Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  “Do I want to be loved in spite of?” said the cat in a voice deep and polished. “Does anyone?”

  I dropped the animal, having reached a new class of despair. I needed sleep.

  Nao brought new green silk jackets and black wool pants to our cell and had us put them on.

  After that, accompanied by a noisy display of handlers, Rama himself began visiting our chamber just to talk with us. He came in silken slippers and flowing robes that two subjects at His back held off the ground. After entering, He would smile at us, say hello, ask how we felt, and leave. At first, we were still not allowed to look at Him, but over time we began to address Him directly.

  Trying to re-create the atmosphere of this period for his readers, a journalist of questionable ethics invented for the German weekly Der Uberfallen a fanciful—and inaccurate—entry in an imaginary diary of a King Raima (sic) of Siam:I met again with my friends the Monster again. Are they two? As this is not a question that can be answered in more than two ways by a sensible man, let a King, who enjoys immunity from any culpability whatsoever, pass it over, and merely state that Chang and Ang are not indistinguishable. Ang is quiet and sullen; little Chang is a delight.

  This passage—this fictional passage—makes me prickly with anger from head to foot. The writer answered his own question: we have always been our own men. Besides, the editor of Der Uberfallen committed a typographical blunder—I was Rama’s Freude (delight).

  This went on for a fortnight, then two, then time enough to make one lose count. I told King Rama I had trouble sleeping, and before I knew it we had pillows, and blankets to lay beneath our bodies and to warm us. Despite that He had us in captivity and was most likely still pondering whether to kill us—He seemed sometimes to be speaking with us as a way to debate the merits of keeping us alive—I was young enough to see His Majesty as friendly. He seemed enthralled by our band and stared at it throughout His visits.

  Soon He moved us to new quarters. While small and austere, this house—slave quarters, by design—was lavish compared to our old cell, and also compared to our floating home on the Mekong. We had a bed, a real bed, and sheets, and it was aboveground and looked out onto the palace. Unfortunately, Nao would not let us take In with us.

  I was able to sleep well there, but I always awoke saddened and wondering if I’d ever see beyond the palace walls. I sometimes imagined my parents calling to me in an exotic language I couldn’t understand.

  Even as my brother and I were awarded more considerate treatment, and despite the companionship of His Highness and the glimpse of palatial beauty that went with it, I more than ever longed for that grimy stretch of Mekong from our infancy, for the wind-riddled houseboat, and especially for Mother and her kind hand. In this cottage by the edge of the palace, taking long flights of imagination along the route of the junks to the bright brown mud and half-sunken posts of home, I was made less miserable by the august presence of the King, and by his royal handlers who brought prawns, rice, and white tuna. For some reason I look back with fondness on that time with the King. I suppose memory has at least two faces, and capricious ones at that.

  By the time His Highness arrived for one of His visits, following drumbeats and a footpath of rose petals, the sun had already set. An hour earlier, His servants would have come to clean our cottage before slipping away silently.

  Chang and I performed handstands for His Highness while He either questioned us or simply talked of the troubles only a leader knows. His men stood still and in a line, each with his gloved hands clasped behind his back (except for the one carrying the bushel of rose petals, and the other who held the food).

  Once, instead of the robe of dragging red silk that covered the floor all around Him, He wore a costume styled more precisely than anything we’d seen Him wear before. The pants, long and straight, were cut snugly according to His royal form, and they were pleated. His strange shoes were made of shiny leather (a material new to us). His jacket, double-breasted, partially hid a gray vest with buttons. This was Western tailoring. The King wore this suit when He had us meet the Emperor of China, and again when He sent us home.

  “You must join Us on a journey, Double-Boy,” He said the first time He visited us dressed in this way.

  “Where, Your Great Highness?” I addressed Him directly.

  The King said Chang and I were to follow Him to the Temple of the Reclining Buddha, where we’d meet the Emperor of Cochin China. “It will be a great honor for you.”

  “That sounds exciting,” a frothy Chang said, tilting his head as though someone were stroking his neck. “Your Highness.” Did he not miss Mother anymore? He did not talk about her at all.

  Our King and His retinue left us alone in our quarters. Soon another group of servants entered carrying two sets of clothes: black silk robes made majestic by yellow tassels, and two pairs of red pants decorated with stitched flames. One of the servants, a sloe-eyed boy of about twelve, shrank away from us, repulsed. My twin stared at him with bitter half-closed eyes; I touched Chang’s hand and brought it to rest on our ligament. We were laughing before the servant boys finished putting on our clothes.

  Outside the door, two other of Rama’s men arrived with a short gray baby elephant. The gray sky showed no sun, nor any clouds. Misty rain fell.

  The first man, who was very short, and whose face was small and round and red like a fleshy pomegranate, sat on top of the elephant. The other man, very large and smelling of dried dirt, took my brother and me by the waist, walked directly behind the beast, and hoisted us onto its back, or tried to; each time the man lifted us high enough, Chang and I would reach for the elephant, but would fail to gain any purchase as the animal swatted its tail or rocked forward.

  “Hold still,” grumbled the man who clutched us. The other man, sitting atop the elephant laughed quietly. On the tenth try we were successfully placed on the creature’s posterior.

  Chang and I held onto the red-faced man as he drove the elephant across the royal grounds. He turned to us over his shoulder and sniggered: “That will be a difficult scene to describe.”

  Chang gave me a look that said he thought it had been fun.

  “It took him ten times to lift you up here,” the man said, turning farther around to get a better look at us. He took a second, and smiled nastily. “You will probably be able to survive in this world as long as you have servants to keep hoisting you up every day of your life.”

  When we got to the end of the royal grounds we were put in a little skiff. At our back, the elephant driver rowed; another man stood next to us on the prow—this was Nao, whom we hadn’t seen for quite some time.

  “Nao, it’s me, Chang and Eng,” said my brother.

  “Yes,” he said. He was squinting because of the misty rain, and standing, elegantly, with one foot on a pile of rope. Years later, when first I saw the famous painting of George Washington crossing the Delaware, I was reminded of Nao.

  As our boat made its way up the river, people began to amass on the shore, rushing to the fold of marsh where the Mekong meets the land; they were pointing. Other boats started pulling up close to ours. Everybody started shouting.

  “What is happening?” asked Chang.

  “Rumors of your arrival have circulated,” said Nao. “The paired-omen.”

  From behind us, I heard the voice of the other man, the red-faced rower. “These folk should have seen that thing try and get on an elephant,” he snorted.

  Meanwhile, the people were approaching.

  They grew in number, and in loudness as they gathered, and under the clamor of gasps and ringing voices they soon made up a crowd.

  Strange boats closed in and bumped ours, more and more of them. And from these circling skiffs, people leaned over, stretching across our prow—to reach for our connecting band. The screams in the air were loud now. More boats; more grabbing hands. Through a shifting curtain of jostling bodies, I caught glimpses of fishermen on the shore jumping up and down; between groping hands an
d lunging arms I could see men running out from the banks—the muscles and veins in their necks tense and bulging—as they yelled: “Look! Look!”

  The swarm of boats now rammed our skiff and bounced off. Chang and I held Nao for support. Faces surrounded us, enough of them to conceal the sky, and it was like shaking in a hive, or in a swarm of wide eyes and desperate mouths and twitching noses. Even as we squeezed closer to Nao, a hundred hands grabbed me; the heat of as many bodies terrorized me; a dense tangle of smells tainted the hundred individual breaths exhaled on me in unison.

  “Back, back!” Nao was yelling as he slashed the mob at its heads, faces, and shoulders with his rattan stick. “Back!”

  The crowd began eventually to recoil. Nao yelled over his shoulder to our rower (who was almost overwhelmed): “Move us, you half-a-dolt!”

  We inched through the mad crowd. And we made our way downstream, past the mob and toward the Temple of the Reclining Buddha. And the sun started to shine.

  The open-air Temple of the Reclining Buddha was composed of a circle of perhaps five thousand tall wooden poles that, as they rose, widened into arches like flower stems spreading into leaves. Every eighth pole held a watch station that, in turn, held a sentry. Inside, flower beds were arranged in huge concentric rings on the ground, at the center of which sat a Golden Buddha. The many flower petals swayed, though there was little breeze. As the flowers moved they sent red, blue, and yellow dust that had been spots of color on their stalks into the air. The muddy brown earth around the beds was, like the statue, stained by the delicate powder. Chang and I were brought to the center ring, in front of the Buddha, to stand in Rama’s party.

  This royal party was arranged in three columns. A step in front of us stood King Rama, wearing bracelets and rings of hammered gold and His Western-style suit; to His left, a few of His wives, including the queen who had made us strip naked. To His right was the princess we had seen at the Great Hall, Rama’s daughter Princess Xenga, whose dark beauty stood out even among the exquisite handmaidens at her side. We stood with Nao, arms across his broad chest and frowning as he noticed me staring at Xenga. Behind us, a host of courtiers fidgeted and cleared their throats. The temple was empty other than we thirty or so members of Rama’s retinue.

  “What are we waiting for, Nao?” asked Chang.

  Annoyance spread across the man’s face. “Keep silent,” he said.

  Through the front gate, in marched an assemblage of a thousand soldiers wearing silver uniforms and wooden helmets. Close by trudged eighty elephants with dusty trunks. Forty drummers went by us, too, one on every second elephant, and a tiger growling in a wooden cage. And then in came a royal personage of some kind, sitting atop a throne carried on the shoulders of four huge, shirtless attendants.

  “The Cochin Chinese delegation,” Nao whispered to us through the side of his half-closed mouth.

  Are they going to kill us now? I asked myself.

  Look at your twin smiling nervously, I told myself. Simple and kind and what a shame you are attached to him.

  The Emperor of Cochin China, chubby like Rama, stood waving and smiling at our delegation. He wore a green vestment and a golden hat taller than any of the tall hats I’d seen Rama wear. The hat swayed and bent as the Emperor waved.

  Rama watched the Emperor and nodded at him without emotion.

  One of the elephants kicked up its forelegs without warning. The drummer sitting on the animal was thrown, landing in a cloud of dust and color on one of the flower-bed circles; his drum crashed down next to him. King Rama exhaled through His nose. Meanwhile the elephant had broken rank, and the earth shuddered as the massive beast galloped around the temple avoiding soldiers. The Cochin Chinese Emperor wore a grimace. “My men shall catch the beast in a moment!” he cried to us in Chinese; he smoothed his robe. “Not to worry!”

  The soldiers collared the elephant and brought it before the Emperor. One of the Emperor’s attendants handed him a whip, and with a troubled smile he struck the animal as at least twenty men held it still. Then the bloodied drummer who had been riding the elephant limped to the Emperor and prostrated himself at his Lord’s red-slippered feet. Another attendant stepped forward holding a sword.

  “You failed,” the Emperor said to the prostrate man in the kindly scolding tones that good-hearted parents use with their children.

  The attendant beheaded the man with one stroke of the blade. From a distance, I saw blood spraying the flowers. A speck of blood stained the green collar of the Emperor.

  Chang and I buckled at the knees. Again, Rama turned His head toward His queen, raised His eyebrows, and exhaled. He shrugged. “Very strict,” the King whispered. Everyone nodded discreetly.

  The Cochin Chinese Emperor walked across the fort to where Rama stood. His hand twitched forward in greeting and he yanked his head abruptly up, not unlike the elephant. The two leaders embraced, kissed each other on the cheeks, then laid hands on each other’s shoulders. As they did so, the Emperor caught sight of us over Rama’s shoulder. He looked away quickly, pretending not to have noticed. The Emperor returned to his supporters. The two parties—the Cochin Chinese retinue and Rama’s—faced each other. Farther afield, the headless body had not been removed from the pool of its own blood.

  Midway between the two parties, the Cochin Chinese lined up all of the elephants across from the tiger in its cage. Then two Cochin Chinese soldiers released the tiger. While Cochin Chinese soldiers stood in a circle around the two breeds of animal, we were treated to a mismatched battle between species.

  The tiger, long a hated beast in Cochin China, had had its mouth sewn shut and its claws removed. It was also attached by rope to a pole the soldiers had planted in the ground. All of the elephants stood in a row before the tiger. Soldiers prodded the beasts, one by one, to fight the tiger, and one by one, the elephants shrank back. The giant beasts were afraid of the defenseless tiger.

  The elephant keepers were flogged with bamboo until they fell unconscious. The Emperor wore his dignified grimace and smoothed his robe as he chuckled. Finally one of the elephants charged the tiger, impaling the smaller animal with its tusks. The skewered cat snarled and tried to scratch its attacker; the elephant shook his head, throwing the tiger high into the air. The tiger was dead when it fell back to earth.

  Not to be outdone, King Rama stepped forward.

  “We have prepared for our neighbors from Hue a demonstration, in honor of the recent revision of the Emperor’s laws regarding trade between our two lands,” he said.

  Nao grabbed us by the hands and walked us to the King. Then he stepped back and away. The King looked at us as God must have at earth on the Seventh Day.

  “Behold the Double-Boy!” Rama cried.

  Chang and I stepped forward in the little black silk jackets Nao had given us for the occasion—our band exposed—and we bent to the muddy floor and stood on our hands. We heard a roar, which was likely the wind. I wondered what would happen to us if we did not please our King and His guest. My gaze went to the flowers, which stood upside down and began to sway between us and the Emperor’s party.

  One stroke is all it took, I was thinking. One stroke to separate a man from his head so cleanly.

  We flipped in the air and landed back on our feet. The only sound was that of elephants breathing. Everyone watched the Emperor, until finally he walked in his twitchy manner to the King and Chang and me. He stood face-to-face with Rama. The foreign emperor took an incredulous look at us and touched our band. He was very young, younger even than Rama.

  Chang and I fell into a bow, and stayed there.

  In a grave voice, the Emperor said: “Of course, We have several people in Our nation who are similarly united.”

  Rama said, “Is this so?”

  “More than several, in fact.” The Emperor jerked his head. “We did not know you prized them, King Rama. If We had, We would have conveyed the many double-boys from My kingdom to you as a gift.”

  “When We pay our r
espects to your country, We shall see them at that time,” said Rama.

  The Emperor’s eyes narrowed. He regarded Rama. “Yes. That will not be difficult to arrange.”

  “They are a sign,” Rama said. “Don’t you agree?”

  With the smell of flowers, a wind rose, carrying dust in itself. The Emperor watched the sand sprinkle.

  “A sign of a blessed nation,” said Rama. “No?”

  The Emperor paused, swallowed, forced a smile. “Yes.”

  Nao stepped forward and escorted Chang and me back to our place in line. The afternoon’s glow was now mixed with the light from torches on watch stations. After two more hours of tedious cordialities, Nao brought us home to our cottage. The mob outside had scattered, and we were hidden from view this time, ducking under a tarpaulin on the deck of a junk to avoid reigniting public interest. Public interest would come later, and too much of it to avoid.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  A Double-Courtship

  December 1842–January 1843

  North Carolina

  Once Adelaide—or Addie, as my brother now called her—accepted Chang’s proposal of marriage, we took an extended break from touring, and my brother changed into someone other than the man who craved the public eye.

  It was not that Chang all at once began to act differently when he and I were alone together; rather, it was when he was with her that he unveiled himself as a new person. In his case, love was not really blind, but blinding. Here was a man who had entertained royalty with his, if not wit, then at least a facile drollery. But now love had so stupefied him, he had lost sight of the fact that the “clever banter” he had developed in the drawing rooms of Europe would serve him at least as well in the social settings of rural North Carolina. He was tongue-tied before country folk.