Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  “Chang-Eng!” Even the dirtiest of children radiant like they’d just been given candy. “Mutant, mutant!”

  “Thank you,” Chang and I said as the dust gathered on our identical black suits—tight and crisply English in cut, the very ones Barnum had bought for us. Strolling through the crowd, my brother and I were two complete bodies affixed at the chest by a fleshy, bendable, seven-inch-long ligament resembling a forearm.

  “Chang-Eng acknowledging you, good people,” Chang said. We crossed Main Street side by side, in the calibrated rhythm of our united movement, arms sweaty over each other’s shoulders. Like Chang, I wore my hair in a black braid long enough to curl around my head. I tied it in a blue silk tassel that fell over my brother’s shoulder, as his fell over mine.

  North Carolina was a welcome change from Boston, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, that series of East Coast cities that even before the War of Yankee Aggression had become as vulgar as a row of women of easy virtue on a street corner. Some believe the war divided America’s history in one stroke, all at once advancing Northern manufacturing and the forward parade of Yankee progress. But by December 1842 the North had swelled so hastily it simmered with industry and crime and most of all too many people, while Southern towns like this remained in rural condition, natural as ever. Wilkesboro was among those bygone cheerful hamlets that were so numerous across the map of North Carolina they seemed like stars in the nighttime sky, before Reconstruction hobbled the South.

  My brother kept his smile and hadn’t quit waving to the townsfolk. Few returned his greeting. A yellow-skinned man and his conjoined twin may be admitted into a village in North Carolina, but will never be adopted by it fully.

  Main Street was rounded, with a humped center and sloping sides, and it led us across town. Chang and I were silent as we walked; I rarely spoke to him. At all times, a wordless debate concerning the fundaments of movement traveled across our bond like a message across telegraph wire, and that was conversation enough. I called this the Silence, and I was comforted by it.

  The people of Wilkesboro had begun to follow us at a distance: here two blond schoolgirls crouched behind a craggy black oak tree to stare; there, in the Law Office Building, under the pressed-metal facade, a few cheerful boys shouted taunts. One brave Negro walked near us before scampering off to giggle behind some wagons tethered to the Court House gallery; across the street near a livery stable a woman froze in her tracks to gape at the Twins, her face turning pale as death. A few townsfolk, however, did smile openly at us as we passed, and let fly a friendly giggle whenever Chang waved.

  “Eng,” Chang said, crimping his eyes as he often did when he found his happy place in the world. “It is exciting, yes?” With his free hand he smoothed the lapels of his jacket.

  “Brother, I don’t know what you mean.”

  Chang was taken off guard; he always managed to discount that we were miles apart in temperament.

  “Well,” he said, searching my face, “this, I mean!” Crooking our ligament, he drew himself in front of and even closer to me, and he looked over my shoulder at the now large crowd following at our heels. Chang and I continued to walk in this manner—nearly face-to-face, with my brother striding backward—as he flung his hand in the air and waved at the people. Everyone clapped. Chang swung around to face forward again.

  It was this sort of pandering showmanship that I hated, and strove to avoid for most of my career. (Like most everybody, I am proud of certain accomplishments: that we never participated in, nor were in any way associated with, an American circus; my predilection for reading, which saved me from the manner of immigrant speech that Chang never lost.)

  Main Street came to an end at the Yates Inn. A Southern community such as Wilkesboro, in its distant relation not only to the central government, but also to neighboring villages, believes itself an individual, free from all others. And yet, little inns just like this one were features of nearly all minor Southern towns, and by now Chang and I felt at home loitering by innyards, waiting to be admitted.

  Wilkesboro’s version of the Southern hostel was a two-story unpainted log house, its modest front yard overgrown with chokecherry. A giant woman sat on the inn’s drooping front porch, fanning herself in the skeletal shade of leafless oaks. She was some five hundred pounds, if not more, this innkeeper. Moist patches of her scalp were visible under her thin gray hair, like peat bog spied through the reeds of a marsh, and her hairline gave way to a glistening forehead just as a marsh would open onto a river.

  My brother and I came to stand before her, resting our two free hands on the porch railing. The lady innkeeper scrutinized Chang and me in our unforgiving black. “A charming creature”—her bassy voice wiggled the flesh hanging below her chin—“just about as strange as they say.” I could not tell whether the woman’s face was friendly or taunting. She wore a homemade dress of gray cloth-stuff made with no thought to style. Her skin refused contour. Birds shrieked in the trees.

  I imagined this woman a courtier in His Majesty King Rama’s palace, bejeweled, dressed in silk while four or five husbands danced around her, runty men with short life spans.

  To her left stood a frowning boy in a straw hat with a crooked rim. To her right, a pair of blond women—her daughters, I guessed, though they were not so young—long-faced, flat-chested, and each with lip rouge on her front teeth. The taller one’s eyes flickered impatiently, like the wings of little birds. The way she did not turn away in horror gave me the urge to saw through my ligament. It was the light at that hour, or my fatigue pressing in, but I believed she was smiling at me.

  My brother’s skin was mucky as the Mekong itself, his breathing a gasp.

  The declining sun acted on the girl’s fine hair, cutting it into elements of gold and pink gold and shadow. She blushed and bowed her head, but she continued to peek at me from under her brows with eyes the color of blueberries. She bit her lip. A young lady was looking at me, of all things, and smiling. I could not fathom it—looking into my eyes! I returned her stare, I don’t know where I discovered the courage.

  Only a few seconds passed, evidently, though I was sure the moment slipped from the calendar. For the seeming eternity I stood there, my heart pounded only once, a single thunderclap, echoing. This strange girl’s clear eyes looked like safe worlds in which to escape the circumstance of what I was.

  Chang’s heart, too, began to go frantic for this tall blond innkeeper’s daughter—I felt it. Was it me the girl was fixing her gaze on, or the twin close at my side?

  The whole time, the girl’s sister stood in shadow and chewed at her nails. But before long this one was looking up into my face, too, without smiling or frowning. The entire town had gathered behind us, watching everything. And the sisters’ large mother leaned forward in her groaning seat and straightened her dress, patted her hair.

  “Jefferson,” the large woman said to her boy. “Go get your father.” Daintily, she removed a little gnat that had flown into her mouth. “Tell him I found a pair of husbands for your sisters.”

  I swear the townsfolk cheered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My Family in Siam

  May 1811–January 1819

  Siam

  Of course, my life did not really begin when first I came to North Carolina. I entered into this world many years before that, nearly eight thousand miles east. In the Kingdom of Siam.

  Everything about our birth is known.

  When Chang and I were born in 1811 on a bamboo mat in our family’s home afloat the Mekong River, there was not a soul outside, because of the hard rain—no one except for my father, who was fishing in the storm. Mekong was the outermost corner of the world, Siam’s badlands. The men all wore thin, pointed mustaches, trying to look Chinese. The river perpetually overflowed its banks and drowned things.

  Mother had been born nearby. She was beautiful, save her teeth, and thus had been given all the advantages. But ours was not a beauty-loving race, at least Father said it wasn’t
; serene struggling was the virtue Siamese loved best. Life was too strenuous, said Father, to celebrate anything as worthless as beauty. But he was known to miss an hour or more of worktime daylight just to pet mother’s delicate head.

  The details of my birth are known.

  It was the beginning of a summerlike spring, a rainy midnight in the rainiest season of a rainy country. Living on the Mekong, we were a day’s journey and a thousand years from Bangkok. Houseboats like ours formed a loose floating village up and down a half-submerged waterfront of muddy swamp and profitless rice field, interrupted by the occasional grove of coconut palm.

  Rubber plants and vines lingered everywhere, handsome, fresh, dangling at unexpected angles over rocks, streams, and puddles, innumerous puddles. We lived in the shadow of two modest limestone hills, among snakes both harmless and deadly, as well as the infrequent tiger or leopard. Across the river, barely visible in the distance, stood the red sandstone cliffs of Kang Gee Hill.

  Moored to the rank green shore, our houseboat floated atop a twitchy ribbon of moonlight that was bleared by the rain. We had a simple home, no more than marbao wood planks arching over a flat-bottomed centerboard, the planks thatched together with bamboo and grass. Everyone was crowded inside its narrow, darkened cabin for the birthing.

  The ceiling leaked on Mother’s swollen belly, on her harelipped midwife Jun, and on our aunts, who had ringed themselves around their laboring sister in a human curtain. Mother was the youngest. Her name was Nok, and she was three-quarters Chinese, as was my father. Mother was a woman who would have been bored with a baby less singular and troublesome than we were. There she is—I imagine her clearly: long black hair brushed up high; praying to her ancestors, her forehead wrinkled from the strain of delivering a double-child; her unblemished skin growing blotches around cheeks so busy panting. I picture Father, also: outside, fishing through the downpour, too anxious to watch.

  The houseboat pitched. Jun knelt at my mother’s ankles on the hard floor, alongside a tree butt that supported a thick white candle. “I see it.” She was reaching between Mother’s legs to ease out the baby. “Nok, I see your child.” Jun’s slow-witted assistant, the cross-eyed teenage boy Deng Xu held a second candle and could not keep it from swaying. Light was scarce.

  Mother was gasping. “How does it look?” New-sprung lines in her face spoke of what she was going through, what was about to happen. “What is it, a boy? Is it a boy?” She squeezed a little silk man, a rag doll she had sewn together two years earlier, the night before her wedding.

  “I don’t know as yet.” The midwife had a happy face. “It looks well. All is well.”

  “Jun, I must know—”

  “Quiet, Nok. Everything will come to pass.”

  Little Deng Xu inadvertently stepped on Jun’s sarong, pinching the kneeling midwife’s calf between foot and floor. “Half-a-dolt!” she yelled. The boy jumped, his candle went out, and Mother’s wail was heard all the way in China, or so tradition has it.

  Jun waved her hand over Mother’s belly, a sweeping kindness meant to end Mother’s pain. Then something sentimental happened.

  Father flew through the door, let fall his empty fishing sack, and stumbled in a skinny heap to the floor beside Mother. “My poor, exquisite heart,” he said, bringing his bony hand over Mother’s sweating forehead. He soothed her skin. Father was soaked, dripping rainwater. His eyes were red-rimmed.

  “Now Ti-eye comes inside,” huffed Mother’s oldest sister. Aunt Ping was a traveling barber who during work hours carried her stock-in-trade with her, including the chair.

  Mother gave another cry, a final push. And Chang and Eng entered this life together.

  Our mother now rolled to one side and fainted from exhaustion. She began an intense dream. She dreamed voices were singing outside, in an unfamiliar tongue, a singing that filled the cabin and lingered over the river and in the darkness; the song moved her to tears. She waked crying.

  And so our nativity was peaceful, at first.

  Chang and I lay closely crammed together, facing head-to-feet. Chang’s face had wound up between my legs.

  “Twins!” Jun exclaimed. “We have twins, healthy and male!” And this animated everyone. One spank to our bottoms, and our gurgles and cries meant we were alive and hearty. The midwife cut the umbilical cord with a candle-warmed knife. Father whistled, and looked at Mother with the coyness of a rascal. She handed him the rag doll and twisted toward Chang and me with open hands.

  Jun told Mother to wait, to let her “right” the one who was upside down.

  “I have merely to give them their baths.” Jun was adamant enough to be imposing. “Allow me to perform my job, and later you can carry out yours for the rest of your life.” But then the midwife saw she could not separate us—that nothing could right my brother and me.

  Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of.

  Jun screamed. Father screamed, and our aunts, too, with a pandemonium that echoed about the trees outside, startling flocks of birds from their nests and out into sheets of rain.

  Jun dropped us to the floor with a crash. The midwife saw Chang and me as a single monster, difficult as that may be to believe. Father looked at his crying twin boys and tried to vomit but produced no more than a taste of bile. He ran from us and cringed on the far side of the cabin.

  We lay wailing at the feet of cross-eyed and cowering Deng Xu; Chang and I each maintained a full, distinct body—with two pairs of arms and legs, two heads and chests, hearts and minds—but everyone noted only that we were bound together at the breastbone by a fleshy, twisted ligament: not two children, but one curse on the family. No one bent to touch the double-child. But the witnesses should have seen—the baby was two.

  While the world is not a place of widespread kindness, a few oysters thrive in a sea of clams. Occasional grace exists. Mother, knowing my brother and me for more than one child, kept her calm. The glimmer of two thousand years of Siamese superstition left her dark eyes in an instant. She cooed into my face and patted our cheeks.

  Mother was a sensible parent. She sat up and took us into her arms, untwisting our ligament. We faced one another, Chang and I. Mother told everyone to leave her. Her dear friend Jun, her sisters, her husband—all were banished from her houseboat.

  “But I live here,” Father said in a panic, his palms up as he walked toward his wife.

  “What does that mean now?” asked Mother, and she kicked her leg up at him. “And don’t forget to take your fishing net. Perhaps you can build a new fortune for yourself.”

  Once everyone had gone, Mother bathed us. Our ligament was short, and Chang and I could lie only face-to-face, not side-to-side. The pounding of rain on the roof had slowed and softened.

  Now Mother rinsed our binding; a thin blue vein traversed its length. Our skin was covered in a sticky film like ooze on the shore where fish has been skinned. Contrary to reports, I did not coo along with my brother as Mother washed under Chang’s chin.

  Outside, Mother’s sisters, as well as Jun, Deng Xu, and assorted townspeople, had gathered by our doorway to peek in. Mother did not acknowledge this. She was too busy drying us, drying her newborns in slips of palm leaf, and she was exhausted. Finally Mother said over her shoulder, “I have not failed to notice that you are all standing there like fools.”

  Everyone scattered.

  Wearied as she was, Mother finished readying our home for us. She swept the floor with a broom made of grass and wood, and she placed us in the bamboo pallet Father had built for his expected child to sleep in.

  And after a time Father came back inside. His hair was drenched and pasted to his forehead, his clothes so wet a picture of his bosom emerged through the fabric. He stood unmoving, drew in his lip, and looked at Mother.

  “Nok.” His bearing was shy as a beggar’s. “Nok, I’ve never loved you more than today, and today never as much as right now.” My father was not a big man, but he was sturdy. A wind came rushi
ng in and curled around our bodies like a wet velvet blanket. We were a family.

  The four of us lived a normal life for six years, until word came from Bangkok that King Rama wanted us dead.

  Though our birth was deemed extraordinary, my brother and I were not the first of our conjoined kind. If one forgets that I am proudly both Siamese and North Carolinian, one might wrongly conclude I belong solely to a fellowship consisting of men and women we have never met.

  The so-called Baby Vertical, 1470, Stuttgart, was fused at the back and able only to hop on the one thickset leg between them; the Identical Scot Monstrosities from Glasgow, 1660, joined at the hips, a pair from the waist up, were a single man below that; Eliza and Mildred Plumphead, approximately 1100, Kent, England, known as the Midland Maids, were bound at the cheekbone and possibly at the shoulders (they faced opposite directions and never saw one another without the aid of a looking glass); the Scandinavian Siblings, Helga and Uula Helpus, who shared a spine and had an immobile hand dangling from their lumbar region.

  These so-called double-people, none of whom approached the kind of fame I share with Chang, were never the secret friends to me that they have been to my brother, who committed their stories to memory ever since The New York Times (announcing our fifth national tour) dug their names from oblivion. I don’t believe I have anything in common with that community.

  When Chang and I were young children of the Mekong, our world was an island of unknowing. Father’s houseboat floated apart from any other by half a mile, but that was only part of it. A volcano would not have been a more isolating boundary to our world than Mother was: my twin and I were not given the chance to understand we were different from other children.