Chang and Eng Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Book One

  CHAPTER ONE - When First We Met

  CHAPTER TWO - My Family in Siam

  CHAPTER THREE - The Yates Sisters

  CHAPTER FOUR - King Rama III

  CHAPTER FIVE - A Double-Courtship

  CHAPTER SIX - The Sadness of Siam

  CHAPTER SEVEN - A Wilkesboro Wedding

  Book Two

  CHAPTER EIGHT - The Mysteries of the Bridal Bed

  CHAPTER NINE - At Sea

  CHAPTER TEN - The Newness of Marriage

  CHAPTER ELEVEN - Fame, and the Movement of Our Hearts

  CHAPTER TWELVE - A Last Lingering Clasp

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Celebrity

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Adult Contentments

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN - Barnum and Our Liberty

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN - Secession and Reconstruction

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN - The Last Journey

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN - Our First Ever Day in North Carolina

  Epilogue

  A NOTE UPON FINISHING THE BOOK

  Are you the REAL McCoy?

  “By homing in on the basic humanity of the twins’ story and working it with such sympathy, Strauss manages to move Chang and Eng from the sideshow stage, placing them at the center of a story of heroic longing . . . Strauss’s novel—its humor, its humanity, its aching sadness—makes for a fine memorial.”

  The New York Times Book Review

  “Poignant . . . memorable . . . compelling and richly atmospheric ... The humanity and history that Strauss has infused into his novel is more than enough to turn subjectivity and speculation into a fully realized portrait.”

  —San Diego Union-Tribune

  “Strauss is an impressively skilled and subtle first novelist . . . A convincingly persuasive and heroic presence.”

  —Time magazine

  “Haunting. Powerful. A great story . . . Gives us the inner life of this remarkable incompatible duo.”

  —People magazine

  “What a remarkable first novel! Darin Strauss immerses us in the turbulent lives of the historic Siamese twins Chang and Eng with consummate skill, intelligence, and sympathy . . . This is one of the most riskily imagined and successfully realized novels I’ve read in years.”

  —Joyce Carol Oates

  “A doozy of a read, as full of charm and wit and love as the sky is full of stars.”

  —Lee K. Abbott, author of Wet Places at Noon

  DARIN STRAUSS’s second novel, The Real McCoy, will be published by Dutton in 2002. He lives in New York City.

  Visit the Chang and Eng Web site at www.changandeng.com.

  “Chang and Eng rocks with twisted passion, wickedly astute ruminations, and a sly and powerful wit. Darin Strauss has crafted a righteously deft and intelligent first novel.”

  —James Ellroy author of L.A. Confidential

  “In this ambitious, assured novel, Strauss imagines these men in full. They are given voice, their fears, hopes, and dreams made vital; most important, Strauss establishes for each man a vivid, poignant personality. He memorably accomplishes through fiction what history has long denied Chang and Eng. He takes these so-called freaks and makes them men.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “Imaginative ... intriguing ... frequently moving ... The author rises to the challenge of his rich material ... creating a deeply human portrait . . . Chang and Eng is a beautifully told novel.”

  —Newsday

  “Stunning.”

  —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

  “No one who reads this beautifully written book will ever be able to think of Chang and Eng again as mere oddities, freaks in Barnum’s sideshow. Darin Strauss’s powerful and affecting first novel makes the distant and unthinkably strange lives of the original ‘Siamese twins’ seem intimately and movingly familiar. It’s a marvel of psychological insight and historical imagination.”

  —Tom Perrotta, author of Election

  “Who but the most fearless of writers would attempt this daring first novel? Strauss’s prose rolls along as softly as music from a flute; it’s daintily filagreed, keenly sincere, and always empathetic. His pages, in short, throb with life.”

  —Salon.com

  “Utterly brilliant.”

  —Book

  “Darin Strauss has created a true gift with this book ... He makes Chang and Eng into two utterly distinct and extraordinary men, never to be blurred into one again.”

  —Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Pilgrims

  “A brilliant conjuring of a historical reality and a wonderful piece of storytelling ... Truly remarkable ... A novel not to be missed.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Heartbreaking ... An exquisitely told story that illustrates what is literally the strongest sibling bond.”

  —Mademoiselle

  “Imposingly original. Admirably researched, always absorbing, and very moving.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “Powerful . . . astonishing ... Nearly every page contains a fresh turn of phrase and a dazzling consistency of voice and sensibility ... Darin Strauss will be swimming in critical accolades, all of them deserved.”

  —The Raleigh News & Observer

  “Graceful and surprising ... hugely entertaining ... Offers a glimpse at some ordinary human truths through the perspective of some extraordinary human beings.”

  —The Portland Sunday Oregonian

  “A fascinating novel that takes major risks ... Hauntingly vivid, with great delicacy and humor ... A real achievement!”

  —Seattle Times

  “Strauss’s fascinating novel undertakes a subject that would daunt writers of renowned accomplishment and long experience ... It accomplishes a feat even some of the greatest novels sometimes fail at. It is extremely interesting, page to page, sentence to sentence ... Its heart is one that animates our common humanity. Darin Strauss has made sure of that.”

  —Greensboro News & Record

  PLUME

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

  Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

  Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

  Published by Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Previously published in a Dutton edition.

  First Plume Printing, May 2001

  Copyright © Darin Strauss, 2000 All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  The Library of Congress has catalogued the Dutton edition as follows:

  Strauss, Darin.

  Chang and Eng : a novel / Darin Strauss.

  p. cm.

  ISBN : 978-1-101-53807-4

  1. Bunker, Chang, 1811-1874—Fiction. 2. Bunker, Eng, 1811-1874—Fiction.

  3. Siamese twins—United States—Fiction. 4. North Carolina—Fic
tion.

  I. Title: Chang and Eng. II. Title.

  PS3569.T692245 C48 2000

  813’.54—dc21

  99-059198

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  BOOKS ARE AVAILABLE AT QUANTITY DISCOUNTS WHEN USED TO PROMOTE PRODUCTS OR SERVICES. FOR INFORMATION PLEASE WRITE TO PREMIUM MARKETING DIVISION, PENGUIN PUTNAM INC., 375 HUDSON STREET, NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10014.

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is affectionately dedicated to:

  Ellen, Bernie, and Izzy Strauss

  John Hodgman, a great writer, a cunning agent, and a true friend

  And Susannah of the Meadows

  Prologue

  January 17, 1874

  Wilkesboro, North Carolina

  This is the end I have feared since we were a child.

  Eng wakes to find Chang cold against him. The smell conjures the muddy stink of the Mekong in this double-wide bed half a world from Siam. Chang, the left, is dead. Eng is the right.

  Then I too am done, Eng thinks, and his heart twists like a cluster of wild vines.

  For the last sixty-three years, the two (few doubt they are two men, though Chang and Eng share a stomach and more) have lived jointly, a pair of complete bodies held together by a cartilaginous band at their chests.

  It is late. The open windows usher the Carolina weather inside. Papers that carry the light of the moon fly across the writing desk like little ghosts. A leaflet from the catastrophic final tour snares on a gift from Tsar Nicholas—a pair of gilded containers, one preserving the shrunken body of a mongoose, the other that of a snake. Over the desk hangs a sketch of the Siamese Double-Boy wielding a pair of rifles to ward off an enraged crowd.

  This bedroom is Eng’s. The twins have lived in separate households for almost six years.

  I will never sail home again. I will never salute the flat green coastline of Siamese shanties in the rain.

  Though he has not been back since they were children, if his head could spill open Eng would find the contours of the Land of the White Elephant in the folds of his brain, the flooding waters of the Mekong trickling from his hollows, and a wealth of faces like their own. Chang’s face has begun to show the green marks of a new-sprung mildew.

  I am the son of a Mekong fisherman, seven thousand, five hundred twenty miles and fifty years from home, Eng thinks. Has everything been Chang’s fault?

  Eng lies on his side, facing Chang; his fingers find the wrist where the pulse would have been. Legs and forearms are twined beneath the quilt, Eng spasmy and prickling under their weight. He tries to pull free and his double dances with him—Chang’s head flops about like the head of a rag doll. Eng collapses back, feeling each hair on his body acutely, and all the sweat underneath his wedding ring. Eng is alone. The smell is asphyxiating. Time is a fish caught in their father’s nets.

  Eng rubs his brother’s chest as if Chang simply is cold. The bedsheet falls to the floor. Eng hits him with a closed fist, but Chang’s breast will not rise. Eng is certain his own soul will go to heaven, but he fears his brother’s is destined for elsewhere.

  Eng’s life full of leering faces, slander, and unlikely love begins to recede. Like an exile looking upon his native city as he sails away into darkness, he is seized by memory, it being the wondrous strange hand pulling him back to the fading shores of his past.

  Book One

  All of man’s unhappiness stems from his inability to stay in a room alone.

  —Pascal

  CHAPTER ONE

  When First We Met

  Monday, December 10, 1842

  North Carolina

  Chang-Eng,” the children chanted. “Mutant, mutant.”

  Now and then the little innocents sprang from the dust cloud chasing our carriage to cry my name and Chang’s. The path we traveled cut through a droughty careworn field, and to either side of us a fast-passing scene of blond grass and dead milkweed thirsted under the burnt sky of sunset. My ear tingled with the nearness of my brother, who picked lint off of my shoulder and knew not to bump my head as he did so. His dark eyes showed little reflections of me. I was thirty-one. My life was about to begin: I was entering North Carolina.

  My brother and I did not know that love was soon to deliver us. But twenty-one children and three decades later, how obvious it seems that everything to follow was a consequence of that evening. When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire. Alone in the dark with a final chance to bind together circumstances that have made you a peasant who sells duck eggs on the Mekong one day and the South’s most famous temperance advocate the next, you see a curtain open onto the landmark moments of your past.

  When Chang and I arrived in North Carolina, we were coming to the end of yet another tour, exhibiting the bond that the public could not see without assuming we two were so very different from everybody else.

  The halfwit we’d hired drove at a quick pace. And now, jounced inside a rickety carriage that had the legend THE SIAMESE TWIN in chipping yellow paint on its doors, I was trying to nap beside Chang.

  My eyes were not closed for long. My brother tapped my shoulder. “Eng?”

  I knew better than to ask him to quiet when he was in one of his talkative moods.

  “Maybe,” Chang said, “you read out loud?” He spoke in a soft voice whenever asking me for something.

  “Now?” I made a show of closing my eyes more tightly. “I’d prefer not.”

  “A Shakespeare speech from your book, make the trip go faster?” There was a shiver in his words from the bustle of our ride. I felt his half of our stomach spasm.

  “Let me please catch a little rest,” I said, opening an eye. “Why don’t you read it yourself?”

  “Me? You joking.” The listlessness in Chang’s smile suggested what it is to spend three decades within five to seven inches of one another. “Eng?”

  Reporters love to mention that I am the “less dominating member of the pair.” A man may be quiet, does that mean he is not assertive?

  “Eng?” That we hadn’t eaten in hours spoiled his breath.

  I shut my eyes tight again. Nailing down a personality is about as easy as pinning marmalade to a wall. I faked a snore.

  “Eng!” he said, patience being a luxury allowed those who have more obliging brothers. “I know you not asleep.”

  The dust of riding whisked us into Wilkesboro, the last stop on this junket of somersaults and smiles that had spanned the eastern seaboard. I could not have imagined that in Wilkesboro we would meet the women who would—for all the kings I’d met and the nations I’d been—make up the kingdom in which I’d walk.

  Chang had the driver bridle our two horses to a stop in a grassy square near the center of town: a little commons that had not yet changed its name from “Union Square” to “Westwood Park.” This open space was blotchy with killed grass, its unused flagpole stood without purpose in the wind. A line of four threadbare trees gesticulated like marionettes behind the flagstaff.

  Townspeople rushed at us from every direction. Dozens of unkempt children and their unkempt parents gathered round our carriage, pointing fingers. The rest of the population climbed on roofs for a better view. My brother grinned at them all. He delivered his patented wave, like a little boy proving with a casual flick that his hand is clean on both sides—the motion Queen Victoria used to greet her mas
ses.

  “Come down, carriage man,” my brother called out to our driver, wetting my face with spittle. “Will you please open door?”

  The driver muttered at us from his buckboard. I asked this idiot, “Did you say something?”

  He let us out, his well-shaved cheeks pink as Mekong tuna meat. He said, “Nothing, sirs.”

  “You are addressing Eng alone.” I accepted the man’s hand, stepping from the carriage with my brother close on my left. “Do you hear my twin talking? You must say, ‘Nothing, sir.’ ” I was tired and irritable. “When you speak to Eng, you speak to one ‘sir,’ not two.”

  Far away, between the rough corners of Wilkesboro’s buildings (small white Presbyterian church with no steeple, narrow white beer parlor, small white general store displaying all its stock in its window), rows of sleeping blue mountains hid in shadow, each more blurred than the last. And the full moon had begun its crawl across the sky.

  Everything about this environment seemed animated by our arrival: the crowd gathering on all sides of us; the bandy-legged old man in a white suit who limped across Union Square with a yellow rose in his lapel, and the pair of young girls who ran over and walked him arm in arm toward our carriage; the slaves across the courtyard pitching straw and pretending not to look; the dirty little white hands poking our ligament as we stepped from the carriage. Several reached for my face.