary, conservative as it was in its intellectual outlook, supplied the twins with the necessary knowledge about the world that looked at them differently, a world where they fought hard to belong.
With London as their base, the twins were exhibited widely in Great Britain during their thirteen-month stay. According to James Hale, who had kept a detailed record of their itineraries, they had traveled “upwards of 2,500 miles in the kingdom, and received the visits of about 300,000 individuals in London, Edinburgh, Dublin, Liverpool, Manchester, Bath, Leeds, York, Sheffield, Bristol, Birmingham, and most of the principal cities and towns in the kingdom. They were honored by visits from her Majesty, Queen Adelaide, and others of the Royal family, the foreign ambassadors, nobility, and by most of the philosophers and scientific men of the age.”9 When in Liverpool, Charles X, the ex-king of France, visited the twins and left them “a present of a piece of gold,” rather than paying the usual admission fee of half a crown. The twins wisecracked that perhaps the reason “why he gave them gold, was because he had no crown.”10
As popular as they were in Great Britain, the twins failed to be impressed. Neither the climate nor the food sat well with them. As Susan Coffin told her children in a letter, “They are made very much of by all that see them though the boys do not like here as they did in Boston they say Boston the best.” Having been away from Siam for about a year, they were also getting homesick. Again, as described in Coffin’s motherly words to her own children: “Your mother very often says to Chang Eng I want to see my dear Abel and Susan they say me want to see my Mother Brother Sister Chang Eng is very good boys indeed they say that they love your mother much I tell them some times I am going home to America they say No No I shall cry mamah if you go home and leave me your Abel and Susan got one good mother and Uncle in America Chang Eng got none.” For unknown reasons, the twins’ travel companion, Tieu, was found to be misbehaving—“a very bad boy indeed,” as Susan Coffin put it.11 Robert Hunter, who was about to leave for Asia, had decided to take Tieu back to Siam, a move that further saddened the twins. Like the string of a kite flying higher and higher into the sky, the tie to their faraway home threatened to snap at any moment.
According to Captain Coffin’s plan, Chang and Eng would be taken from Great Britain to France, the native land of Rabelaisian giants and freaks: Gargantua, Pantagruel, and other carnivalesque creatures of grotesque realism.12 But French officials refused to grant them permission to cross the English Channel for fear of “maternal impressions,” a time-honored belief that a pregnant woman seeing a monster would lead to deformation of her unborn baby. The superstition survived well into the twentieth century: When film became popular, many pregnant women in rural China were forbidden to go to a movie—either because movies often showcase monsters and freaks or because film itself is a freakish and frightening technology. The Chinese call film “the electric shadows.” Parisians, thus deprived of an opportunity of peeking at “the wonder of nature,” would have to make do, within a few months, with a fictional figure who was “almost human”—Quasimodo, the bell-ringing Hunchback of Notre Dame.
The French rejection brought the twins’ European tour to an early close. In January 1831, just as Hugo’s timeless classic was released onto the streets of Paris, and another popular book featuring the twins was coming off the press at a print shop in London, Chang and Eng boarded the Cambria and returned to America.
Part Three
AMERICA ON THE ROAD
(1831–1839)
ACCOUNT BOOK OF CHANG AND ENG
13
The Great Eclipse
In America, 1831 was dubbed the “Year of the Great Eclipse.”
In the lead-up to the solar event, doomsayers predicted that the end of the world was coming. As one almanac peddler warned, the darkness would be such that domestic fowl would retire to roost, the moon would ride unsteadily in its orbit, and Earth would tremble on its axis. When the solar eclipse finally occurred on February 12—lasting one minute and fifty-seven seconds and covering a path up to sixty miles wide, America became a nation of anxious stargazers. From bleary-eyed elders to bright-eyed infants, everyone looked up to the darkening heavens through a piece of smoked glass and dreaded the worst. However, the highly anticipated apocalypse ended with a whimper, not a bang. The spectacle was quite a letdown, with the darkness fleeing, as one observer snorted, like “a thunder gust.” The stargazers felt bamboozled by advertising quacks who had promised an exhibition of “fireworks or phantasmagoria.”1
Anticlimactic as the celestial event was, it did launch a year of chaos and cataclysm that would decisively change the destiny of the United States. On January 1, William Lloyd Garrison published the first issue of The Liberator, igniting a spark that would soon turn into the wildfire of the abolitionist movement. In March, the Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Marshall, handed down a decision in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, legitimizing the genocidal removal of Indians, blazing the infamous Trail of Tears. In August, Nat Turner led a violent insurrection of slaves in Virginia that shook the nation to its core. If the disappointed heaven-gazers in February had blamed doomsayers for their superstitious exaggerations that fizzled, they would now have to think again when Turner’s band of rebels roamed and rampaged, spilling the blood of white masters, mistresses, and innocent children in the swampland of southeastern Virginia. In fact, Turner, a self-taught, literate preacher, had regarded the February eclipse as a divine signal for action. “I had a vision,” as he confessed later in jail. “I saw white spirits and black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened—the thunder rolled in the Heavens, and blood flowed in streams.”2 After Turner was hanged, the nation had scarcely any time to recover from the shock before another calamity loomed on the horizon: cholera. It was the same epidemic that had begun in India in 1817 and taken the lives of Chang and Eng’s father and siblings in 1819, reaching China by 1820, and then crossing the border into Siberia. After that, the epidemic ravaged Europe much as Genghis Khan’s Mongol hordes had done. It made its appearance in Liverpool in September 1831, and, given the direct trading routes between Liverpool and the United States, would hit the nation with force by year’s end, causing thousands of deaths.
When Chang and Eng watched the darkening sun from the decks of the Cambria on February 12, they probably recalled scenes of the lunar eclipse on the eve of their departure from Siam, when the locals, following custom, banged gongs, beat pots and pans, and screamed at the tops of their lungs to scare away the sky dog trying to swallow the moon.
On this return trip across the Atlantic, they made certain not to travel in steerage. Perhaps their protest the previous time had paid off; or perhaps Susan Coffin, who now alone managed the twins with the help of James Hale, had finally realized the importance of keeping the twins comfortable and contented so that she could milk more cash out of them. Now that Robert Hunter, prior to his depa
rture for Asia, had sold his share in the twins to the Coffins, she and her husband had become sole owners of Chang and Eng. As Mrs. Coffin told her children in a letter, “Your Father has got these boys to earn money to send you both to school with.”3 Abel Coffin, traveling on the other side of the world, also wrote to tell his wife to “be kind to Chang Eng,” although he immediately added, “but you must not let them have too much their own head it is necessary to have them mind you.” Coffin acknowledged that he might have been harsh in his treatment of the twins, but he was also quick to defend himself. He asked his wife to tell Chang and Eng that, “although they might think I was hard with them I think their own good sense will convince them that I have never done anything but what is for their good. . . . I shall always do by them as by my own children.”4 These words of reluctant admission and ready self-exoneration revealed a relationship fraught with tension. In his self-righteous way, Coffin might have thought that he had been treating the twins like his children. Ahab might have thought that his harshness toward the Pequod’s crew was merely typical behavior of a strict patriarch, but Ishmael knew well, as did Melville in real life on the whaler Acushnet, that the condition aboard was no better than chattel slavery. Likewise, even though Chang and Eng now enjoyed traveling in cabin class rather than the dreaded steerage, they knew that the improved treatment did not originate from Mrs. Coffin’s kindness. As they would put it bitterly one day in a letter, referring to themselves in the third person because the letter was written by an intermediary, “As to Mrs. Coffin doing all she could for their comfort & loving them & liking them—they say, they have no doubt that the number of thousands of hard shining dollars which they have enabled her to spend have made her like them—but let Mrs. C. look into her own heart & they feel confident she will discover that the great loving & liking was not for their own sakes—but for the sake of the said Dollars.”5
