Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  Every morning we mixed clay and salt in a bamboo tub and preserved the eggs in a clay-salt compound that conjured the muddy stink of sweat. My right arm and Chang’s left were becoming strong from blending this sinewy clay and salt mixture, stronger than misery. My brother and I still did not talk to each other much, but we shared this accomplishment. Contrary to Western accounts of our life, our business was successful not due solely to a morbid curiosity on the part of our customers, but thanks to our hard work. We sold quite a few eggs.

  “Let’s keep one,” he said one hot, sunny day.

  “What do you mean?” I asked. We were bare-chested, mixing the compound. Arms around each other’s shoulders, we each had a hand on the pole we were using to stir the paste.

  My brother pointed to a small thin white duck circling the pond in need of a bath. “That one. As a pet.” We named the duck In. He had a long bill and a fetching hop.

  Then once upon a Mekong morning we saw two men walking side by side over the hill, marching toward us. One was small and the other was tall. We did not know then that this day would change our world forever.

  “Right this way,” one of them was saying to the other.

  The first, dressed in a dirty Siamese peasant’s frock and wringing his hands while he walked, tripped over himself as he led the second through the mud to our duck pond. It was raining, of course, and the first was holding an umbrella over the taller head of the second. “I think you’ll find that the double-elephant is this way, sir,” the first said, dripping, raising the umbrella like a beacon above his taller companion.

  The second man looked strange; he was a giant, with skin not only pale like Ping’s at her funeral, but at the same time vaguely pink like animal fat, and his hair was brown—a freakish color! He shielded one eye with a round piece of glass, leaned on a white walking stick, and under his greatcoat had on a suit like the tight-fitting and oddly cut suits Rama had sometimes shown off. The man also had a bushy mustache, like a scraggly brown puppy above his lip.

  I remembered that I had seen him before: when we’d first met King Rama in His court, this odd man had been there, standing apart from the crowd.

  Chang and I waited for this white man and his companion to approach. Ducks waddled around us, shaking water off their wings. The men stepped around our flock and came before us.

  “I have searched for you,” the strange man said, his tongue not quite conquering the demands of the Thai language. He was puffing at his pipe, despite the rain, and the smell of cherry tobacco reached my nose in smoky ringlets.

  “We are Chang-Eng,” said my brother, and I asked, “Who are you?”

  “I am Captain Abel Coffin,” the tall man said, in booming voice. He smiled at us smugly, as if he’d been our confidant forever. And he percolated with energy, and from under his balding dome his broad nose seemed to occupy the center of his face by force.

  “Are you unwell?” my brother asked him.

  “I’m sorry?” he asked.

  Chang pointed to the Captain’s light hair and then his too-pale cheek.

  The man laughed and said: “Have you somewhere inside where we can chat?” And he handed his subordinate his cane as he began walking toward our houseboat without waiting to be invited.

  What was it about Captain Coffin?

  His voice was a foghorn, his steps wide as nations.

  But was that enough? How could a man—even such a man in such a place—have persuaded Mother to allow him to do what he did?

  We followed Captain Coffin and his companion into the houseboat. Even in the daytime, with little or no sun getting in through the one tiny window-hole, our small cabin was hazy with a dusk yellow light, amid which the candles looked like pale thin ghosts as they fought the drizzle. Mother was sitting with Sen, silently, their chairs facing one another, her hand in his. They turned toward the Captain slowly, without a start.

  “Hello, my good lady,” the white man said, his Thai shaky but loud.

  “Hello,” echoed Coffin’s man, a step behind the Captain and very wet.

  Mother examined the Captain for a long time. She said nothing, focusing on his mustache.

  “I am Captain Coffin.” Then, more slowly “Coffin. Cof-fin, it’s an English name.” Chang and I moved out from behind the Captain to see what Mother’s reaction was.

  “Are you unwell?” she asked him.

  Coffin turned to his man, confused.

  “He is a foreigner,” the man told Mother, gesturing toward Coffin’s skin and hair.

  “What do you want here?” she asked.

  “I want to change your lives,” he whispered, filling the sentence with the white cadences of his foreign speech. Air from between his lips ruffled the bottom half of his mustache.

  The Captain wheeled around toward my brother and me, taking us by Chang’s arm and putting us between him and Mother.

  “I want to make them rich, and you too, by, by—what’s the word in this backward tongue?”

  “By extension,” the other man said.

  “Yes, by extension.” The Captain rolled his monocle between two fingers of his free hand. His other still grasped Chang’s arm.

  I felt the jiggling bulk of his entire frame behind the slightness of ours—he was as broad as Chang and me both—and he now clasped my wiry bicep with his large hand. As he held my brother and me, I could feel the tugging and closing of his ringed fingers, and despite his height, I was unable to avoid the smell of his breath—which was unmoving and heavy with tobacco smoke.

  “Do you fathom what I am offering you?” he asked. The houseboat was steady as he spoke, as were the muffled calls of the ducks outside in their pen. “I am offering you glory.” The pale skin of his hands looked even more unwell in the gloomy light. The flickering candlelight of the houseboat were slender indifferent ghosts playing on his knuckles. And Mother’s weary face was just another of the particulars of the scene that could not have been more inexpressive, more indifferent to Captain Coffin.

  He told of his plan to take Chang and me to America and England, republics of which we had never heard. Coffin said we would be made rich beyond our dreams.

  “Savages?” Mother said. “You want to take my babies to savages?”

  “No,” said the Captain. He spoke the way men do when they understand that the world bends to their own vigor; it was the way Rama spoke, low-pitched and with heft. “The people in these places are like me,” he said.

  Mother shrugged her shoulders.

  “The people there are not like you,” the Captain said. “They are like me.”

  Mother frowned.

  “Chang and Eng would be rich?” Sen asked. “Are there many ducks that need tending in these lands?”

  The Captain smoothed his greatcoat. “People will pay money to see these brilliant creatures.” He took a breath. “Allowing them to be a circus attraction would bring great honor to your family, and your nation, that the world may behold what the most blessed woman in the favored empire of Siam could alone offer.”

  Mother looked confused; there was no translation for the word “circus.”

  The Captain spun us around to face him, and he knelt before us. The spinning entangled my feet with Chang’s, and the Captain had to catch us from falling. His huge bent knees touched our chests, and he looked into our eyes. “Of all the nations of the earth, of all the families, Siam and this family alone have the double-creature, the living wonder.”

  “They are just children, no different from other boys,” Mother said. “Except they are attached.”

  Captain Coffin assured her that we would be treated with respect, and that the money we earned would go directly to her. “And they will be back in a year’s time. Two, on the outside,” said the Captain.

  “Two at most,” the Captain’s man said.

  The Captain rose.

  “You can trust in me, I am a friend of your king.” He told us about the cities of America, places of tall stone and solid pavement and gaslight
s and electricity and locomotives and horse carriages and glass, and of steamships that could outrun any junk on the Mekong.

  The room was filled with skeptical silence.

  “You will never have to work again,” Coffin told Mother. A different kind of silence fell upon us.

  The Captain snapped his fingers. His man stepped forward and handed Mother a pouch filled with jewelry. “Your sons will be treated feelingly,” said Captain. “With great dignity.”

  Terrible, helpless anguish spread in my heart: We were leaving again.

  The Sachem, the 397-ton sailing ship under Coffin’s command, was the most impressive I’d ever seen. Two masts at either end of the boat held five huge white sails, and a taller third mast between the two held six. A network of ropes connected the sails and met at the conning tower atop the mizzenmast. A hundred feet long and thirty feet wide with two shining decks, she was unlike any junk afloat. At the prow, a huge pointed pole lanced the air ahead of it. Large white sailors on the lower decks jostled one another against massive sacks of rice. Even the cabin rats were colossal.

  The first time we saw the ship, Chang and I were in Xau’s rowboat with Mother and Sen and our pet duck In, weaving our way up the Mekong, and there in front of us, where a row of old houseboats bobbed like wreckage between our boat and the mouth of the Gulf of Siam, and where the eye was met with an excess of familiar sights—the green rice fields flanking the river as it emptied into the gulf, and the network of clotheslines mimicking the fishing nets below them, and the glut of little boats like ours carrying fish or prawns or silk—was the grandest sight of all: behind the jumbled angles of roofs and walls and beyond the gray Siamese peasant frocks dancing on their clotheslines were the masts of the Sachem, standing amused above it all, the way adults loom over children at play. The sight caused a bristling shiver to rake out from my spine like internal lightning.

  I heard Mother sniff. I looked up at her and saw she was smiling through the tears that streamed down her face. “How beautiful,” she whistled inadvertently through the space where her tooth would have been.

  “We don’t want to leave Siam,” Chang said. We sat next to Mother; Sen paddled. Quacking In was jumping from Chang’s lap to mine.

  “You have beheld more in your young lives than I ever have,” Mother said, her voice splintering. “And you will behold even more now.”

  “We don’t want to,” Chang said, close to tears. Sen made a grumbling sound from behind us.

  “We will be all right, Mother,” I said. Chang hit me in the chest, hard, just above where our band flares out into my body. I slapped him across his little ear and we fell to the floor of the junk, wrestling. In fell along with us and flapped his white wings.

  “Shh. Stop it, now,” Mother said.

  Leaning on the starboard rail of the ship, Captain Coffin was waiting for us. We could make out his mustache from twenty yards; waxed this time, coming to sharp points on either end, it was wider than his face, probably wide enough for people behind him to see both greased tips.

  So much higher than we were, standing with his hands behind the small of his back, Coffin wore his red tunic puffed out from under his blue captain’s jacket. His golden buttons glinted in the early sun, matching his epaulets, and his white breeches flared out by his thighs. Even among the huge masts of his ship, he seemed a giant. The tip of his hat seemed from our angle to buss the clouds.

  He waved when he saw us, and let out a hearty laugh. He bid us a deep hello in the Thai language. Mother hugged Chang and me and said good-bye. “I’ll see you in a year’s time, my babies.” The morning sun was casting orange disks on the water.

  “This is for the best,” Sen told us.

  Then came the ship’s whistle, and Chang and I left Mother and boarded the Sachem with In, our pet duck, and headed off for America.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A Wilkesboro Wedding

  1842–1843

  Wilkesboro

  Our double-wedding was set up very quickly. Not that the town had sanctioned it, or Mr. Yates, either. But I wrote Yates a letter, spelling out my feelings and intentions, and sent a copy to the Wilkes County Spectator. I was chaste and a Christian, and would continue to be both, my pen informed them. And so Mr. Yates capitulated to the will of the three women in his life, and fairly gently at that. That is not to say that he could yet look at Chang and me, or speak to us. But he did not say much against us, either. And so Chang and I found ourselves one day arguing before a North Carolina court that neither Sarah nor Adelaide would be committing bigamy by marrying conjoined twins. The judge, the Honorable Patch Meadows, somehow agreed.

  We were careful not to break other laws. In North Carolina, a free white woman could not marry anyone with Indian, Negro, mustee, or mulatto blood down to the third generation. I felt lucky that North Carolinians hadn’t any legislation forbidding Siamese, though the looks and hisses we caught let us know that there may soon have been such an addition to the court’s ledger.

  We were also told to choose a last name. Wanting to appear American, I came up with Bunker, after the battle that started this country on the path to freedom. Chang agreed, and we became Chang and Eng Bunker.

  Just when it seemed everything was coming off easily, life again became a hardship. In the eveningtime before my wedding ceremony, we were summoned to the rectory of Wilkesboro’s Parson Hodge, a man we barely knew. Sitting in the parson’s study, with books of God gaping down at us, we had to explain our intentions to this thickset young minister who had hairless pink cheeks and Benjamin Franklin eyeglasses. The town of Wilkesboro, Hodge said, demanded it.

  Think about what it is these people want from you, I told myself.

  Perhaps, I told myself, it is the same thing that you want.

  I said to the Parson, bringing his teacup to my lips, “If it will save Adelaide and Sarah from disgrace”—I took a calm, gentlemanly sip, then put down the cup—“then my brother and I will be split asunder.”

  “Yes, we will do,” said Chang, though he did not look happy about it.

  Surely we knew the dangers, and yet here we were, discussing disunion. This was not the first time we’d considered attempting such an operation with a Westerner. In London, New York, Philadelphia, and Paris, doctors had asked to evaluate us for a possible separation, and always they convinced Chang it was too unsafe. I wanted to try it, despite the risk—especially if it meant winning our right to wed. If I could be married and separated, what an unhoped-for bliss my life would become!

  “Listen, Mr.—Eng, is it? You don’t understand,” Hodge said. The young parson looked mussed, as if he’d spent the whole day fully dressed in his wrinkled brown suit and sprawled in bed. “The town is very upset. And people are ready to—”

  “Oh, we understand, Parson Hodge,” I said. “I know that it presumably will kill us.”

  I couldn’t escape our double-reflection in that little room. It lived in the smudged mirror on the far wall, in the spoon I used to stir my tea; it was undulating in the tea itself, in the burnished wood of the table, in the Parson’s eyes.

  “Yes, we understand,” said my brother. “We so very different, the town people all afraid of us. I have wanted to be disconnected never in our lives. I like Chang and Eng the way he is. But still we make a decision.” My brother leaned us forward. “We understand.”

  The murmur of a crowd assembling in the distance had grown loud. Through Hodge’s front window, on a dark hilltop yards away, single glowing dots bobbed toward a large body of light—men with torches joining a throng under the stars. The town had its demands. That is why Chang and I had brought guns with us.

  “No,” Hodge told us. “You don’t understand. These are the sort of people, they couldn’t care so much that you are born quare. We have a town of mountain people here. Wilkesboro is isolated, and that’s so by choice.” He was whispering to peel away the meanness in his words.

  “We’re uncontaminated by the other world,” he said. “Picture
these Southern highlands as a sort of islet, left alone for generation on generation. Maybe now you recognize us. We don’t see many outlanders from beyond. People here are not used even to people from Savannah or New Orleans, and we call them foreigners.” He was kind-faced now and positively grinning. “So, what the people don’t want—they don’t want these Yates girls marrying nearniggers from the other world. Especially these girls, especially after—” He looked at me a long time.

  He knew I was a Christian. We had talked about God when Chang and I first arrived at his door, and I had impressed him with my knowledge of the Bible.

  The Parson spoke in a soft voice. “Perhaps you’ve stayed too long in Wilkesboro.” He smiled. “I know what you are thinking. We are not a backward people. We have a powerful ambition when we see something to win out over, and we have the sort of heart that’s fair. We just like things the old-fashioned way, as it was for Daniel Boone a hundred years ago, and the way it was before him. Time doesn’t scoot along here; it stays on.” He was not finished. “The point is that you’re Chinamen, that you got lemoncolor skin.”

  Outside, the crowd began its approach. I did not believe Hodge. Surely what they were protesting, I thought, was the idea that the husbands were one, the wives two. The Yates girls, it had been hissed, were after lustful perversion.

  The throng’s murmur was now a roar.

  Conclusions, not deliberations, propel action. Reason cannot bring strangers to one’s perception of the world. No dialogue can bridge the great divisions. Chang and I decided to fight. A man must remain a man.

  “Excuse us, Parson.”

  We took our shotguns and walked to the porch. We had never fired a gun, but how difficult could it be? I held my left arm fast around my brother’s shoulder. We kept the firearms down, at our sides, and loaded. Parson Hodge came outside and stood by us. I remember thinking he was a brave American.